War of the Babies--When Modern Warfare and Demography Square Off, Demography Wins
What was the most important battle of the late 20th century? You could argue it was the one that took place on the southern border of Morocco on November 6, 1975. Of course, we’re not talking about another Stalingrad here. In fact, what happened that day isn’t usually called a battle at all. Its official name is “The Green March.” On one side were 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians carrying green (Islamic) flags, and on the other—miles inside the border, because they were hoping not to have to confront any of the marchers—was a shaky, demoralized token force of Spanish troops pretending to defend a former Spanish colony, the Spanish Sahara.
The Spanish Sahara hangs below Morocco where the Sahara meets the Atlantic like a crumbling brick wall. It was about the least desirable chunk of coastal Africa around, with no water to speak of and a tiny population, which is why the Spanish got it. By the time the European powers were ready to divide up Africa in the late nineteenth century, Spain had long since lost its glory and tended to get the scraps and leftovers.
But one thing we’ve learned over the last century is that on this crowded, hungry planet, there’s no such thing as worthless land. Spanish Sahara has proven that: in the 30 years it’s belonged to Morocco, big money has been made from the fishing off the coast and the huge phosphate mine at Bou Craa, a hundred miles inland.
That’s why the Moroccan King Hassan II, a wily old sultan with friends in the CIA, decided it was worth his while to ship all those loyal subjects down to Morocco’s southern border, hand out little green flags for the cameras, and send them across the border toward those Spanish troops.
The Moroccans had to think outside the traditional military-conquest box, for the simple reason that Morocco’s armed forces are pathetic. They’re so bad their only contributions to military history have been in the “slapstick comedy” department. For instance, the Minister of Defense once tried to have fighters from the Moroccan Air Force kill Hassan II by shooting down his Boeing 727 as it came home from a foreign trip. They failed. Seriously: jet fighters failed to intercept and destroy a big, fat, slow civilian airliner even when they knew its exact flight path. A military like that pretty much has to resort to unarmed conquest, because its chances in a fair fight are zero.
Of course the Moroccans had the advantage of facing a weak, dispirited colonial Spain just at the moment the Spanish dictator, General Franco, finally got around to dying. If you’re old enough to recall those early SNL seasons, you probably remember Chevy Chase’s running joke, “This just in: General Franco still dead!” The reason that joke worked is that it took the old General a long time to die, and that meant that greedy up-and-coming regional powers like Morocco had plenty of time to plan ways of getting their hands on former Spanish colonies.
It may not have been very exciting for combat fans, but it was an extremely effective invasion. The Spanish troops didn’t fire a shot. The marchers walked over the border, got sand in their shoes, shouted about how this sacred patch of waterless, flat desert was now an integral part of the Kingdom of Morocco, and went back home. And since then, the Spanish Sahara has been dominated by Morocco, although the local guerrilla army, POLISARIO, gave them some serious problems for a while.
What makes this weird episode my nominee for “Most Significant Battle of the Era” is that it showed the new way of winning disputed territory. If there’s one thing that we should have learned over the past hundred years, it’s that traditional armed conquests are getting less and less effective. This is one of the most surprising twists in all military history. All through the nineteenth century, the European powers, led by the British and French, took the land they wanted on the grounds that they had better military technology, transport and organization. Locals who disputed that notion tended to disappear as casualties of inevitable progress. And that was just an updated version of what had been happening all over the world for thousands of years: bigger, stronger tribes displace and wiped out weaker tribes whenever they could. That was the norm, even in pre-contact North America, where the Navajo were displacing the Ute in the American Southwest long before the white guys showed up.
Now, even though the balance in conventional warfare is if anything tilting further toward the first world, the technologically advanced and organized countries are in retreat, and the former victims are pushing back, not just claiming their old territories but infiltrating the former colonizers’ countries. What matters now is morale, national will. The Spanish didn’t have it, and the Moroccans did. So even though the Spanish troops could have wiped out those unarmed marchers, they failed to open fire. Weapons are only weapons if you’re willing to use them. A technologically advanced army without the will to fire is no army at all.
Only us dedicated war nerds seem to realize how weird this is, how totally unprecedented in military history. Until the 20th century, the problem wasn’t usually getting militarily superior forces to open fire—it was getting them to stop before the weaker tribe, army or country was totally wiped out. I don’t know of a single case, before the 20th century, of a militarily superior tribe or nation lacking the will to defend its territory, or for that matter, take the territory of weaker neighbors.
