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Is it wrong for me to talk about race?
(Note: I highly recommend this discussion, which has continued all day Wednesday.)
A reader writes:
When reading your blog, I am struck by the number of times you and others talk about the “white race” or a “white majority.” You seem fixated on race.
However, the battle we are fighting has little to do with “race” and everything to do with “culture.” For example, I am an Indian (ie non white). Yet I am also a traditionalist Catholic who believes very strongly in the superiority of Western traditions and culture. 99 percent of the whites I know are probably not even aware of their own cultural tradition. However, the constant fixation with the “white race” , would exclude me and other non-whites from being a traditionalist simply because of the colour of my skin.
Race is irrelevant. Culture is what matters. Whether a person is black or white, Hispanic or Asian, their adherence to traditional Western culture is paramount. At the moment, they are encouraged by liberals to hate Western traditions and celebrate their own cultural identity. But there is no reason why non-whites cannot be traditionalists or spearhead the Western traditionalist movement.
LA replies:
Context and numbers are everything.
A small number of people of different race can join a majority group without changing the identity of the group, because, being a small number, they act as individuals and are seen as individuals, though they may be seen as exotics.
A massive number of people of different race fundamentally changes the whole society. Then it becomes a matter, not of individuals joining an existing culture, but of one group and its culture replacing another group and its culture.
This distinction is all important. You must understand it if you are to understand the immigration problem.
If you don’t get the distinction between a few people and a lot of people, you are going to go on believing the neoconservative fantasy that you can transform an entire country from a 100 percent or a 90 percent white country to a majority nonwhite country and everything is going to remain the same. You’re not going to see the reality of, for example, the Mexican invasion, in which Mexicans are involved in a national/racial takeover of major parts of the U.S., in which they, the Mexicans, are conscious of themselves gaining power as a group, and of the whites as losing power.
As we see in places throughout the country, particularly California, when a foreign people moves in en masse, they bring their culture, their way of life, their notions of law and order, their notions of right and wrong, their ethnic and national loyalties, with them. The former majority people and their way of life are pushed aside, and a new people and way of life displace them. You may THINK that culture has nothing to do with race. But that doesn’t change the fact that one people brings one culture, and displaces another people with another culture.
The only way for this not to happen is that the numbers of the newcomers must be very small. But that is not the case, is it? Nor apparently are you calling for it to be the case. You presumably want to continue the massive influx of foreign peoples into America and Britain and other Western countries, even as you tell me that I’m supposed to ignore this influx of foreign peoples and talk only about culture!
You have a misconception, based on looking at this issue through your personal situation. You are one person, of Indian ancestry and Catholic religion. You feel yourself to be a part of the Western historic culture, though you don’t mention any actual Western country that you feel a part of, though I gather you are writing from Britain. So when you hear me saying that race matters, you are offended, and perhaps you feel that your own place in the West is threatened.
But you’re not seeing the thing that I’m seeing. I’m not seeing one person of Indian ancestry and Catholic religion. I’m seeing tens of millions of non-European people entering this country and other countries and transforming them into completely different countries, even as the historic majority people—under the pressure of this invasion in which they are constantly being told that they are becoming a minority and that their day is over and that they must give way to other peoples—have lost their confidence, and virtually given up any control over what was once their country, given up any belief in themselves as a people.
I’m reminded of Mark Steyn saying in a column a year or two ago that even as the West is being Islamized, Westerners must assimilate the Muslims. It’s beyond absurd, the fumings of a terminally unserious mind. How can a people who are in the act of being displaced have the ability, authority and confidence to assimilate the very people who are displacing them?
You say that “[nonwhites] are encouraged by liberals to hate Western traditions and celebrate their own cultural identity.” True, liberals want to destroy the traditions of this country and other countries. But does it not occur to you that the surest way for the left to destroy the traditions of a country is to displace its historic majority people and turn them into a minority? Do you think this has not occurred to the left? Do you not think that they understand that open borders is the surest path to destroy the historic America and the historic Britain? Has that not occurred to you?
So you need to look at the situation that I and other race-conscious immigration restrictionists are looking at, not just at your own situation.
