05/10/2024
01:06 CPAC abroad. (CPAC, a broad.)
06:46 A landmark speech. (The Great Replacement is real.)
19:33 Who won the argument? (Fukuyama or Huntington?)
26:01 The Muslim vote. (U.K. municipal elections… and us.)
31:54 Snobs and slobs. (Always this way.)
34:36 Sample snobs. (T.R. turning in his grave.)
38:31 Insulting the doughboys. (Nihilism strikes.)
40:01 Does divestment work? (Only symbolically.)
41:58 Signoff. (For V.E. Day.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is your boldly genial host John Derbyshire with ruminations on the week’s news.
Actually, to begin with, the week before last’s news. The disruptions of April that I lamented in my Diary left me way behind; I've just been catching up.
What especially got my attention, for multiple reasons that I shall elaborate on, was a speech. Let me give you a preface for that, and then the actual speech.
02 — CPAC abroad. CPAC: the Conservative Political Action Conference. My acquaintance with CPAC has been minimal. I attended the February 2012 CPAC in Washington, D.C. and gave a speech there. You can find the speech archived for posterity at my personal website under Opinions-slash-HumanSciences.
That one episode aside, I can’t recall interacting with CPAC at all. I've traversed these past twelve years carrying with me the vague notion that there’s a CPAC in February every year, probably in D.C.
That’s all wrong. The home base for CPAC is in fact Maryland, although in recent years CPACs have also been held in Florida and Texas.
And abroad! Australia, Brazil, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea have hosted CPACs this past seven years, with American names like Steve Bannon, Gordon Chang, Mick Mulvaney, Candace Owens, Jeanine Pirro and Matthew Whitaker giving speeches. Yo guys: an invitation would be nice.
Well, one of these foreign CPACs was held in Budapest at the end of April — Thursday and Friday, April 25th and 26th. That overlapped with the VDARE conference in West Virginia, so I wouldn’t have been able to go to Budapest even if I'd been invited, which I wasn’t, in spite of having declared myself a Hungarophile way before Hungarophilia was cool. It just doesn’t pay to be out ahead of fashion.
On the morning of the first day there, April 25th, the Budapest CPAC was addressed by a young Dutch lady named Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Twenty-seven years old and quite exceptionally easy on the eye, Ms Vlaardingerbroek is variously billed as lawyer, commentator, conservative activist, and actress.
In support of that last descriptor Ms Vlaardingerbroek has an entry on the Internet Movie Database, IMDb. That doesn’t impress me quite as much as it ought to since I myself have an IMDb entry. Hers, however, is a full-page bio while mine is just a line item. Eh; we struggle and strive but rarely get more than a few rungs up the ladder.
So this young lady from Holland gave an address to CPAC in Budapest two weeks ago. What did she say?
Not much: just 12m42s of oratory. It got people’s imagination, though. And yes, let’s be frank: It got people’s imagination more than it would have if it had been delivered not by a hot young blonde but by a rumpled old geezer with sagging jowls. The video was reproduced on Twitter: It got over 45 million views and 85,000 likes in just two days.
Catching up earlier this week I watched the video myself. I was quite swept away.
For frequenters of outlets like VDARE.com there was nothing original in Ms Vlaardingerbroek’s address. There was, though, plain speaking on topics we are not supposed to speak plainly about, delivered with all the vigor and courage of young adulthood.
Just a few days ago, in my monthly Diary at the end of April, I reminisced about an event I had attended in March that was packed with attendees I described as "friendly, cheerful, lively, smart, and … young." For us weary veterans of the Dissident Right, this kind of thing is wonderfully encouraging. Say not the struggle naught availeth!
That’s a heck of a long introduction for a twelve-minute speech. Enough of my croaking: I’m going to give you the whole thing as a separate segment, in the voice of Ms Vlaardingerbroek herself. Here you go.
[Clip. Hello, Hungary. Hello, Budapest. Hello, fellow Europeans and American friends. Thank you so much for having me. Allow me to skip formalities for a moment and dive right into a subject that is not so cheerful, but very, very necessary to discuss. Let me walk you through the past seven days in Europe.This week in Stockholm, three elderly women in their 70s were stabbed in broad daylight on the streets. In London, four people were stabbed in a time span of just 42 hours. In Paris, hundreds of Afghan migrants took to the street to riot. And in Bringolo, also in France, yet another church was burned down to the ground.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just a few incidents in just a couple of days on our beautiful continent. But we all know that these incidents aren’t incidents anymore. If there’s one thing that’s for sure it’s that we know, and our governments also know, that there is a link between mass migration and crime.