The 20th century was the big turning point. New powers like Germany and Japan tried to imitate the older colonial powers of the 19th century and suffered total, disastrous defeat, even though they usually prevailed on the battlefield. That’s the weird lesson of the two world wars: military superiority in the narrow sense just doesn’t cut it any more. Despite the total battlefield dominance of the Wehrmacht (and to a lesser extent the Imperial Japanese forces), Germany and Japan ended the war not just without additional territory but with their home territories in ruins, their cultures gelded, their birthrates for generations to come among the lowest in the world.
Even the older colonial powers, Britain and France, finished the century in big trouble, without the will to resist the new kind of unarmed invasion by immigrants from the colonies they’d once ruled. We’re at a very strange moment militarily: our weapons still work but our will is gone.
The colonies that were established earliest are the most successful. For example, northern North America, now the U.S. and Canada, passed into permanent possession of the European settlers (or so it seemed, until recently). Two things determined this: first, they were settled in the 17th and 18th century, before conscience set in, and because most of the native population had been relatively tiny groups of hunter-gatherers (which also holds true for Australia, though it was settled much later). Everywhere else—in Latin America, Africa, Asia—the locals have been pushing back the colonizers without coming close to what old-style military theorists would call military superiority. That’s what we’re seeing now in South Africa, and more slowly in Europe and the southern United States. In other places, especially those colonized by the French (who were never as good at it as the Brits), huge colonial populations were totally eliminated, like the million-plus French residents of Algeria.
So there’s a shocking lesson that military buffs have been slow to face: military superiority doesn’t matter nearly as much right now as birthrate and sheer ruthless will.
Ah, birth rate—funny how it’s become such a taboo subject for both Left and Right. The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making, and most right wingers can’t bring themselves to endorse birth control even if it could slow the destruction of their own countries.
So birth rate is a weapon without a counter-weapon right now. So it tends to win. The Moroccans made it clear that the Green March was all about birth rate. The number of “volunteers” they sent to the border was 350,000, exactly the number of births per year in Morocco. So this was basically a ”Lebensraum” argument like the one the Germans tried earlier in the century. You might have heard about that one, a little dust-up called the Eastern Front. And you might be saying right now that if any policy ever failed decisively, it was the Nazis’ attempt to elbow themselves a little living space from Stalin. Which is totally true. But the Nazis tried it the old-fashioned way, with armed conquest.
To succeed in the post-1918 world, the world Woodrow Wilson dreamed up where “small nations” have rights even if they can’t defend them, you need to use slower, less obviously military methods, like birthrate and immigration. Immigration and birth rate actually have one of those “synergistic relationships” New Agers like to yammer about, because immigrant families tend to have more kids than they would have had if they’d stayed home—and the base rate for their home countries is usually way, way more than the locals have in the rich countries they move to.
The classic example of this kind of slow conquest is Kosovo. The Serbs could always defeat the Albanians on the battlefield, even when outnumbered, but the Albanians had a huge advantage in the most important military production of all—babies. According to the BBC, the birthrate of Kosovo Albanians 50 years ago was an amazing 8.5 children per woman.
The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about “rights.” In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official “good guys,” being oppressed by the official “bad guys,” the Serbs. At least that’s the way the naïve American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.
The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the “victims,” which led directly to U.S. military intervention.
To win the way the Albanians won in Kosovo, you need to make a lot of babies. It’s that simple. And to see how it works, you have to drop the namby-pamby liberal idea that people only have babies out of “love.” In lots of places on this planet, baby-making is a form of weapons production.
In some places, it’s open policy. For example, in Palestine there’s an all-out birthrate war going on between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And one of the most frustrating things about this kind of struggle, from the Israeli perspective, is that the worse you make life for the people in the occupied zones, the more kids they have. The Gaza Strip, for instance, has one of the highest fertility rates in the world outside Africa, at
5.6 kids per woman.
The rate for Israeli overall is about 2.8 children per woman, high for a rich country. But the most amazing rates anywhere, even higher than for the Gaza Palestinians, are in the most extreme Zionist groups, the Haredi “ultra-orthodox” Jews. Until recently they averaged eight or nine children per woman. There was actually a
big panic in the Israeli settler press when news hit that their rate had dropped to a mere 7.7 kids per woman.
