P. Hitchens confirms himself in his liberal folly about race and immigration

Karen writes from England:

Peter Hitchens has posted a blog entry today in which he responds to some of his reader’s comments on his recent article about the BNP. He makes some astounding comments about race and ethnicity and his concept of Britishness.

Hitchens writes:

What is “ethnic loyalty”, Hal K? Do you really believe a man is defined unalterably by the colour of his skin? Try reading Farnham’s Freehold, a clever book by Robert Heinlein, which imagines a world in which (among other interesting changes) white people are regarded by blacks as inferior creatures, fit only for servitude. It might at least make you conscious of how your view appears when seen from a different direction.

Hitchens continues:

Somebody calling himself “Prezza” (does that mean your real name is Preseltine?) says “The problem is Peter, that your “civilised conservatism, with its liking for the rule of law and its roots in Christianity” has utterly failed to preserve the ethnic and national identity of this country. And the tragedy is that, consequently, within the foreseeable future your ‘civilised conservatism, with its liking for the rule of law and its roots in Christianity’ will itself be a thing of the past. “Hang on, Mr Preseltine. Firstly, my sort of civilised conservatism hasn’t been in power, so hasn’t had the chance to preserve anything. And what IS this about ‘ethnic’ identity. It is perfectly possible to preserve the national identity of this country without any racial restrictions. Anyone can become British, if he wants to, and he is allowed to. The problem is that our current rulers don’t want new citizens to become British. My view may well become a thing of the past, alas. But will that be a good thing?

The most absurd statement ever! The Government is giving out British passports like there is no tomorrow. It is perfectly impossible to maintain the national identity of this country with a large number of unassimilable aliens. How does Hitchens think that Muslims can “become British” without rejecting Islam totally? He frequently criticises the Islamisation of Britain but has no answers as to what to do about it. Now we know what he thinks; evidently Muslims in his view can be British.

You are right, he is an extreme and radical liberal

LA replies:

Devastating. What a fool. He thinks he’s a conservative, and he is wedded to beliefs that must lead to the end of his people and country.

His liberalism is seen in statements like, “Do you really believe a man is defined unalterably by the colour of his skin?” He thinks it’s all about individuals. He thinks the concern about mass non-Western immigration is all about judging and discriminating against individuals. So the fact of significant group differences cannot be allowed into consciousness—the fact that, for example, if you allow North Africans to flood Italy, Italy will stop being Italy and become like North Africa—as a New York woman just back from Florence recently complained to a friend of mine. This true statement cannot be made in Hitchens’s presence, cannot be discussed, because it would mean that we are precluding the possibility that any individual North African might assimilate into Italy.

But we are not doing that. We are not saying that race is an absolute bar in all individual cases to cultural assimilation to another culture. But when you’re dealing with an entire population of different race and culture being transferred from a country then the racial change that occurs in the society is virtually identical to the cultural change. People bring all their qualities with them, their qualities don’t disappear when they enter a new country. Liberals cannot take in the reality and impact on a society of entire collectivities of people of a different race and culture, because that would mean letting go of their sacred paradigm that only the individual matters, that race doesn’t matter at all, that all people are basically alike and that all nonwhite people can assimilate into white society, and, indeed, that we must never, ever, ever make a generalization about a people not being like us if there is the possibility that even one individual of that people can assimilate to our culture, because then we’d be discriminating against that one individual, and it would be better to let our country be destroyed than to discriminate against one individual.

Hitchens is not even at a kindergarten level of grasping the racial crisis that dooms the West unless it is confronted. All he has in his head is catastrophic liberal cliches.

This confirms my view that without the racial aspect of conservatism, all the other aspects of conservatism come to naught.

As I said at the end of my 1994 speech, “The War on White America,” a conservatism that lacks a grasp of the basic truths about race cannot be a serious conservatism.

Karen replies:

My thoughts exactly!

This man is a fool who has never put his Trotskyite past behind him. His Conservative policies on drugs, crime, Christianity and morality are worthless if the country is going to be overrun by “anyone who wants to be British”. Don’t you think the Daily Mail, employing idiots like Melanie and Hitchens, is a fake right wing paper?

- end of initial entry -

Mark Jaws writes:

Not only is Peter Hitchens a cowardly right-wing liberal afraid to confront the reality of race, but his take on the book, Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert Heinlein, is all wet. Farnham’s Freehold deals with the time travels of Hugh Farnham, who through a nuclear explosion is catapulted into the future in which atomic war has reduced the white race to minority status, and blacks and Moslems, who escaped the nuclear war, have taken the reigns of power. While the ruling blacks in the novel do indeed view whites as inferiors and even raise young white females to cannibalize them, the majority of the technicians and scientists who run this nightmarish world are white. Hence the not very subtle message about black savagery and competence is there for everyone to grasp.

When I read Farnham’s Freehold in 1974 as a 19 year old during my summer camp escapades (with Howard Stern, by the way), it raised in me for the first time a level of racial consciousness which heretofore had lain unstirred. If Hitchens cannot grasp the obvious message of Farnham’s Freehold, then he cannot be trusted to deal with the more complex issues of race, culture, and society. As someone who supervised military analysts, some of them very talented English majors, I learned long ago that eloquent writing skills do not a perceptive analyst make.

LA replies:

The thing that really puts me off on Hitchens is not just that he’s not on our side of the race issue—I wouldn’t expect that. It’s the whole position he takes on it, and the way he expresses it. He’s utterly clueless and immersed in never-examined liberal attitudes, in much the same way that Melanie Phillips is. But at least Phillips is a self-described liberal. Hitchens is a self-described conservative, oh, he’s a big conservative, all right, one of the best known conservative journalists in Britain—who, moreover wrote a book called “The Abolition of Britain.” Yet this supposed conservative, his head stuffed with unreflective liberal dogma on race, expresses far more hostility to race-aware whites than I’ve ever seen Phillips do. He demands absolute race blindness and the equal inclusion of all peoples in Britain, imagining that that is compatible with the cultural survival of Britain—not realizing that it must lead to the abolition of Britain. I’m seriously annoyed at this guy.

I’m actually holding myself back from what I want to say about Hitchens, since as the host of this site I must maintain a certain decorum.

Hal K. writes:

I found out about Peter Hitchen’s earlier blog entry “My riposte to BNP sympathisers…” from “View from the Right” and posted one of the comments to which he responded. I have posted two replies to his comment directed towards me specifically, but only one has shown up so far on his blog. In my latest comment I point out how different the situation in the fictional tale of “Farnham’s Freehold” is from that in Britain, regardless of which race you cast in which role. It does seem like Mr. Hitchen’s views on the subject of race are stuck in the past. Regardless, I am glad to have gotten a chance to argue directly with him.

Reimer writes:

Hitchens continues to hold to the line that rather than Britain’s natives do anything for themselves politically they should wait for the elite to decide to ride to the rescue (the same elite that engineered the present dangerous mess) or not. Hopefully the Tory Party will collapse in the wake of the next lost general election, or perhaps the one after that, and a new party fit to carry the torch of Hitchensism will arise to seriously look at fixing what’s got logarithmically worse in the intervening years, hopefully. But don’t make a fuss if it doesn’t happen—wouldn’t be British, that. Remember your place—following orders issued in stentorian fashion from your betters such as me, Peter Hitchens, eminence grise of stoic principled passivity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2007 01:37 AM | Send