If you were sincere in your position that you have no desire to see the majority culture of the Western countries destroyed, you would seek drastic reductions in the numbers of the immigrants who are rapidly transforming the racial and ethnic composition of the West and thus its national cultures as well. But, again, you don’t seem to be calling for such reductions. Which suggests that you want the massive immigration to continue. In other words, you, who criticize me for having a racial agenda, have your own implicit racial agenda, which is to transform the West into a nonwhite civilization. Which leads to the question, why is my racial program to preserve the historic majority character of the West objectionable, while your program to destroy that character is ok?
It comes down to this. If the protestations of conservative nonwhites that they are conservatives are to be believed, they must be on the side of restricting immigration, not on the side of continuing it and increasing it.
Race is not the only thing that matters. But it does matter. And the greater the racial differences, and the more the numbers, the more it matters.
For more on why race matters, go here and read or download (or contact me for information how to purchase) The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism.
The reader replies:
Firstly, once again, you are equating race with culture. If 10 million Mexicans moved to America and adopted the American way of life, values, ideals, culture and became traditionalist conservatives, would this be a positive or negative thing for western culture? Mexicans you say, bring their culture—but only because the failed ideology of ‘multiculturalism’ encourages them to. [LA replies: First, I am not equating race and culture. Race and culture are not identical. But at the same time they cannot be entirely separated. Further, in many instances, for all practical purposes, they are identical. A genetically similar people (a race) carries its culture with it, and only under very special circumstances can people of one race switch to the culture of people of another race. Second, the assumption that Mexicans could wholesale adopt and carry forward our institutions and standards is false for the specific reason that Mexican Mestizos have an average IQ of about 90. A people with an average IQ of 90 cannot carry on the civilization created by a people with an average IQ of 100. In fact, your entire notion that race is not a constituent element of culture is blown out of the water by the fact of intrinsic racial differences in IQ and thus intrinsic racial differences in civilizational abilities.]
For example, I am from Australia and in the 50s and 60s, immigrants here from Europe anglicised their names e.g. Brodzky became Brodney and so forth. They did this because they wanted to assimilate into the broader culture. Yet today, the idea of making new immigrants anglicise their names is unthinkable. Further, they are encouraged to maintain and celebrate their own culture, while assimilation into the broader culture is discouraged. [LA replies: The examples you give are Caucasian immigrants in Australia, that is very different from a mass immigration of people of completely different race.]
Secondly, you are making a number of assumptions about my views on immigration, none of which is true. I do not support massive floods of immigration—this is sheer stupidity. I am in favour of tightly controlled immigration, primarily drawn from Christian countries. Why? Because culture matters, not race, and here Christian culture is the common element. [LA replies: I’m glad to hear it. My main concern is immigration which must be drastically reduced. If you want to reduce immigration drastically, I’m happy, regardless of your reasons.]
Third, you do Western traditionalism a great disservice by narrowing it down to merely the ‘white race’. If the white race ceases to exist in the future (a distinct possibility with current birthrates I might add), this does not mean Western values or culture cease to exist. The simple fact is, for all your protestations about the superiority of the ‘white’ race, it is whites who are currently committing cultural and demographic suicide. You have given up your religion, and with it, your culture. The torch is now being passed to Christian Asians, Indians and Africans to maintain the heritage of the West. [You simply haven’t read me if you think I’m narrowing down the West to the white race. I repeatedly discuss the multi-leveled nature of our culture, it’s one of my main themes. You write to me complaining of my supposedly reductionist views on race when it’s evident you don’t know what my views are. I am the opposite of a racial reductionist; I do, however, say that race matters.]
I have no allegiance to the white race. What I do have is an allegiance to Western principles, as embodied in Christianity. [Your view comes down to a kind of neoconservatism: the Proposition Civilization, plus Christianity. So it’s nothing to you if the white race, everything it is and has been, is pushed off the pages of history and disappears. For example, if the Irish people were to be completely replaced by ethnic Chinese Christians, that would be nothing to you. If white America were to become Mestizo America (so long as the Mestizos supposedly had our culture) that would be nothing to you . You disregard Solzhenitsyn’s statement that nations are the distinct personalities of mankind. The West you believe in is a set of ideas, plus Christianity. You have no regard for the actual peoples and their qualities that made the West and its distinct cultures and nations. In reality people’s ethnic, racial, physical qualities are part of what they are. By disregarding that, you deny people’s humanity. Your view is anti-human.]