That’s actually higher than the rate for Mali (7.38 per woman), which has the highest birthrate in the world.
The settlers don’t hide the fact that they’re producing as many kids as they can in order to change the demographics of “Greater Israel” in their favor—above all to make sure the Palestinians never become the majority.
What’s interesting is that there were plenty of voices in the ultra-Orthodox community in favor of using Israel’s military superiority to settle the problem the old-fashioned way, by expelling or wiping out the Palestinians. Those people lost out; their leader, Meir Kahane, was assassinated by an Egyptian cabbie in New York, but he’d lost the debate long before he died. You just can’t get away with those methods these days, not even with every born-again Baptist Zionist in Texas backing you to the hilt.
If you want an example closer to home, just go to Northern Ireland where the Protestant majority the border was designed to maintain has been getting smaller and smaller, thanks to the higher birthrate among Catholics. As of 2001, the Catholics were about
46% of the population, up from 35% in 1961.
But as the dreaded “Catholic Majority” date approaches, a funny thing is happening up in Ulster: the Catholic birth rate is slowing down even faster than the Protestant rate. This always happens when a tribe breaks out of its slums into the middle class. This illustrates one of the real brain-twisters of contemporary demographic struggle: if you really hate the enemy tribe, the best thing you could do would be to make them rich. Rich people don’t have nearly as many kids. Of course there are exceptions like the Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who are fairly well-off and just dedicated to making as many kids as possible, but generally, money distracts people from starting big families. So the old methods of keeping down the enemy tribe are usually counterproductive. If the Ulster hotheads like Ian Paisley had had their way and kept the Catholics down in the slums, their birthrate over the past 30 years would have been much higher and they’d be ready to stage a Kosovo-style “majority rule” coup like the Albanians did against the Serbs, complete with the USAF blowing up every television tower in Belfast like we did to the ones in Belgrade, just to teach those Serbs a lesson: “No TV till you let your little Albanian brother have Kosovo!”
Makin’em rich is the only way you’re going to settle the kind of conquest-by-immigration we’re seeing now in Europe and North America. Nobody will even say honestly how many illegal immigrants there are in the U.S. right now, but just from what I see driving to work, I’m inclined to go with the higher estimates, something up to 20 million people who snuck in from Mexico and points south looking for work.
As far as I know, nobody’s claiming the Latino immigrants decided to have a lot of kids as a way of reconquering Texas and California, the way the Israeli settlers are doing. They had a lot of kids because they were peasants and that’s what peasants do. La reconquista, if it happens, will be an unforeseen result of rising birth rates and falling death rates for countries like Mexico that are just moving up from the third world to, say, the second-and-a-halfth.
By 1970, Mexico was at that dangerous stage where there’s just enough basic medical care to keep people alive, so death rates are falling sharply, but people are still poor enough to want a lot of kids. Between 1970 and 2000, the Mexican population doubled, from 48 million to 98 million. So on one side of the Rio Grande you had a lot of young poor people, and on the other, a lot of money and companies eager for cheap labor. And a muddy little creek like the Rio Grande wasn’t nearly wide enough to keep those two groups apart.
As the population of Mexico increased and the living standard rose, the fertility rate actually went into an amazing dive, to the point that the rate for Mexican women now is only 2.39 kids per woman, just two places up from Israel’s 2.38.
And the only thing that’s brought the Latino birthrate down—in their home countries, not among the ones who immigrated to the U.S.—is getting enough money that peasant families start thinking of themselves as consumers, and get more excited about buying a new truck or a flat-screen TV than having little José.
This is all pretty slow to unfold, compared to traditional military conquest. Birth rate takes decades to have an effect; the Albanian victory in Kosovo is the result of birth rates from the mid-20th century. And in some parts of the world, like the US and Europe, immigrants have a history of being absorbed by the locals rather than sticking to the old tribal hatreds in the style of the Balkans and the Middle East. It’s a cultural deal, after all, not racial. Studies of the U.S. Hispanic population show that within a generation or two, most American Hispanics are ranting about policing the borders and keeping those damn immigrants out of the country. What’s really weird—and I can testify to this from my own experiences growing up—is when the local culture infiltrates the immigrants, like the fact that Mexicans in the U.S. are deserting the Catholics and becoming born-again Protestants. Go to any of the younger, feister churchers in the U.S. like the Church of the Nazarene and you’ll see lots of Mexican families with plenty of kids, singing old Scottish hymns in Tex-Mex English. In fact, I ran into a really hilarious article by a U.S. Baptist writer who worried that the Baptist birthrate is going down while the Nazarenes are having babies at a rate of three-plus per woman. So the nightmare scenario that anti-immigrant bloggers are always predicting, where the U.S. turns into one giant Mexico, might end up being true in what you might call “racial” terms—I mean, your second-grade class photo might be two-thirds Hispanic—but those Hispanic faces would have absorbed a whole born-again American world picture that actually comes from the Scots-Irish who settled the American south hundreds of years ago.