In the Dutch city of Dordrecht, something interesting happened the other day. They announced, and this is a small city in the Netherlands, in my home country, that a new asylum center will be put in that little town. And what did the municipality do? They said, We are going to offer citizens who live in the vicinity of this center, a thousand euros to take extra safety measures.
Our new reality in Europe consists of frequent rapes, stabbings, killings, murders, shootings, even beheadings. But let me be clear about one thing. This did not used to happen before. This is a newly imported problem.
Samuel P. Huntington predicted this over 25 years ago when he wrote, and I quote: "In the new world of mass migration, the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflict will not be between the social classes. They will not be between the rich and the poor. They will be between peoples belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations."
Well, boy, was he right! And the worst part is, we as a society seem to have become indifferent to it. When another white boy or a white girl dies at the hand of an immigrant, We might shake our head, we might let out a sigh, we might even get angry for a minute or two, and then we go on with our lives. We offer the family thoughts and prayers, but nothing ever changes.
Ladies and gentlemen, what does that say about us? This is the response of a society that has already given up, a society that has already accepted its defeat. But is this true? Have we given up? Do we really accept the new reality that our globalist leaders have in mind for us?
I know one thing for sure, and that is that if nothing changes, if we don’t start to seriously fight for our continent, for our religion, for our people, our countries, then this time that we live in will go down in history as the time in which Western nations no longer had to get invaded by hostile armies in order to be conquered. This time will then go down in history as the period in which the invader was actively invited in by a corrupt elite. And not only did this corrupt elite invite the enemy in, they made the native population pay for it, too.
Everyone who has eyes can see it. The native, white, Christian, European population is being replaced at an ever-accelerating rate.
Let me back this up for you with some statistics from my home country. Let’s take Amsterdam, the capital. Amsterdam currently consists of 56 percent migrants. The Hague, 58 percent migrants. Rotterdam, almost 60 percent migrants. And of course, most of these immigrants come from non-Christian, non-western, African and Middle Eastern countries. Conclusion, the Dutch population is already outnumbered in the majority of our cities.
But let’s look onwards. London, 54 percent migrants. Again, conclusion, native population outnumbered. Brussels, color me shocked, 70 percent migrants. Conclusion, native population, majorly outnumbered. And other Europeans will, of course, follow suit soon if they haven’t already.
I’m going to draw the forbidden conclusion here. The Great Replacement Theory is no longer a theory, it’s reality. And what’s interesting about replacement is that the establishment will either deny its existence or when they admit to it, they say that it’s a good thing that the native European population is soon no longer a majority on its own continent.
Dutch national disgrace — and dubbed "Climate Pope" — Frantz Timmermans, already stated in 2015 that diversity is humanity’s destiny, and that Europe will be diverse.
And of course, by now, I think we all know what they mean with the word "diversity." It means less white people, less of you.
Imagine this in an Asian or an African country. Imagine their leaders rejoicing in the fact that their people will soon no longer be a majority in their own country. Absolutely unthinkable, unimaginable!
So what in the world is wrong with our leaders? The underlying sentiment of what they say is always the same. Our establishment claims that white people are evil and that our history is somehow fundamentally different from that of others. Consciously or unconsciously, they have sucked up the lies and the anti-white dogmas of the neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory.
That’s why the totalitarians in Brussels are trying to force you, the Hungarian people, a sovereign nation, to accept immigrants despite the fact that the population has said no, and so has the government. But make no mistake, the majority of the Dutch people haven’t asked for this either. Just like Brussels is forcing Hungary to accept these hordes of immigrants, they are doing the same now, even in the smallest of towns in the Netherlands.
No part may remain remain Dutch in the traditional sense of the word. No part of Europe may remain European.
And it’s not difficult to understand why. If the old Europe still exists in certain places, then people will be able to compare the new Europe to the old, and — news flash — they will prefer the old. That’s why the Eurocrats hate Hungary so much.
And their message is clear. Our way of life, our Christian religion, our nations, they have to go without exception. Their vision of the future is the neoliberal, unrecognizable Europe, where every city becomes like Brussels. Ugly, dirty, unsafe, zero social cohesion, where the buildings are constantly under construction and they never, ever seem to finish. And even when they do, the end result is ugly or somehow than what they started with.
What are we left with? A permanent state of isolation, confusion, and disorientation. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the New World Order. (Applause.)