[It would be as if I went to India and said, “The Indian people as they’ve existed for thousands of years, with their distinctive type and personality which we can see in ancient paintings and sculptures and which still exists today, this unique Indian people, is of no importance to me. I don’t give a damn if it disappears. I want to import all the other peoples of the world into India to recreate India as a European/Chinese/black/Mestizo country based on Christianity. All that matters is Christianity. The particular qualities of the Indian people, the way they look, the way they talk, are nothing to me.”]
From one’s religion comes one’s culture. Culture matters, not race. [This is a dangerously simplistic view of culture. Religion is the core of culture, but not the totality of it. You are the one with a reductionist view of culture and civilization. Read my article “How liberal Christianity promotes open borders and one-worldism,” where I show how the Bible respects individual nations and peoples and even after God’s transformation of the world and the coming down of the New Jerusalem at the end of the Book of Revelations, mankind is still represented as distinct nations, “and the glory of them.” And this is what neoconservatives hate. They want a single humanity, with all distinctions dissolved.]
A. Zarkov writes:
In my mind the real test of a person’s commitment to liberal ideas about race is where he sends his children to school. Under this test, almost everyone flunks. Everyone that has the means sends his own children to segregated school systems. Outside of Jimmy Carter, I can’t think of a single exception. All the big-mouth boosters of school integration in Washington DC quietly send their own children to schools like Sidwell Friends and not Jefferson High School. Schools today are almost as racially segregated as in the era before the Brown decision. The real effect of Brown was to deny poor white people the opportunity to send their children to segregated schools. When you ask liberals where their own children go to school, they quickly change the subject. I can’t these people seriously.
LA replies:
But is that so open-and-shut? Can’t the parents argue that those schools are troubled by poverty, violence, fatherlessness, “anti-academic culture,” etc., not race per se, and that those problems are in turn caused by society? also, in nice places like Shaker Heights, Ohio, the schools are completely integrated. In other words, if there are middle class blacks, liberal whites are happy to send their children to those schools.
Mark P. writes:
The only flaw with this reasoning is the extent to which such “integrated” neighborhoods have private schools. According to this, there are five private schools and nine public schools operating in Shaker Heights. If it turns out that larger percentages of whites are occupying these private schools, then “integration” is a joke.
Mark J. writes:
I am very glad that you made the point that the Indian would have no objection to the white race disappearing entirely as long as Western culture survived. I believe I detected a bit of barely suppressed glee on his part at the idea that the white race may be dooming itself to demographic extinction and that, as he put it, “the torch is now being passed to Christian Asians, Indians and Africans to maintain the heritage of the West.” This reminds me of an email conversation I had with an Indian in which he began by talking about how he admired America and then shortly began to gloat about how India was going to rule things in the future and that the white race was doomed. His actual anti-white passion was striking and frightening. People may talk all nice about how race doesn’t matter but the fact seems to be that when pressed their real loyalties to their own people come through.
Your Indian correspondant’s main contention is that race is irrelevant and that culture is all that matters. I would argue that the opposite is true. Race—i.e., the survival and happiness of one’s people—is what matters and culture is merely a tool. I believe this is so because a people—a distinct ethnic group—evolves a culture that reflects them and works for them. Their culture is a survival tool and an expression of what they most value. But it is not the people themselves. To say that the culture is all that matters is like saying that all that matters in Iraq is that Iraqis have democracy. Democracy is a way of organizing the political aspect of society, it is not a good in itself. It works well in certain circumstances for certain peoples, that’s all. If the white race disappears I frankly don’t care whether democracy is adopted by the peoples who replace us.
What the Indian is saying is that he likes the cultural tools that white people have developed, and he’s happy to pick them up and use them because they serve him well; and if the people who developed them disappear completely, well, that’s of little importance to him. As one of those people, I have a bulletin for him: (a) we’re not going anywhere, and (b) I suspect that the reality would be that Western (i.e., white) culture would not survive without white people. That was certainly the case in Haiti and in other places whites colonized and then left.
The egotism of your correspondant should be a lesson to us all. We allowed people like him into our nations in a spirit of goodwill, and now his position is that it’s fine with him if we disappear because he’ll keep sweeping up the church and raising the flag on the Fourth of July after we’re gone, so we’re really not needed. Our mistake began the day we began letting alien peoples in with the idealistic but mistaken notion that “race doesn’t matter.”
