, which was attacked, almost automatically, with comments "along the lines of "this was a free country, yes, except for blacks, women, Latinos," etc." (You can view the actual comments here.)
12/31/2010
What are you doing New Year’s? That was songwriter Frank Loesser’s question in the song they play every year at this time. [MP3]
In France, for Muslim immigrants, the answer is: "Setting Cars On Fire".
"Youths in depressed suburbs of French cities have been torching hundreds of vehicles on New Year’s Eve and Bastille Day since the early 1990s. Police say the annual rite has turned competitive, with youths tracking the news in the first days of the New Year to see which neighborhood did the most damage.
"I have decided to put an end to the competition, the sweepstakes, and will [no] longer publish the number of burned vehicles," Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said this week, adding that publishing statistics encouraged vandalism." [France Steels Itself for Annual Muslim Car Burnings, Atlas Shrugs, December 31, 2010]
Since the number is not going to be published — not as an MSM decision to suppress it for ideological reasons, but as an official French government decision — I'll just note that last year, the number was one thousand, one hundred, and forty-seven cars, and that’s just on New Year’s, without even a riot happening.
This, of course, is one more surrender on the part of the French to their Muslim immigrant population.
There used to be a similar tradition in Detroit, but it happened around Halloween, and was called "Devil’s Night." ['Devil’s Night' Fires Decline By More Than Half in Detroit, New York Times, November 3, 1991]. It has calmed down slightly over the years, down to 41 fires this year, down from a high of 810. But that, of course, is not precisely the result of immigration, but of internal migration.
Fortunately for Americans, especially owners of expensive, inflammable cars, Hispanic New Year’s Eve traditions don’t seem to be so rowdy.
But with people coming from all over the world, including some very uncivilized parts of it, knows what the future holds in that regard?
While they may not be burning down the place, they're changing it.
Peggy Noonan has a typically sentimental column in the WSJ about the New Year’s tradition of Auld Lang Syne. [Days of Auld Lang What? December 31, 2010]
She translates Auld Lang Syne as "old times past" and collects reactions to it from various people, but she may not get it that nostalgia for a past America is now verboten. You see, it turns out that in the past (specifically before the Immigration Act of 1965), America was much whiter. And how could anyone legitimately be nostalgic for that?
See, as a typical example, Racism, Right-Wing Rage and the Politics of White Nostalgia, by Tim Wise, dailykos.com, August 17, 2009, and Wise’s more recent An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum, in which he wrote:
"[Y]our kind — mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like — are dying. …
"And in the pantheon of American history, old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.
"Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.
"Because you're on the endangered list.
"And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving….
By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it."
Tim Wise has a kind of reverse nostalgia for an America where people like you are extinct.
G. Gordon Liddy is the author of When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country
But Liddy was right, as you know if you've tried, recently, to light up a cigarette, or get on an airplane. If you tried to do both at once, you're probably reading this from jail.
You can’t be nostalgic for the past in today’s America without being called racist. (This goes double if you live south of the Mason-Dixon line — ask Haley Barbour.)
The conventional wisdom about nostalgia is that it’s caused by a rose-colored view of the past and the fact that we were younger then, but it really wasn’t better.
But the truth is that, between demographic changes, and government interventions, it may turn out that "old times past" really were better.
But that doesn’t mean that we should give up. Tim Wise’s demographic projection, above, requires that there should be no change in current immigration policy, and no enforcement of immigration law. That’s something that can be changed.
So sing Auld Lang Syne in the regular Scottish/American style, not the salsa version, or Trinidad and Tobago Soca version.
And remember, even if you are actually Scottish, to give to VDARE.com, so we can keep fighting in the New Year.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.