11/17/2012
I've had a little fun in the past (here and here) playing off the old 1940s leftist groan about having been "premature anti-fascists." As I explained it in the first of those links:
Seasoned European leftists of the 1940s were wont to refer to themselves bitterly as "premature anti-fascists." They had (they grumbled) been fighting against fascism when nobody much outside the Left minded it ? when, indeed, some very respectable establishment types in Britain and the U.S.A. embraced it. Now that everyone agreed that fascism was the Supreme Evil, weren’t they entitled to some credit for their foresight?
Political history is often like that. Some idea, ideology, policy, style, or practice is fine with most everyone but an annoying minority of dissenters until it isn’t. Then suddenly all the wise and good are saying, to each other’s hearty approval, what the dissenters had said ten years previously, to general scorn ? or, more often, contemptuous silence.
Something like that is now happening with attitudes to mass Hispanic immigration. Look at Mark Steyn’s current piece on NRO. It would have sat very comfortably on VDARE.com ten years ago, or alongside the late Samuel Huntington’s 2004 book Who Are We, which Conservatism, Inc. did its utmost to ignore.
For that matter, its main points are right there or implicit in Peter Brimelow’s 1992 National Review essay "Time to Rethink Immigration." I've been pegging away at the topic myself from the same perspective for twelve years, and there’s a whole chapter of immigration cynicism in my 2009 book We Are Doomed.
Now the penny has dropped with the Respectable Right. They are not quite ready to say out loud that importing 40 million high-mean-TFR, low-mean-IQ persons from regions of zero historical attainment and atavistic hostility to white Europeans was A SUICIDALLY CRAZY IDEA; but give 'em another twenty years ? they'll get there.
By which I mean, of course, here.
Odds are that twenty years from now Peter Brimelow and I will be helping Sam Huntington to push up the daisies, and so will be unable to receive the embarrassed apologies of those who saw the truth too late.
I doubt such apologies will be forthcoming anyway. As I pointed out in that "premature anti-fascist" comment last year:
The rewards of accurate prophecy are, I think, pretty well known.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.