12/23/2011
But back away from the obvious conclusion. VDH has again exposed the radical left on immigration. Immigration is killing off California’s Central Valley. Mexicans are literally stealing everything that is not nailed down, then even stealing that which is nailed down.
National Review Online December 21, 2011 Victor Davis HansonI am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it.
Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?
The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street lights in front of their own homes?
In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is our version of Trotskyization.
The Catholic church was just looted (again) of its bronze and silver icons. Manhole covers are missing (some of the town’s own maintenance staff were arrested for this theft, no less!). The Little League clubhouse was ransacked of its equipment.
Problem identified. And the perpetrators?
There is, of course, a vague code of silence about who is doing the stealing, although occasionally the most flagrant offenders are caught either by sheriffs or on tape; or, in my typical case, run off only to return successfully at night. In the vast majority of cases, rural central California is being vandalized by gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans —
…
Perpetrators identified. Yet, perhaps out of fear, fear of the Brimelow or O’sullivan treatment, or even the Federale treatment from Kevin Williamson, VDH backpedals. Its not a big problem or an overwhelming number of people who are the problem. Just a teny, tiny, subset of a certain group, who are also conveniently victims as well, and not the sea in which the criminal swims:
… in the latter case, a criminal subset of an otherwise largely successful and increasingly integrated and assimilated near majority of the state’s population. Everyone knows it; everyone keeps quiet about it — even though increasingly the victims are the established local Mexican-American middle class that now runs the city councils of most rural towns and must deal with the costs.
Yet he touches on the problem briefly, the racist mindset of Mexican immigrants. But VDH calls it "ethnic favoritism:"
Perhaps because illegal immigration poses so many mind-boggling challenges (e.g., probably over $20 billion lost to the state in remittances, the undermining of federal law, the prejudice shown against legal immigration applicants, ethnic favoritism as the engine of amnesty, subterfuge on the part of Mexico, vast costs in entitlements and subsidies), talking about it is futile.
But the fear is there, fear of what happened to others at NR, or what happened to Samuel Francis.
So most don’t, in fear of accusations of “racism.”
The fear is there. But VDH is coming to the obvious conclusion. Will he finally gain the courage to stand up to the raza hustlers? Stay tuned for any upcoming purges led by Kevin Williamson.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.