Jonathan C. writes:
Wow! Just when I’m ready to give in to despair and/or frustration at the nuanced comments I read, comes your wonderful reply to the Indian in Australia. Your refutations are spot-on, and with pinpoint accuracy and clarity. I remember reading something similar in a comment from one of VFRs readers a while back. I particularly agree with Mark J.—your Indian correspondent finds western civilization a useful tool, but considers its originators irrelevant. Religion and culture and race are ineluctably intertwined, and despite the Indian’s Christianity, I doubt we would have anything else in common—views on politics, personal responsibility, and other cultural indicators.
I remember when I was a visa officer in Jamaica and had to do my prison visits (to Americans, almost exclusively black, who had been arrested on primarily drug and a few other charges). I marvelled at how we had NOTHING in common despite our shared “nationality,” and how closely their language and their lives paralleled that of the Jamaicans—welfare, illegitimacy, illiteracy, and so on. Once, to be American and have a shared nationality also meant a shared culture, if not race and/or religion. Now, whenever I read of some plane crash or natural catastrophe somewhere in the world and the MSM says “Americans” were killed, I know they mean Mexicans/Indonesians/Indians or someone of some other third world nation who happens to hold an American passport.
If Western civilization was simply a sort of transcendent gift or mindset that anyone of any race or religion or nationality could share, then why did it not originate or flower anywhere BUT IN THE WEST? Everyone keeps begging the question—these values and virtues do not flow from a vacuum. They are the product of a particular race and culture—and if that race and culture are eliminated, so will its values and virtues be also. An America filled with Mexican, Chinese, and Indian Christians would not be America, nor would it be a bastion of Western civilization—quite the opposite.
LA—keep on fighting the good fight. Even when I give up, I know you’re out there still going strong. I don’t know how you do it, but I know we need you to.
LA writes:
Thanks to Jonathan.
And thanks to Mark J. for noticing that shocking sentence of Indian Catholic’s, which I missed: “The torch is now being passed to Christian Asians, Indians and Africans to maintain the heritage of the West.” That says it all. He says race doesn’t matter, but what he really means is that the white race doesn’t matter and he doesn’t care if it disappears from history. “The torch has been passed.” By whom? And says who? Says our Indian Catholic, who by those words shows that he is actively wishing the white Western people into non-existence. And he says this at the very moment in history when the white West is being attacked from within and without, its very ability to survive in question. So he has made all too clear what side he is on.
This is an attitude not uncommon among a certain type of “conservative” Catholic, including whites such as Fr. Benedict Groeshel and the neocon Catholic managing editor of First Things, Joseph Bottum. These people have no regard for the United States and other Western countries as nations, they have no regard for the historic peoples and cultures that formed the West. They reduce everything to Catholicism or Christianity.
The same false reductionism leads Indian Catholic to his notion that Asian Christians or African Christians would preserve the “heritage of the West.” To believe this, one would have to believe that the West consists of nothing but Christianity. Once you become a Christian, boom, you now embody the entire heritage of Western culture! Does the Indian Catholic believe that black African Christians have the culture, the way of life, the political understandings, the legal institutions, the artistic sensibilities, the historic memories and loyalties, the idiom, the mindset, the personality, of Europeans and Americans? For someone to say that a black African is a legatee of the entire heritage of the West simply by virtue of being a Christian represents a horrible reductionism which is very similar to neoconservatism. According to the neocons, America consists of nothing but an Idea, and the moment you suscribe to that Idea, even if you live on the other side of the world, you are fully an American. The problem is, once you’ve detached yourself from the actual country, you also also lose the will to preserve its Idea. Look at how silent the neocons are in the face of the ongoing Islamization of the West by Muslims who evidently do not share our Idea. Indeed, the neocons are now saying that sharia-believing Muslims are ok, so long as they are non-violent. So what happened to the Idea?
The point is, once you have abstracted your country and culture into an idea, you’ve turned yourself into a void, so there’s nothing left to defend, nor the will and energy to defend it.
In conclusion, what we are seeing here, whether in its “Catholic conservative” form, its “sentimental conservative evangelical” form, or its neoconservative form, is a modernist, anti-human reductionism that must be resisted at all costs.