This is one point where people’s anxiety over these slow, demographic conquests splits according to their real fears: do you just not want to see that kind of face when you go outside, or do you not want to import the culture of the immigrants’ home country? The whole debate right now is so censored, so totally dishonest on both sides, that nobody will come clean about which it is. I suspect for some people it’s the faces: they want the faces on their street to be the same shape and color they were when they were growing up. If that’s what you want, then no matter where you are, I can guarantee that if you’re rich enough to worry about things like this (as opposed to where your next meal’s coming from), then yup, you definitely have grounds for worry. People move around to where the food is, the money, the good grazing, the jobs. The Germanic tribes who moved in on Europe a couple millennia back took a more reasonable view; they called wars “the movements of the peoples.” The Huns push the Goths off the steppe, and boom! Next thing you know, the Goths are wiping out a Roman army at Adrianople.
The faces are going to change. We are in a new military-historical era, in which the only states with the sheer will to resist slow “conquest” by immigration were the Stalinist states. Of course they didn’t have much of a problem there anyway—not too many immigrants trying to sneak into North Korea or the old USSR—but even if they had faced real demographic challenge, they had the will to open fire. The Berlin Wall is a nasty case in point, where the will was used to stop people leaving.
But those Stalinist states are not exactly a growth industry these days, and no liberal democratic state has the will to shoot down unarmed people trying to get in (or out, for that matter). Even the Israelis, who are maybe the fiercest first-worlders on demographic issues, thanks to their “moral certainty” from the Holocaust, don’t shoot the poor Africans who cross to Beersheba for jobs in the cafes. They just send them back to Sudan to be shot there.
So the movement of the peoples, the slow demographic wars, are going to go on. We just don’t have a counter-move, except maybe bombarding poor people with money to stay home. Basically, no matter where you are, the complexions and the features you see on the streets are going to change. If it’s any consolation to face-fascists, you Europeans got your licks in first, so to speak. Not many African-Americans around with pure African blood; not many Mexican Indians without some Spanish in them. Us westerners had our fun—well, not me personally, but probably some lucky ancestor. So now the faces blend the other way; it’s not the end of the world.
For most people the real worry, if they were allowed to even say it out loud, is culture: if you’re French, you really don’t want Paris turning into Kinshasa, because let’s be honest, Kinshasa is a Hellhole. If you’re English, you don’t want London turning into Karachi, because Karachi is a nightmare. If you’re American, you don’t want Houston—oh Hell, ever been to Houston? If you have half a brain, you don’t want Houston at all, the lousy sweatbox. But I was going to say, you don’t want your U.S. hometown turning into Honduras, because it’s nothing but poverty, heat and parasites.
The thing is, most of the people who invaded from those places tend to agree with you. That’s why they moved in the first place. Nobody knows what a Hellhole the Congo is like a Congolese. I read somewhere that on the Congo riverboats, they have these slang terms for the different decks. The first-class deck they call “Europe.” The second-class deck is “China,” meaning not that great, but livable. The third-class deck is “Congo,” and nobody wants to be there, least of all the Congolese.
What that means is that immigrants in some situations—not Kosovo, not Palestine, but some—are the biggest fans of anti-immigrant politicians. I would bet you that a lot of French people from North Africa voted for le Pen: “Yes! Get those dirty Arabs out!” What those people want above all is to shrug off where they came from. I’ve seen it too many times growing up with Mexicans: five years after they come north from Guadalajara they’ve got the big truck with Republican bumper stickers on it. Sure, they have a lot of kids, but that’s what immigrants always do. It’ll stop in the next generation, they’ll turn into nice kid-less selfish yuppies. The only Mexicans I ever met who really got all nostalgic about the old country were second-generation college brats, who’d never been there.
