03/15/2012
VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow wrote in his 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, and has repeated a few times since, that “There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America.” Brimelow argued that the justified horror over Hitler’s racial policies became perverted into an all-out revulsion from any healthy sense of nationalism and identity. Specifically, the American elite, in a misguided effort to “cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia,” changed our immigration policies via the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act.
Menachem Rosensaft cited the “Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge” quote, without any context, in his smear of Peter Brimelow, White Nationalism: A Scourge That Won’t Go Away [Huffington Post, March 12, 2012]. No one could possibly interpret Brimelow’s words as praising Hitler. But to Rosensaft, simply having an immigration patriot cite that name at all obviously evokes images of death camps.
In doing so, Rosensaft inadvertently proves Brimelow’s point: hysteria about the supposed rise of the next Hitler has done more to destroy this country than the Fuhrer could ever dream of.
Rosensaft, who was born after World War II, has made an entire career out of the fact that his parents were Holocaust survivors. His one-line biography below his photo on his Huffington Post column bills him as a “Professor of law and son of Holocaust survivors.” If you look at his slightly longer bio at the bottom of the article, you read that he teaches the “law of genocide and World War II war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia, Cornell, and Syracuse.” His extended bio from Cornell notes that he is
“Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Holocaust Survivors' Memoirs Project, a joint publishing endeavor with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. He is also Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants…”
You get the idea.
Rosensaft announces:
The ADL has been following Brimelow’s activities for some time. In February of 2009, the organization tells us, "Brimelow demonstrated his racist views" at "a conference of racists in Baltimore, Maryland, dedicated to 'Preserving Western Civilization.'" There, Brimelow "delivered one of the most extreme presentations at the conference. He argued that the influx of "non-traditional" immigration is a problem all over the Western world and that the loss of control over the country by "white Protestants" will mean a collapse of the American political system. He urged that whites respond by creating an explicitly white nationalist political party."
Hmm? An "explicitly white nationalist political party"? Where have we heard that before?
(Significantly, both the ADL [Anti-Defamation League]and Rosensaft suppress the fact that the Preserving Western Civilization conference was co-organized by two Jews, Mike Berman and Dr. Michael Hart and featured several Jewish speakers. Nor, of course, did Brimelow’s speech call for “creating an explicitly white nationalist political party” but merely noted that math suggests the GOP’s most effective route to victory is to mobilize its white base and that the Obama Administration contains very few white Protestants — both apparently “hate facts.”)
Given that it’s Rosensaft’s job to warn of the next Hitler, I assume his rhetorical question about “a white nationalist political party” refers to the Nazis.
But he could just as well be referring to Hitler’s greatest foe. Winston Churchill once described non-white immigration as “the most important subject facing this country” and suggested the Conservative Party adopt the slogan of “Keep England White.”
How’s that for a “white nationalist political party”?
The bulk of Rosensaft’s piece is merely reciting a litany of other quotes by Brimelow and other VDARE.com writers that are supposed to be so self-evidently “racist” that the reader will agree that Brimelow should be excluded from what Rosensaft calls “polite society.”
But it is worth noting that the same sentiments have been uttered by many liberals — and, in fact, many Jews.
For example, Rosensaft is aghast that Brimelow said: “Democrats have given up on winning the white working class vote, so they use bilingualism to build up a client constituency.”
However, this is now pretty much a widely acknowledged fact. Thus in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall wrote, “preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.” Edsall cites Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira as advocating “a revised Democratic alliance in which whites without college degrees are effectively replaced by well-educated socially liberal whites in alliance with the growing ranks of less affluent minority voters, especially Hispanics.” [The Future of the Obama Coalition, November 27, 2011]
Similarly, Rosensaft complains that American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor wrote: “Some of us, however, rather like being White, and would like for our children and grandchildren to be White, too.”
Yet many Jews have said the exact same thing about their tribe. Thus Steven Bayme of the American Jewish Committee has noted that Jewish policy often reflects " the fears and anxieties of Jewish communal leaders as to whether their grandchildren will be Jewish." (Why Be Jewish?, AJC.org [ PDF])
Apparently, whites are not allowed to have this concern.
Finally, I want to touch on the issue of the term “white nationalist”, which (along with “white nationalism”) appears seven times in Rosensaft’s piece. I note that this is being used more and more as a smear against opponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism.
I believe the reason for this is actually quite heartening: the term “racist” has lost its meaning in the age of Obama. Calling VDARE.com and Brimelow racists would just put them in the same league as Sarah Palin, the Tea Parties, the Republican Party, and anyone else who doesn’t like Obama.
The word “white nationalist” is unfamiliar to your average reader, and unlike “racist,” it is not always a pejorative. However, Peter Brimelow never uses that word to describe himself or VDARE.com. Brimelow carefully distinguishes between white nationalism and “white supremacism” and, in a passage quoted by Rosensaft, he merely says that some (but not all) VDARE.com contributors, for example Jared Taylor, are
“'white nationalist,' in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are rational and civil. They brush their teeth."
(Again significantly, Rosensaft suppressed Brimelow’s next sentence:
But they unashamedly work for their people — exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.)
For the record, Jared Taylor himself rejects the term “white nationalist” entirely, preferring “race realist” and “white advocate”.
I’m not sure exactly how successful the strategy of calling someone a “white nationalist” will be in silencing them. But it’s important to be aware of this new tactic.
As I have argued before “race realism,” “white nationalism,” or whatever you want to call, it will not lead to the second coming of the Third Reich.
However, as a Jew I will point out that, in making empty accusations of racism, vague allusions to the Holocaust, and citing Jewish smear groups like the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to VDARE.com)to try to stifle the free speech of American patriots like Peter Brimelow, Rosensaft is conforming to the worst stereotypes of Jews.
Perhaps this, too, is Hitler’s posthumous revenge.
Charles Bloch considers himself an unhyphenated American.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.