LA writes:
A blogger named the Kvetcher says I’m saying that race is the primary divider between groups, at least with regard to immigration problems. He continues:
Still, could not the same thing happen between those of a similar (even exactly the same) race? For instance, when haredim move into and take over a formerly secular and Modern Orthodox neighborhood, the same dynamics without a disparate racial ingredient play out in a similar fashion in terms of cultural takeover.
If we accept that, then the question remains, why talk (primarily) in terms of race?
I posted a reply at his site (revised here slightly):
Why does the Kvetcher assume the most simplistic possible interpretation of my position? Have I ever said or remotely implied that race is the only basis for division between people? The human world is organized into all kinds of larger wholes—family, ethnicity, culture, race, religion, nation, civilization, political philosophy, economic class, and on and on. Divisions can occur along any of these divides.
But among these divides, and the most intractable of them, is race. And when you have large, conspicuosly different racial groups inhabiting the same society which is lacking an unquestioned majority culture, serious culture/racial conflict is inevitable. A society must have a recognized majority culture and people if it is to thrive and survive.
Richard W. writes:
An interesting discussion. The “Catholic Indian” raised some interesting points, buy his own chauvinism defeated his arguments.
Let me give some more powerful examples:
I’m the father of two grown girls, both raised their entire lives by me. One is half Chinese and half white, the other is 100 percent Chinese. Both were raised by their mother, a native Chinese who moved here at age 13, and myself, a fourth generation American.
I’m not sure either daughter considers herself “white” totally, but I’m sure both consider themselves “Western” and “American.” The 100 percent Chinese daughter I have heard tell people “I’m not Asian, I’m American,” by which she means: “I don’t speak Chinese, I don’t worship or even know much about Chinese gods, I’m not some shrinking little Jade Princess like you imagine, I played water polo in high school and root for the Seahawks in the fall.”
I see no difference in the “Western-ism” of the two, even though one looks like Lucy Lui and the other looks like Lucy Lawless.
Isn’t assimilation the missing concept here. Of course a first generation immigrant in the vast majority of cases is not part of “the West” though some try harder and some not at all.
But traditionally, and still in many cases, over several generations the melting pot works and people who are members of various races (genetically) share all the proclivities of the American majority.
The arguments you make are more true for other nations than the USA, precisely because we DO have the history of assimilation, shared culture among separate races, and intermarriage. Those are things that make us unique and make the “blood and soil” arguments less convincing then they would be if you were discussing Italy, Poland or Japan.
Were the Irish considered a foreign “race” 100 years ago? That seems quaint now. So, while the Indian fellow sort of bobbled the argument, I still think that his overall point is that culture is stronger—and ultimately more interesting—than “race,” which is a soft category in any case.
LA replies:
Here we go again. I’ve already acknowledged, in this thread and a thousand times previously, that individuals of any race can assimilate into a culture of people of a different race. That is very different from mass immigration transforming and displacing an entire people and culture, as his happening now throughout the entire West. The danger represented by someone like Richard W. is that he sees that entire vast problem through the filter of his personal experience. So whenever he hears about American culture being displaced, whenever he hears about the Mexican invasion, whenever he hears about advancing Islamization, he thinks about his daughters and says, “These worries are illusory. As my daughters’ experience demonstrates, everything will work out.” He lives in a bubble, congratulating his daughters while Rome burns.
Vincent Chiarello writes:
Your rejoinder to the Indian Traditional Catholic about the dangers of untrammeled immigration from the Third World was as convincing as anything I’ve ever read. Which is why your blog is the first I turn to in the morning, and the last I peruse before turning off the computer.
Leonard K. writes:
Your Indian correspondent from Australia writes:
“The torch is now being passed to Christian Asians, Indians and Africans to maintain the heritage of the West.”
Never heard of a torch being used to maintain anything, so let me rephrase:
“The torch is now being passed to Africans to torch the heritage of the West.”
The reader (Indian Catholic from Australia) replies:
This is the last point I’ll make. You say: “A people with an average IQ of 90 cannot carry on the civilization created by a people with an average IQ of 100. In fact, your entire notion that race is not a constituent element of culture is blown out of the water by the fact of intrinsic racial differences in IQ and thus intrinsic racial differences in civilizational abilities.”
If we are to buy into your argument and judge people on the basis of their “racial” IQ, studies have proven that East Asians have higher IQs than whites.
This is why in previous posts you have complained of an Asian intellectual elite—this is common to all Western countries. But by your own definition, Asian culture is superior to white culture because of their higher IQs—i.e. a lesser race is being replaced by a superior race.
