02/21/2006
Since the degeneration of National Review into a GOP cheer leader, it has been far more instructive to consider what it will not publish than what it does. VDARE.com will carry an important example of this later this week.
In the meantime, Derbyshire-repression is back. John Derbyshire, a beacon of intellectual integrity amongst these sycophantic courtiers and coarse thugs, was prevented last September, it will be remembered, from mentioning the crucial racial dimension to New Orleans Katrina problems. Even defending George W., it appears, takes second place to conforming to (liberal) conventional wisdom.
The current example, not just an NRO item, but a full column, is even more revealing. Hesperophobia ctd. [Hesperohobia is dislike of the West] is a thoughtful assessment of the hostility evinced by the rest of the world to the West and specifically America. It comes to arguably white nationalist conclusions using socio-biological concepts which should greatly appeal to the likes of VDARE.com writers Steve Sailer and J-P Rushton:
They hate us from wounded ethnic pride. They hate us because of our cultural superiority; which is to say, at one remove, our political superiority. They hate us because they can’t organize societies like ours, in which security, prosperity, and hope for the future are available to all, and creativity flourishes. They can’t, they know they can’t, and the knowledge drives them nuts… Over most of the non-Western world, government is just an ATM for the clever, ruthless, entrenched, and well-connected…Consider the flocks of illegal immigrants gathering at six thirty every morning on some street corner in your town. Why are they here? Fundamentally, because of the sheer excruciating crappiness of government in Central American nations. Citizens of those nations watch their corrupt elites shovel the national wealth into their private bank accounts. They look to the North and see a place where at least a day’s work will get you a day’s pay, which you will not then have to hand over as a bribe to some cop or official. So North they come, often bringing their native hesperophobia along in their baggage.
Probably what mobilized the NR commissars was Derbyshire’s rejection of the neocon faith that a bit of institutional tinkering will change things
…we give them democracy, not to mention boxcar-loads of cash, and they elect… Mugabe, Chavez, Hamas.
his contention that these behavioral patterns might have genetic roots
It has long been known, for example, that East Asians have better visual-spatial skills than other peoples…Now, visual-spatial skills originate in the brain. So, however, do social skills. …But if a group of humans with one genetic heritage can differ slightly from some other group in the way they process visual information, might they not also differ in the way they process social information? And if they do so differ, might it not be that forms of society that come easily to one group, might come only with great difficulty, or not at all, to another?
and that
my neocon friends and …talk a great deal about the history of political thought: about Aristotle and Machiavelli, Montesquieu and de Maistre, Buckley and Strauss. All very instructive, to be sure; and it is of course deplorable of me to fidget and chafe at the coyness with which we all avoid noticing a thing — a rather plain, physical thing — that all those thinkers have in common. The leftist, hesperophobic presidents of Venezuela and Bolivia have a similar thing in common — not with Aristotle and the rest, but with each other.
In other words: skin color. Derbyshire is saying that hostility to the West stems from an inability to emulate its successes that is probably genetic in origin and which is symbolized and exacerbated by the fact that the West is white.
Interesting, stimulating, important — all reasons why the essay would be unsuitable for National Review as currently managed.
But it is worth considering why an article that might conceivably incline the founding people of this country to consider matters from the angle of their ethnic interest is forbidden at NR. After all, they are the indispensable core constituency underpinning the Republican regime so assiduously courted by the magazine. What is NR afraid of?
Hat Tip, Gene Expression
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.