So to assess your situation in terms of the new conquests, you have to decide whether you’re in a Kosovo—two tribes hating each other forever, turning out babies as weapons—or that Congolese riverboat, where nobody wants it too “authentic” if they can help it. There’s a lot of blurring and overlap between those two models, sure. Take Northern Ireland: a lot of yelling, a lot of noisy tribal hate, but I just don’t think they have it in them to be another Kosovo. Too interested in TV and cars.
That’s what’s funny about the debate right now: the diehards in the U.S. and Europe wish we had the old ruthless will to seal the borders, but the “weakness” of the advanced countries generally works pretty well to turn the immigrants into immigrant-hating locals in a generation or two. The old model, bayonets on the border, isn’t even in the running. Time to face that fact. So the faces will change.
If you can handle these new faces, you’re likely to be surprised to see your “weak” American or European culture win out, slowly, un-gloriously but surely, and you may live long enough to see a whole new crop of pols who look like they just came from Karachi or Kinshasa until you turn the sound on and hear them ranting about how we need to get rid of all these damn immigrants.
Gary Brecher writes “The War Nerd” column in The eXile, the English-language bi-weekly based in Moscow.
Comments
Mexico is hardly a hell hole, and most Mexicans I know in the US--citizens and otherwise--have ambivalent feelings about Mexico, still consider it “home,” and, contrary to your anecdote, still vote 2:1 Democratic. Coming from semi-socialist Mexico they still harbor a certain fear, envy, insecurity, and hostility to the US, which they see as one large hacienda to be raided, a la, Pancho Villa, Juarez, et al.
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Mr Brecher writes an interesting, if long, article on an important issue. But I would, respectfully, ask him one favor: if he wants to discuss the history of Spain under Franco I would appreciate it if he would approach the subject with a little more seriousness.
Thinking “outside the box” would require an honest appraisal of Franco instead of merely mouthing the unhistorical nonsense and tiresome cheap shots of the Left. And there are, after all, two sides to every story, something every good journalist should always keep in mind.
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What matters now is morale, national will. The Spanish didn’t have it, and the Moroccans did. So even though the Spanish troops could have wiped out those unarmed marchers, they failed to open fire. Weapons are only weapons if you’re willing to use them. A technologically advanced army without the will to fire is no army at all.
The West reminds me of a kid I knew in junior high. He was really big but lacking in self-esteems and kids a third his size could look tough by picking on him, knowing that he wouldn’t fight back. He could’ve crushed them at any moment but just sat there like a pathetic blob. How sad.
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Where exactly do you get the idea that Mexicans are simply transforming into darker Americans? This article is what I expect from the Wall Street Journal editiorial board or a Republican political hack, telling stories about Mexicans with American flags on the pickups to convince us its all going to be ok. Typical use of hearwarming nonsense on racial matters that has become the standard substitute for factual analysis. Somebody needs to go back and count the number of quotes like “I’d bet...” and “It seems like”. No evidence was provided of successful, assimilating, Mexican and Muslim immigrants because none exists.
According to Samuel Huntington’s “Where are we?” Mexicans underachieve economically and educationally well into the fourth generation and overwhelmingly vote big government. He’s too politically correct to go into rates of crime, welfare dependency or out of wedlock births but I’m gonna guess the pattern holds. The part about the patiotic French Muslims voting for Le Pen is even more absurd.
Funny how Japan and Korea manage to keep immigrants out of their countries without “bayonets on the border”.
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Where to begin with this mess of an article?
The term “face-facist” is very offensive, even if said in a flippant way. To suggest that a desire to have your countrymen share a common ancestry is fascistic, a notion considered laughable by almost everyone outside of the Western world, shows that that PC bug has indeed bitten Mr Brecher deeply.
The substitution of culture being the issue rather than race is merely a neo-con tactic to reframe the debate in terms more acceptable to the Left. (Mark Steyn et al).
I could go on but will leave it at that. How is this article in any way paleo-conservative?
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There may be much to disagree with, but there are a few points that cannot be argued against with much success. No doubt demography is destiny, and the typical WASP is losing that battle big time in the US (whether that is a good or bad thing I’ll not comment). And it seems pretty obvious that as socio-economic status increases for a particular demographic, birthrate decreases.
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Demography is a critical factor but it is a function of the will to live. Liberalism corrupts that will (see James Burnham). It is when nations liberalize that they sign their own death warrants.
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Here’s Jared Taylor on the Japanese, a country that has a birthrate at European levels but would (oh my God!) rather have a slight decrease in their GDP than be destroyed as a people.