Obviously, this is not the case—which is why claiming that race matters is nonsense.
LA replies:
Are you so literal minded that you translate my statement about Mestizo IQ into the statement, “People with higher IQ have superior culture … and therefore whites should want to have their culture taken over by that of Asians”? Are you not aware that the difference between Northeast Asians and whites is small and ambiguous (Asians better with numbers, whites better with words and also with larger standard deviation), while the difference between both and, say Mestizos and blacks is significantly larger? Are you not aware that while there are many other factors besides IQ, such as the style of a culture (e.g., the differences between West and Asia), the difference between a 100 IQ and a 90 IQ is a difference of basic functionality?
In any case, besides throwing easy asides at my argument, what is your position? Are you saying that IQ differences between individuals and between groups do not matter? Are you saying that a Mestizo California will remain at the same level of civilization as white California? If you are, then you’re only showing again how dangerous is the libera/neocon/Catholic view. It adds up to a kind of cultural Communism that says that all peoples have the same qualities and abilities, and that, in pursuit of manifesting that equality, will destroy all actual cultural and economic goods, as Communism did.
Last night someone was telling me that the neocon view of human sameness ultimately derives from the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School. I disagreed. But maybe there was something to what he was saying.
Terry M. writes:
ICA writes: “Firstly, once again, you are equating race with culture. If 10 million Mexicans moved to America and adopted the American way of life, values, ideals, culture and became traditionalist conservatives, would this be a positive or negative thing for Western culture? Mexicans you say, bring their culture—but only because the failed ideology of ‘multiculturalism’ encourages them to.”
Your reader reasons from effect to cause. He says that Mexicans bring their culture with them because of the failed ideology of multiculturalism. I would argue it differently, much differently. It is not because of multiculturalism that peoples of other cultures bring their culture with them, it is because they have invariably brought their culture with them, even in comparatively small numbers, that liberals have attempted to account for the cultural disparities and resulting clashes between the various races by the propagation of the false ideas of multiculturalism. In other words, the liberal ideology of multiculturalism is an effect of the liberal cause of inviting peoples of different cultures into our society, not the other way around.
But no matter how he sees it, the evidence speaks for itself. Over ten million Mexicans have invaded our country and they have not adopted the American way of life, values, ideals, culture, and become traditionalist conservatives. Why? Not because of multiculturalism have they retained their racial and cultural identity, but because their racial and cultural identity cannot be separated from them. Multiculturalism only helps them in doing this; invading Western countries en masse, with no compunction that they should leave their cultural identity behind. They are Mexicans, with a Mexican heritage they are accustomed to and seek to retain. End of story.
LA replies:
Also, notice how ICA, in neocon fashion, blames the lack of assimilation of Mexicans solely on the American left, not on the Mexicans, their attachment to their own culture, and their deliberate program of national expansion and imperialism, which I detailed here. Neocons must deny that any significant cultural differences between an immigrant group and the host culture come from the immigrant group, as that would invalidate the liberal assumption of universal human sameness. The difference must have been artificially imposed on the immigrant group—by the evil left, the source of all evils.
In fact, the neocons reason exactly like Rousseau, the father of leftism.
Rousseau said that all men are naturally free and equal, and that it is only the artificial institutions of civilization that make them unequal.
The neocons say that all peoples are the same and are equally assimilable into America, and that it is only the leftist institutions of America that artificially create cultural differences.
Of course, when the neocons are into putting down Europe, then they reverse the picture and say that the Europeans are failing to assimilate their Muslims, but that America is doing a beautiful job of assimilating its Muslims. But, increasingly, what the neocons mean by assimilating the Muslims is accommodating them, includinig sharia.
LA adds:
Also, James W. in an e-mail took ICA’s side and suggested that we misunderstood ICA’s comment about passing the torch. He thought ICA meant that whites were sharing the civilization rather than giving it up. But, he added, “If giving it up is what he meant, then your instincts would be correct, and mine wrong.” I invited ICA to clear up any misunderstandings on my part, but haven’t heard back from him.
In any case, as I see it, there is nothing ambiguous about passing the torch. One person is carrying the torch, and he passes it to another, who takes it from him. I think that ICA’s statement that the white race is passing the torch of Western civilization to Asians and blacks means exactly what it seems to mean.