So what’s the antidote? A strong Christian Europe of sovereign Nation States. That’s why we need to outright reject the lie that nationalism causes war.
It’s not nationalism or national sovereignty that causes war. It’s expansionism. And where in Europe do we find that nowadays? In one place and one place only, Brussels. (Applause.)
Isn’t it funny how the same people who erode our national sovereignty and love to do it, give it all up to the Eurocrats there, that those people are now telling us that we need to spend billions and billions of euros on the national sovereignty of Ukraine? (Applause.)
It’s a joke, honestly, and it’s a pretty sick, expensive, and dangerous joke.
During a recent interview, I got asked by an interviewer, Do you think that you ever go too far? Do you think that you're ever too radical? I thought about it for a second and I said, "No, I don’t think I go too far." (Applause.)
Truth be told, ladies and gentlemen, I think we in Europe do not go far enough. I think that if we really think about the organized structural attack on our civilization, that we don’t do enough.
Do we do enough to stop the attack on our families, on our continent, on our countries, on our religion? When we hear about another murder, another stabbing of a young innocent child, do we do enough?
When we know that our national sovereignty has been given up in less than a century to Brussels, do we do enough? When we hear that Christian kids in Germany are now converting to Islam to fit in, do we do enough? I don’t think so.
The Totalitarian Institute of the European Union needs to come down. Let me be clear, I don’t believe in reforms. When the foundation of your institution is rotten, and that is the case in Brussels, you can rebuild the house on top of it all you want, but it’s still going to crumble.
So the only answer is the Tower of Babel needs to be destroyed. (Applause.)
Ladies and gentlemen, we are the daughters and sons of the greatest nations on Earth. (Applause.) And we need to ask ourselves, what has happened to us? Where do we come from? And more importantly, where are we going?
Our elites have declared a war on us, and now it is time for us to put on the full armor of God, fight back, and win. Thank you so much. (Applause, cheering.)]
04 — Who’s won the 1990s argument? Ms Vlaardingerbroek’s passing reference there to the late Professor Samuel Huntington refers to Huntington’s 1993 essay, which became a 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
For listeners who weren’t around or weren’t paying attention in the mid-1990s, that was when, following the collapse of the USSR, geopolitical discussion was dominated by speculations about what would come next — what direction the world would take during the next few decades, the decades we are now navigating.
The first major line of speculation was started by Francis Fukuyama with his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama, who had studied under Prof. Huntington at Harvard, declared that liberal democracy had won and that the human race would not embark on any more grand ideological adventures.
Samuel Huntington countered that with ideas like the one Ms Vlaardingerbroek quoted. Here is the Huntington quote again, quote:
In the new world of mass migration, the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between the social classes. They will not be between the rich and the poor. They will be between peoples belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations.
End quote.
Huntington foresaw that Islam would cause particular, major problems for Western Civ. He was right, although at the time I’m speaking this is much more obvious in Britain and Europe than it is in North America.
The Brits and the Europeans are separated by a few dozen miles of fairly placid, easily-crossed water from the tired, poor, huddled masses of Islamia and black Africa.
They are separated from those masses even more significantly by differential fertility rates.
Only a handful of Islamic nations have below-replacement fertility. Defining "replacement level" in the usual way as 2.1 children per woman, for West Asia and North Africa I see only Tunisia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Lebanon as below replacement.
Up above it: Kuwait 2.21, Morocco 2.25, Oman 2.64, Egypt 2.65, Syria 2.69, Yemen 2.82, Jordan 2.87, Algeria 2.94, Libya 3, Iraq 3.1, Gaza 3.26, Pakistan 3.32, the West Bank 3.49, Afghanistan 4.43, Sudan 4.47.
Black Africa? Don’t ask. Suffice it to say that Afghanistan ranks number 17 in the list of nations by Total Fertility Rate; of the sixteen nations ranked with fertility rates higher than Afghanistan’s, all but one are black African. The exception is Sudan, which I included in Islamia.
How do the Brits and Europeans compare? Again: better not to ask. Since I've asked, though, here’s a sample: Italy 1.26, Spain 1.3, Poland 1.32, Greece 1.4, Portugal 1.45, Austria 1.52, Norway 1.57, Germany 1.58, Switzerland 1.59, Hungary 1.6, Ms Vlaardingerbroek’s Holland 1.61, U.K. 1.63, Sweden 1.67, Ireland 1.72, Finland 1.74, Denmark 1.77, France 1.9, … and so depressingly on.
