By Paul Nachman
04/24/2017
VDARE.com founder and editor Peter Brimelow opened his 1995 book Alien Nation with this arresting passage:There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration Act (technically, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments) of 1965. And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration, so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform — and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy — the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the 20th century.(The passage is reproduced, minus the part about Brecht, in a 2006 article here.)Today, U.S. government policy is literally dissolving the people and electing a new one, in the words of the Bertolt Brecht poem that heads Chapter 3, where the process is described in detail. You can be for this or you can be against it. But the fact is undeniable.
Our immigration madness as "Hitler’s revenge" — that’s a concept one tends to remember.
Since he was a frequent contributor at VDARE.com in its early days, Scott McConnell (later a founding editor of The American Conservative) is likely familiar with Alien Nation, although I haven’t found explicit evidence for this. In any event, McConnell’s article The Battle for France in the April 20, 2017 issue of TAC contains quite the parallel to Brimelow’s insight quoted above:
[Eric] Zemmour ["France’s most important political intellectual on the right"] was correct in arguing that the 1980s intensification of French guilt over Vichy and the Shoah played a significant part in pushing much of France’s cultural and political establishment toward a view that they had a moral obligation to reject traditional France. Some saw replacing it with new immigrants as a kind of providential opportunity.(The "Shoah" is what’s otherwise known as "the Holocaust," the Nazis' attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population.)
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