Leonard K. writes:
You write: “He thought ICA meant that whites were sharing the civilization rather than giving it up.”
But one line above the infamous “torch” sentence, the ICA wrote: “…it is whites who are currently committing cultural and demographic suicide.”
“Sharing the civilization” just before committing a suicide?
LA replies:
Good catch.
However, maybe ICA was just adopting Mark Steyn’s argument that we Westerners in the act of being taken over by the Muslims should make friends with them and pass on our culture to them, so that the Muslims after they take us over will be nice to us. I kid you not—Steyn wrote that. But of course Steyn will say anything, and never pays a price for it. No member of the Bush/neocon establishment ever pays a price.
James W. writes (9/28):
I read all the posts replying to Indian Catholic, especially concerning the one we were addressing—passing the torch. There exists an ancient axiom that what is not denied is true. As unfair as that will be at times, this is a free and frank forum that would warrant the truth of that. So, I must acknowledge that your instincts were right and mine were not.
How very interesting that anyone would embrace the beauty and utility of the best of Western Civilization while managing to evade its lessons.
For my part, I have this thought: We do not see things as they are, but as we are. And, we do not readily suspect things in others of which we ourselves are incapable.
Not an excuse, but an understanding by the way of our gradual evolution.
Richard W. replies to my earlier reply to him:
Thanks for posting and responding to my note in your blog. As mentioned previously, it’s a very interesting topic too little discussed.
You wrote:
“Here we go again. I’ve already acknowledged, in this thread and a thousand times previously, that individuals of any race can assimilate into a culture of people of a different race.”
I’m new to reading your blog. I was only made aware of it a few weeks ago when excerpts were posted on FreeRepublic.com It is most excellent.
“… that is very different from mass immigration transforming and displacing an entire people and culture, as his happening now throughout the entire West.”
Yes, that’s very different. I agree. I’ve read enough of your blog, and also some of your writings in “A Race Against Time” collection that I understand that point. I agree that my annecdotal story of my kids success doesn’t really prove anything one way or the other vis-a-vis the cultural disruption of mass immigration.
So, no, I don’t think I live in a bubble. But in looking for a solution to a very large, nearly intractable problem I’d have to say that one component is probably trying like hell to get back to assimilation as a virtue. This is why things like Spanish language on the MAX system (mass transit) in Portland anger me.
Hopefully there are other components to, up to and including mass deportations, changing laws that allow too much (legal) immigration, etc.
But even with all that one of the best hopes will be that those here already acculturate.
The Chinese have this term: ABC. American Born Chinese. It signifies that most of them have become more American in cultural outlook than their Chinese parents. (Interestingly Chinese have historically been one of, if not the most, unwilling to assimilate. As their numbers have increased though, this tendency has delinced, at least among ABC. I used to be amazed at 2nd and 3rd generation Chinese in Chinatown, NYC, who spoke only rudamentary broken English. My daughters speak only rudamentary broken Chinese.)
Thanks again for an informative and thought provoking web site. I will continue to read it with great interest.
LA replies:
I very much appreciate Richard’s receptivity to the idea I was trying to get accross. Not enough people are. The way many people’s thought run on this issue is something like this, “I know a Mexican, and he’s a nice person. Therefore Mexican immigration is good.” End of thought process, end of subject, end of America.
Or, “My mother came here from the old country with nothing. And now her son is a successful journalist. Therefore immigration is good and anyone who questions it is a bigot.” End of thought process, end of subject, end of America.
Or, “My daughter in law is Filipino, and my grandchildren are half-Filipino. So race is irrelevant and we have to become a diverse, non-white country.” End of thought process, end of subject, end of America.
Or, “If it hadn’t been for immigration, I would have been smoke.” (Midge Decter, quoted in Huddled Cliches, p. 50) Therefore immigration cannot be questioned. End of thought process, end of subject, end of America.
One of the most important things to understand in this issue is the difference between the individual or family level and the collective or national level. People take their personal experience and project it onto the nation as a whole, without trying to understand the nation as a whole and its needs.
Indian Catholic from Australia replies:
My apologies—I have been busy with work and not able to answer previously.
Once again, you have presumed my views. First it was the fact that I had a “racial agenda to make the West non white.” This was proved incorrect as my position is one of restricted immigration. Now because I state race doesn’t matter, you now have presumed I “really mean the white race doesn’t matter.”