And bear in mind that for countries like France, Spain, Germany, and the U.K. that have taken in big numbers of the huddled masses, fertility rates are inflated by people from Islamia and Africa already settled there.
So-o-o … End of history and triumph of liberal democracy, or a clash of civilizations? Who has won the mid-1990s argument, Fukuyama or Huntington? It really isn’t hard to figure out.
05 — The Muslim vote. May 2nd, a week ago yesterday, there were municipal elections all over the U.K. For a sign of things to come, it was the Muslim vote that everyone was talking about.
A little background here. As in the USA, British politics is dominated by two big old parties that millions of voters adhere to either from dumb loyalty or from conviction that none of the smaller parties is likely to win enough seats to form a government so best pick the lesser of two evils.
The Conservative Party, a.k.a. the Tories, have held power, although sometimes in coalition, for most of the past fourteen years. They have accomplished basically nothing — they have certainly conserved nothing whatsoever — and their voter base is seriously fed up with them.
Under Britain’s constitution there has to be a general election in the next few months; the Tories look set fair for a major defeat.
The other big party, the Labour Party, is looking good by default, although they ran out of constructive ideas a generation ago. They have always taken an easier line than the Tories on immigration: the great immigration surge from 1997 to 2007 was supervised by Tony Blair’s Labour government. Because of that Labour have been getting a disproportionate share of the immigrant vote.
Well: in these May 2nd elections the Muslims did well. Sadiq Khan, a Muslim supremacist, easily won a third term as Mayor of London, the first person ever to do so. Muslims got elected to municipal council seats all over, at least one of them celebrating his victory with a hearty "Allahu akbar!"
These were more Muslim victories than Labour victories, though. A lot of the Muslim victors had stood as independents, unhappy with the Labour Party’s lack of enthusiasm for Hamas.
Sample quote from BBC News, May 3rd. This concerns Bradford. a big city in the North of England. Edited quote:
Labour has retained control of Bradford City Council, with a large number of young independents also winning seats.Independent candidates now hold the same number of seats as the Conservatives, with both having 13 elected members.
Labour suffered four net losses …
According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the success of independent candidates in many of Bradford’s inner-city wards was due to dissatisfaction with how the national Labour Party has handled the war in Gaza.
Among those successful candidates were three young people — Mohammed Ali Islam, 20, Ismail Uddin,19, and 18-year-old Atira Malik …
They were met with cheering crowds outside, with Mohammed Ali Islam carried out of the election count on the shoulders of supporters.
End quote.
Newsweek magazine drew the obvious lesson for Joe Biden. Edited quote from them, May 3rd:
President Joe Biden may be looking across the Atlantic with trepidation as Britain’s Labour Party suffers heavy losses among Muslim voters across the country …With millions of votes still to be counted, Labour has already been found to have lost scores of votes in areas with significant Muslim populations, with the BBC reporting that the party’s vote is down 8 percent compared to last year in wards where more than one in 10 residents identify as Muslim. The falling Muslim support is seen as a direct response to how Labour and its leader, Keir Starmer, reacted to Israel’s war against Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.
End quote.
So the Muslim vote, there and here, is significant. Stick around a decade or two: it'll be crucial.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Returning to that Samuel Huntington quote: He was right that class antagonism will not likely be the major issue in future conflicts. It will always be an issue, though. It always has been.
Every human society I know of has exhibited some level of distinction between slobs and snobs: between hoi polloi and those who are better favored, better off, and feel themselves to be just … better.
That old Greek phrase hoi polloi is itself more than twenty-four hundred years old. Roget’s Thesaurus gives twenty-one synonyms for it: "the masses," "the multitude," "the herd," "the great unwashed," and so on.
Distinctions like that come from deep within human nature. They don’t get erased by mere historical development.
That came to mind when I was reading news stories about cops clearing the demonstrators on our college campuses.
They did a pretty good job of it. I didn’t see any water cannons; but other kinds of no-nonsense crowd control were used — rubber bullets at UCLA.
What’s the slobs'n’snobs angle there? Well, these precious little college students with their designer headscarfs and Soros-supplied camping tents are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to learn crackpot social theory from overpaid geriatric Marxist-Leninist academics so they can get high-paying jobs as DEI consultants.
The cops kicking them aside and dismantling their tents are from working- or lower-middle-class backgrounds, doing messy and often dangerous work on society’s behalf for less than academic wages.
So … snobs versus slobs. It’s always been this way and always will be.
Item: You want examples? Here’s one: 18-year-old Quentin Colon Roosevelt, a freshman at Princeton University and a keen supporter of Hamas. Young Quentin is the great-great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. A snob? Probably.
