What’s behind this madness?

(And see the e-mail from the reader who asks, what if we keep losing?)

“If one were to imagine the worst possible way to reform our immigration system, it would probably look a lot like the immigration bill the U.S. Senate is currently considering,” writes Sen. Rick Santorum in a short article at NRO that seems to have been taken from a Senate speech. He continues:

First, this bill largely rewards those who have broken the law and threatens the health of our nation’s social safety net—Social Security—by adding millions of new beneficiaries to an already unsustainable program. Millions of illegal immigrants who forged identification documents and used stolen or fraudulent Social Security numbers when seeking employment will be given the opportunity to stay in America, receive Social Security benefits, and continue their lives.

When I read this, I thought, given the huge unneeded burdens the bill would add to our society, why is the Senate doing this? Its sheer irrationality in ordinary terms makes me return again to what I think is the real reason they’re doing this: they’re doing it to show that America is not discriminatory against nonwhites. That’s what this is all about. America is the country where race doesn’t matter, where race must not matter. But as long as we have a residual historic majority population and culture, as long as whites are still the threatened and vulnerable majority in America and nonwhites the rising minority, as long as we have any discomfort at the prospect of three or five million Third Worlders per year gaining legal permanent residency in the U.S., we still look like a country where race matters and therefore we’re still racist.

While I cannot prove that getting rid of this racism is the motivation that drives support for the bill, the evidence—including the statements of more frank open-borders proponents such as John McCain—clearly points in that direction. The obvious dishonesty and harmfulness of the bill itself, combined with the obvious force of “anti-racism” that fills its sails and that is being used to intimidate critics, combined with the unprecedented manifestation of a Mexican/Hispanic peoplehood in the streets of America that has been celebrated by media and politicians, leads to the conclusion that racial surrender is the motive. America is choosing to inflict permanent economic and cultural harm on itself, including the speeded-up destruction of its European majority culture and polity, not for economic gain, but in order to cease to be racist. Like the liberal Europeans in their willing surrender to expansionist Islam, liberal Americans are willingly surrendering to the Mexican invasion, in order to end white dominance and the white majority culture.

While this policy is very extreme, it is not extreme in terms of our established liberal principles. We constantly tell ourselves that we’re a non-racist, non-discriminatory nation. We keep saying that we’re the country that transcends race—namely our own race. But, after decades of half-way measures, we have realized that the only way we can prove these exalted claims—once and for all, no more shilly-shallying!—is by erasing our white majority character.

The liberal creed says that America’s historical racial composition has no value, and that it’s primitive and immoral to think otherwise. Our leaders have been sermonizing us on this theme for the last 40 years. Now they’re acting on it.

- end of initial entry -

A reader asks: What if we lose?

Great weblog at VFR, I just found it and it has absorbed my attention. It’s a more complete and unhindered analysis of the immigration threat than even VDARE, which is high praise in my book. I appreciate your tone of determined and even hopeful resistance to the “national suicide” being foisted on us by our elites.

But what if we lose? What if the historic American nation, or what’s left of it, is completely swamped despite the best efforts of the as-yet unorganized few who recognize it for what it is: ethnic cleansing of the founding population? What if the white majority never asserts itself during its waning decades as the majority, and becomes a despised and ever-dwindling (and still clueless) minority? What do the powerless remnant do then, those who want something more for their children than slow obliteration from history? I saw a show on television a while back about archaeologists who tracked down a rare blonde, light-eyed Mongolian girl and found a genetic link to the ancient Scythians via a millenia-old white female skeleton buried in what is now Asia. Considering the parallel to what non-white immigration is doing to Europe and America, it chilled me to the bone. Where do we go to draw lines and hold our ground?

It strikes me that whites, despite their exploratory, commercial, and military extensions all over the globe from the European/Mediterranean cradle, have been under pressure and losing ground demographically and/or geographically to the East for thousands of years: the Ainu; Kennewick man; the Silk Road mummies; the Scythian woman; the driving of the Germanic tribes back east by the Huns and the fall of Rome; the Mongol yoke; Constantinople; the Ottomans. White expansion into the New World almost seems to have been forced by constant threat from the East, and now nonwhite demographic pressure is absorbing or pushing whites back in from their escapist westernmost migrations (California, Vancouver, the American Southwest). And this time, there’s no Roman Empire to fall back on, since Europe seems to have thrown open the gates to Islam and the old colonial populations.

Perhaps if whites took a larger and different historical view, namely that maybe they have not been the world’s greatest genocidal maniacs, but instead have been under threat of extinction even in their little European homeland from time immemorial, they would feel like defending themselves. The commercial and military successes of Europeans in the last five hundred years seem to have erased the natural and healthy concern for simple ethnic/cultural survival that one can still find in the writings of Westerners as late as Martin Luther, who urged Christians to do their duty and fight the apparently relentless Turk to the last breath.

I haven’t given up, but I’m pessimistic (or at least temporarily out of ideas). I’m learning Spanish to help draw out local illegals in conversation; I give the police and ICE tips on suspicious activity; I engage friends in conversation and argument to try to wake them out of their comfortable fog; I send links and contribute and donate to immigration restriction websites and candidates; I’ve written and called my Congressional representatives. And still, S. 2611 passes and the tide rolls inexorably in. Any ideas for the Camp of the Saints scenario? I’m a Christian, I know that our eternal citizenship is not in this world or its kingdoms or races of men. But we’re here for the time being, and it strikes me as tragic to see a whole race of people, imperfect but created by God for His purposes like all the others, go out of business. Especially when it’s that of my children.

Thank you again, God bless you.

LA replies:

Thank you very much, and thanks for this thoughtful and well written letter. First, please note that S.2611 has not become law and will most likely be stopped by the House. However, your key point is in your second paragraph: what do we do if there is no resistance, if the majority just keeps folding?

The simplest answer is that what we do in the event you describe is the same thing we must do in any case: We keep saying no to the prevailing forces and the prevailing culture. We never accept them. Whatever else happens, whatever else we are able to achieve or are not able to achieve, that refusal must be our base. As I wrote here:

… what I think is the most important course of action for traditionalist conservatives at the present moment (given the seemingly unstoppable power of the dominant culture, it may be the only available course of action)—and that is, knowing the truth, refusing to yield to the lies that surround us, refusing to yield to the prevailing mentality of our society, no matter how victorious it may seem.

Everybody today, particularly Republicans and mainstream conservatives, is echoing the same refrain: “Diversity is happening, immigration is happening, moral liberation is happening. We cannot return to the past. To exist and get along in this society we must accept these things.” Traditionalists must entirely reject such accommodationism. The starting point, the indispensable condition of any conservative or traditionalist movement, as well as of our personal spiritual survival, is that we say NO to the prevailing values of the liberal order and that we keep saying no, that we never accept them inwardly, even while recognizing the fact that they exercise effective control over society at present and that we may need to accommodate ourselves to them to a certain degree in our external interactions with society.

That inward refusal, that inward, spiritual independence of our environment, shared among enough like-minded people, can become the basis of a new community. And then other things, more active and external things, may become possible as well.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 25, 2006 11:37 PM | Send