Another path to national suicide

In today’s big thread about diversity-worshipping NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Ken Hechtman writes:

Meanwhile, the next few men to walk on the moon may well be non-white and NASA will have nothing to do with it.

Of the missions on the list, India’s is probably the most likely to happen. Iran’s is probably the least.

NASA can’t even do a shuttle launch anymore without relying on private business.

To which I replied:

I wonder if it occurs to Mr. Hechtman—and if it did, would he feel good about it?—that a primary reason for America’s increasing and future decline relative to other countries is the inclusionary and egalitarian policies he supports. Other countries are seeking to achieve things, while we’re spending a massive part of our national energy on the lowering of all our standards for the sake of including and “equalizing” blacks; on the massive lies we tell ourselves in order to justify this effort; and on the constant, paralyzing obsession with “discrimination.” When I wrote The Path to National Suicide in 1990, I was speaking of mass non-Western immigration and only mentioned the problems related to American blacks in passing. But it occurs to me that the madness involved in our crusade to placate blacks and raise them up to equality with ourselves is so extreme, and has messed us up to such a degree, that it could, by itself, even if there were no other diverse groups in America, lead to national suicide.

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April 18

Henry McCullough writes:

I fear you may be right. But the liberal/”conservative” shared obsession with black-white equality in America has been the precondition for other, even more destructive, U.S. government social policies.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which should be called the Hart-Celler-Kennedy Death to America Act [LA replies: Making it the predecessor of the 2007 Bush-McCain-Kennedy Faster Death to America Act which thankfully was stopped]) was passed in the same wave of civil-rights enthusiasm as the Civil rights Act of 1964 and the Voting rights Act of 1965; each of the three acts was radical social-engineering legislation pushed over the top by the frenzy of liberal activism that followed the assassination of President Kennedy. In combination, they have ever since held everything else in America hostage to the great liberal equality project, whose goals can never be achieved and thus will never end short of the destruction of American society altogether.

American liberals’ obsession with equalizing the conditions—in every imaginable respect—of black Americans to those of white Americans may have been the necessary predicate for America’s post-1965 immigration insanity: throwing open the United States to everyone from everywhere, no matter how wildly incompatible the immigrants might be. From a doctrinaire liberal point of view, open immigration is the most effective way over time to equalize the material conditions of white Americans to those of all the non-white people in the world—in the case of unrestricted immigration by the lowering of Americans’ living standards and degradation of their rights that inevitably follow upon making residence in America (and ultimately American citizenship as well) essentially worthless by making it effectively a universal human right. It is, of course, also the surest way to destroy the American nation, which can never make amends for its collective sins of slavery and segregation. The continued existence of traditional America is an intolerable affront to the dogmatic liberal. It must be swept aside and replaced by a North American Rainbow Nation, with immigration as the catalyst. That Rainbow Nations cannot truly exist, thanks to human nature, is of no importance to liberals on the march in service of a Cause. But how wonderful the progress made, that America now has a president who calls himself Barack Hussein Obama! I doubt even the Congressmen who forced the CRA, VRA and INA down America’s collective throat could have imagined such a thing in 1965.

By the Immigration Act of 1924 (vehemently opposed by Emanuel Celler, incidentally, who tragically for America was still around in 1965 to contribute materially to its undoing), Americans acted decisively to restrict immigration, correctly seeing it as a threat both to public order and the distinctive character of the American nation. In the 1960s, the country’s Frankfurt-Schooled “elites,” filled simultaneously with liberal triumphalism and gnawing guilt over race relations, chose to reverse that national decision. That most Americans disagreed was not merely ignored, but considered to be evidence of the sociopathy of the average American that immigration was deemed necessary to eliminate. [LA replies: Mr. McCullough makes a type of argument that I have repeatedly disagreed with and will do so again. Namely, he’s blaming the radical left for something that was done by mainstream liberals. The 1965 immigration reform was not the work of leftists, Frankfort-school or otherwise; it was the work of centrist American liberals, e.g. the late President Kennedy and his brother Robert, whose intention was to bring our immigration laws into conformity with the non-discriminatory principle that had just been apotheosized in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Personally I consider the blaming of the Frankfurt School for every ill under the sun to be a lazy mental reaction from which conservatives ought to wean themselves.]

When the history of America’s decline and self-inflicted fall is written, it will be evident that NASA’s quest through Mercury, Gemini and Apollo to land men on the Moon and return them safely to the Earth was the last great act of the American nation. In no decade subsequent to the 1960s would such an achievement be possible for Americans, for—even with the cultural revolution going on at the same time—that was the last decade when the U.S. government could commit itself fully to such a program. As you point out, and the state of NASA today is all the evidence one could ask for, ever since President Nixon cancelled the last three Apollo missions, all such things come second to the insatiable demands of the unachievable equality project.

A counter-argument to my theory that America’s peculiar race relations problem was a predicate to the country’s self-destruction through mass immigration is that European nations with no historically settled black populations are also killing themselves through mass incompatible immigration and truckling to the demands of hostile newcomers. In reply to that I would say that for Great Britain and European countries the necessary liberal guilt-feelings are derived from the legacy of European imperialism and colonialism. It is noteworthy, perhaps, that European nations with no history of venturing abroad to conquer, rule, educate and ameliorate the condition of non-while peoples are less prone to suicidal liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 17, 2012 08:25 PM | Send