The May 5th New York Post told us that in a recent post on Twitter young Roosevelt included an image of a hand-drawn Palestinian flag. The online version of the story includes a link to that Twitter post. Strange to say, however, when I clicked on the link all I got was: "Sorry, that post has been deleted."
Or how about this one: James Carlson, forty years old, a professional agitator with public-disorder arrests going back to 2005.
Carlson inherited an eight-digit fortune. He owns a three-and-a-half-million-dollar Brooklyn townhouse with four bedrooms and four bathrooms, and his baby momma is a fashion model.
Another snob? For sure. However, he’s been arrested and charged with arson, criminal mischief and possession of stolen property while occupying Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall.
Not only is he not a student at Columbia, he never was; he has no connection with the place at all. His alma mater is the University of California in Santa Cruz.
I'll allow that there may have been some sincerity in those protests: young people, Quentin Roosevelt perhaps, after years of indoctrination by lefty schoolteachers, stirred to anger and indignation by footage of the destruction in Gaza, all shaped into oppressor-oppressed narrative for them by college faculty.
While there is surely some of that, though, there is just as surely some of the James Carlson: professional agitators looking for any opportunity, any excuse, to rage against the man. Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, Stop Oil, … whatever.
That too is an element that’s always been present, at least in the modern age: a deep-rooted grudge against society as it is, with a willingness to commit violence in the hope of bringing it all down. "Nihilists" they were called in Dostoyevsky’s time; later the term "Anarchists" was favored.
The guy who shot President McKinley in 1901 wasn’t upset about the Spanish-American War or the election defeat of William Jennings Bryan. He was an anarchist. He wanted to burn the whole thing down, or at least contribute to the burning.
"Gaza? Palestine? Yeah, sure. Just break that window enough that I can get through, would you?"
Item: I got the same kind of nihilistic vibe from Monday’s vandalizing of the WW1 memorial in New York City’s Central Park.
That one ticked me off more than the college-campus antics. Like most Brits I have a special place in my heart for that war, the more so in my case because my Dad actually fought in it.
Americans don’t have such a strong collective memory of WW1. It’s regarded more as a kind of blip between the big ones: the Civil War and WW2. I lived in New York City for a while without even knowing there is a memorial. It’s off the beaten track in Central Park; my wife and I came across it by chance while walking there one day.
So what kind of point were these vandals trying to make on Monday, defacing the memorial with graffiti and stickers of the Palestine flag?
No kind of point. They just wanted to show each other how bold they are in their hatred of the U.S.A. Nihilism doesn’t need any point or reason.
Item: Just one more on the campus demos.
If American college students truly, sincerely disapprove of American firms helping Israel to preserve itself, then there is some point to the divestment movement — the movement to have university endowments purged of any Israel-related investments.
So I have always supposed. In the May 4th issue of The Economist, however, that magazine’s columnist "Buttonwood" throws a wet blanket over the whole idea.
Sure, he allows, there’s some symbolic value to divestment. It’s highly unlikely it would have any political consequences, though. Sample quote:
Things would really have to snowball for divestment from Israeli assets to influence Mr Netanyahu’s calculations.
End quote.
"Buttonwood" gets down into the financial nitty-gritty. For example: Tailoring a college’s endowments to exclude this or that characteristic is expensive: it raises the fees that investment firms charge to manage the portfolio … And so on.
It’s a substantial column — more than 700 words — by a writer who knows the world of finance and investing very well. If you've been thinking of signing up to one of those divestment petitions, I recommend it to your attention.
07 — Signoff. That’s all, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, for your emails and donations.
Last week I noted that Wednesday had been the first of May, and I gave you the Bee Gees to commemorate that.
Wednesday this week was May 8th, a date with far greater significance. May 8th is VE Day, commemorating the end of World War 2 in Europe.
Here’s a lovely song from back then. I don’t think it it was recorded on vinyl until some months later, but it was being sung onstage in London’s West End by May 8th 1945. Everybody in my parents' generation — the WW2 generation — knew it.
I don’t feel altogether easy offering you a quote from Wikipedia, given what we know about senior management of that enterprise. This particular Wikipedia editor hit the nail on the head, though. Quote:
Written as World War II drew to its close, the song describes the yearning of parted couples to be reunited. It evokes the joy they would feel when together once again, and the pleasures of the English countryside in spring with its lilac blossom.
End quote.
Here is the version my mother liked best, sung by Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, "We'll Gather Lilacs."]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.