Once again this incorrect—race, whatever race, does not matter. Culture does.
Western culture springs from Christianity. If Indians, Africans and Asians become Westernised and Christianised, they will carry on the principles of Western civilisation. You have not once disproven this claim. What exactly is it Lawrence, about the white race that means they and only they can inherit these values? The answer is nothing. Just as,in exactly the same way, there is nothing inherently different about the Indian race.
The problem is not simply immigration—the problem is mass immigration where immigrants are encouraged to maintain their own cultural identities. Why is it that non-Western cultures are always described as “rich” and “vibrant”? Why is it their symbols, beliefs and practices must always be respected and “celebrated”? Yet trashing own traditions, holidays and religion is considered “progressive.
On the subject of passing the torch, given that whites are committing cultural suicide, it will indeed be Christianised Indians, Africans and Asians who will carry on Western principles.
On that subject, do not presume to blame immigrants for the problems that whites face. These are all self inflicted.
For example, white European populations have embraced what the Pope called “the culture of death”—abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality and left-liberalism. This is a choice not forced upon them, but freely embraced. By making that choice, Europe has signed its own death warrant and will become Muslim. Even if Europeans today stopped all immigration and deported all “non-whites,” in 50 to 100 years, their own populations will still die out because of their “lifestyle choices.” Immigration here is not the problem, it is the symptom of the problem—their denial and hatred of Christianity.
LA replies:
ILA’s dogmatic blindness to the reality of race—and to the connection between the physical, racial being of a people and their culture, memory, identity, and will to exist as a people—continues. On one hand, he keeps saying that race doesn’t matter at all, and is an illegitimate concept; remember that he began this discussion by accusing me of being “fixated” on race. On the other hand he writes:
The problem is not simply immigration—the problem is mass immigration where immigrants are encouraged to maintain their own cultural identities. Why is it that non-Western cultures are always described as “rich” and “vibrant”? Why is it their symbols, beliefs and practices must always be respected and “celebrated”? Yet trashing own traditions, holidays and religion is considered “progressive”…. white European populations have embraced what the Pope called “the culture of death”—abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality and left-liberalism.
Because race for him is a non-reality, ILA doesn’t realize the Western behavior he is describing is race suicide. Whites are canceling out themselves, their nations, their cultures, and allowing other peoples to take their countries over. This thing is happening in front of his eyes, and he’s describing it, yet he doesn’t see it, because of his dogma that race doesn’t exist or is of no importance. It doesn’t occur to him that the reason there is this mass immigration (which he criticizes) is the Western doctrine that racial discrimination and exclusion is evil and must be avoided at all costs, and therefore all peoples of all types in unlimited numbers must be permitted to immigrate into Western countries. In his view, it is a failure of cultural or religious discrimination that is at fault. He ignores what actually is driving this catastrophe—the enforced belief that any kind of racial consciousness (on the part of white people) is wrong; and therefore that all the white nations, to become moral, must turn themselves into nonwhite nations. And that is a principle that ILA himself also agrees with since he says that race is completely unimportant and illegitimate. In the typical neocon manner, he embraces the principle of racial non-discrimination which has opened wide the doors of the West and has destroyed the moral ability of the Western peoples to shut the doors, then he blithely turns around and complains about the resulting cultural damage, which in reality was brought about by the practice of his own race-blind beliefs.
The reality is that the white race is being targeted as the white race (both by leftist whites and by nonwhites). How can the white race defend itself from this attack if whites are not even allowed to talk about themselves as whites, as ILA would have it? He criticizes the Western suicide, even as he himself seeks to silence the Western peoples so that they cannot even protest their own suicide.
If the Western Christian culture that ILA says he believes in is to be saved, then the white Western peoples who are the creators and carriers of that culture must regain their own legitimacy as peoples. But that is impossible so long as Westerners believe what ILA tells them: (a) that race doesn’t matter, (b) that it’s wrong and immoral to say it does, and (c) that white Western Christians are completely interchangeable with African and Asian Christians.
On another point, the same pope, John Paul II, who spoke of the “culture of death” also said that the culture of death included immigration restrictions. He ordered the Western peoples to commit suicide through open borders, then he complained about the “culture of death.”
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 25, 2007 09:07 PM | Send
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