Aliens in positions of leadership

Howard Sutherland wrote (on February 13):

In your commentary on Her Majesty’s Government’s craven refusal to admit Geert Wilders into Britain (I always used to say, partly from politeness, partly wishful thinking, “Great Britain”; this latest disgrace convinced even me it’s long past time to drop the Great), there are quotes from David Miliband, Gordon Brown’s child Foreign Secretary.

Don’t think I’m going all Kevin MacDonald on you, but Miliband is another example, along with Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama, of the folly of entrusting a country’s leadership and security to people who have no roots in it. No doubt there are a few worthy exceptions, but I think as a precautionary principle it’s a good one.

Miliband, who so casually dismisses freedom of speech with his fire-in-the-theater analogy, has essentially no roots in Britain at all, other than his school ties. As far as I can tell, no ancestor of Miliband’s was in Britain before 1940. He is the progeny of Polish and Belgian Jewish Marxists, and as far as I can tell his loyalties are to a Socialist multicultural One World, free of impertinences such as global warming, Geert Wilders, and you and me; not to England (where he grew up) as a real country or place, nor to the United Kingdom as a real and unique union worth preserving and defending. Why, other than perhaps gratitude for getting a place at Oxford, should they be? Certainly post-Great Britain has made precious little effort to make Britons of its immigrants and their children.

I haven’t had any ancestors in the British Isles since the 17th Century but, with 100 percent English and Scottish ancestry, I’m sure I feel greater attachment to the idea of preserving a British Britain (even becoming Great again) than David Miliband ever will. But then I subscribe to the retrograde notion that countries should be allowed to be themselves, so I’m for a French France, a Japanese Japan, even a Mexican Mexico and—shock, horrors!—an American America and, yes, a Jewish Israel. That last, of course, puts me in a different corner altogether from MacDonald.

To be fair, though, it isn’t only the imports who sell us out. Despite her faux-French given name, the execrable and corrupt Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is probably 100 percent Brit. She certainly looks it, and I don’t mean that as a compliment in her case. And, of course, Mexican agents GW Bush and John McCain are, as far as I know, 100 percent old stock American. But the fact that we have no lack of native sell-outs is no reason to be relaxed about putting people who are alien to our traditions in positions of power.

LA replies:

I was aware of Miliband’s Jewish and leftist background and considered saying something about it in the initial entry. As you yourself understand, your references to Anglo-Saxon traitors weakens your message about Miliband.

You write:

“Miliband, who so casually dismisses freedom of speech with his fire-in-the-theater analogy, has essentially no roots in Britain at all, other than his school ties.”

This is a weak argument. By the same token, one could say that Gary Cooper, born of English immigrants just arrived in the U.S., had as essentially no roots in America at all, other than his school ties. One could say that Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, an immigrant from Switzerland, had no roots in America at all, other than his political ties to the Jeffersonians. One could say that the German military man, Baron von Steuben, who trained Washington’s troops at Valley Forge in the winter and spring of 1778 and turned them into the disciplined army that held its own at the battle of Monmouth and basically drove the British back into New York City for the duration of the war, had no roots in America, period. If Mr. Sutherland wants to exclude all immigrants and descendants of immigrants who are not of the majority ethnic/national group from prominent or leading positions, his argument is not sustainable.

What bothers Mr. Sutherland (and me) about Miliband is that he is a leftist Jew (and also I think the son of a prominent Marxist author) who probably has very little loyalty and affection for the English nation. Were some other Jew occupying the Foreign Ministership, Mr. Sutherland probably wouldn’t notice. Consider the colorless and drab Conservative party leader who preceded the current leader. He was a Jew, but from his name (which I forget) and his personality no one would know that he was a Jew. And I doubt that Mr. Sutherland would object if, say, Disraeli came back from the dead to lead a revived Tory party.

So the point Mr. Sutherland is trying to get at is not that a child of immigrants or a Jew should not be in a government position, but that, as he put it, there be a “precautionary principle.” In this I agree. But the problem is, who is there to exercise this precautionary principle, given that the majority natives are also traitors?

The answer, which I’ve stated before, is that two things are needed: (1) the restoration of a dominant, self-confident, majority culture that leads and sets the tone for the country, and (2) that doesn’t allow minorities or exotics to enter its ranks unless they have sufficiently assimilated, which means, inter alia, that their primary loyalty and identification is with the nation and its majority culture, over any loyalty to a minority group.

Howard Sutherland writes:

A very fair reply. You have made my point, such as it was, better than I did.

Still, Gary Cooper (didn’t know he was of immigrant stock) was the son of parents whose countrymen had founded the country they moved to—there is some predisposition to assimilation there that I submit is absent in the Milibands. The Swiss Gallatin made a conscious decision to move to America and embrace it, at a time when anywhere in America was still Indian Country from the European point of view. Steuben, to our benefit, came to America as much to leave behind a checkered and stalled career as a Prussian officer as for any other reason.

In all three cases, we’re talking about people who were compatible ethnically, culturally and, as far as I know, in religion with the society they were joining. They were not contemptuous of it, didn’t see it as something that needed to be transformed and didn’t attempt to replace it with some ideological Utopia.

As for Michael Howard, the former Tory leader you mention, he was the son of a Romanian father and a Welsh mother. Maybe his father was Jewish; I don’t know. While he made some feints in the direction of doing something about Britain’s immigration problems, he really wasn’t of much use on the National Question in the end.

You’re right, though. Applying my precautionary principle, David Miliband makes my antennae go up, while neither Benjamin Disraeli nor Michael Howard would.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 23, 2009 04:53 PM | Send