And there are many other things Japanese can do if labor really gets tight. Even with falling birth rates, more Japanese women stay home with children than in the West, and some of them could work. The agriculture and retail distribution sectors are still notoriously overmanned and could be rationalized. As a long-term measure, the government could directly subsidize child-bearing as some European governments do. This has not been very effective in Europe, but Japanese are more group-oriented than Europeans, and might respond to a serious more-babies-for-the-fatherland campaign.
But open the country to Turks and Bangladeshis? Never!
http://vdare.com/taylor/japan.htm
You have to wonder about the intentions of people, like the author of this article, who try to tell us the destruction of European culture and whites as a disctinct biological race is inevitable. Once again, you see the same tactics here as you do in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. Tell us the West’s destruction is gonna happen no matter what and imply that anybody who resits is advocating Nazism. Don’t forget to throw in the story about the nice immigrant family while ignoring the statisical facts of immigrant crime and welfare dependency.
I second the commentor’s question about how this article is in anyway paleo-conservative.
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I have long been a long been a fan of Brecher’s, but this is by far his worst column. He has apparently abandoned his usually cold-eye analysis for kumbaya multiculturalism.
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That the “new” becomes “native” within a generation or two is hardly novel in American context. Immigration and the progressive revitalization of our democracy has been an ongoing, integral component of our nation since Jamestown.
What is new is the elimination of assimilation in the process. The open-borders ideal of multiculturalism fills our country with foreign-born inhabitants at too fast a rate for them ever to become “American”, even if doing so should be their wish. A typical, if undesirable, model would be San Francisco’s old Chinatown, where some arrivals from long ago choose to live out their lives speaking only Cantonese; a perilous drive through the neighborhood also reveals some of these expatriates, as pedestrians, never learn the significance of traffic signals, either.
“American” is not a race or ethnic group, neither it is a religion or political code. It is the state at which we function – imperfectly, humanly – as citizens in this democracy. Mexico is backward, poverty stricken, profoundly corrupt and oppressive; by “oppressive” I mean it is a shoot-first / f*ck- questions-later police state. Virtually all Hispanic states in this hemisphere have profound difficulty instituting successful domestic democracies.
It’s absurd to believe flooding this country with too many, too soon, all from one place will not have profound ramifications.
In the wake of the 2005 London bombings, when it became known the jihadists were native-born “Englishmen”, Britain discovered the pseudo-religion of multiculturalism is as insipid as the British Right always said it was, and that by adhering to for as long as it did, the country nursed vipers at its bosom.
I hope our own revelation is not as loud – or bloody.
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Mr Brecher
I liked your piece - demographics is destiny and demographics seems to have an odd habit of accelerating outcomes faster than forecasts anticipate.
As a small endorsement of your hypothesis - here in Australia with near-full employment, a relatively advanced economy and birth rate on the downtrend - future recruitment is taxing the minds of the defence planners.
Since the Timor deployment and numerous subsequent operations, the ADF has been well and truely punching above its weight. But where the future battalions of diggers and SAS commandoes are coming from in 10/15 years, no one knows. There are regional implications in this if Australia cannot assist with security and stabilisation in this region in the future for sheer want of capable military grunt.
Rgds
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Back some 25 or 30 years ago when Japan seemed to be riding astride the world economically, I watched a PBS documentary on Scotland’s economy verses that of Japan. The understated purpose was to show how the Scots and other countries HAD to change and act like the Japanese.
Near the end, an interviewer was lamenting to a young worker about Scotland’s failure to follow the Japanese model when the Scot literally screamed at the interviewer “I don’t want to be Japanese, I’m a Scot!”
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If my readings of history are accurate, I seem to remember that Persia had a population several times that of the Greeks, yet failed to conquer. Or maybe the Persians should have just stayed home and procreated even more. Gee, they should have just walked in unarmed and the future of the world would have been completely different, and Western Civilization would have been stillborn.
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Mr. Brecher,
Ha’aretz is a post-Zionist paper. It hates “settlers” more than the NY Times.
I know of no Israeli politician, even Kahanists, who wanted to exterminate Palestinian Arabs. The goal has always been to keep then current Israel and the disputed territories or the entire 1923 “Mandate” + the Golan, while moving most Arabs to the remain 3/4 of “Palestine” known as Jordan.
Nazi Germany did not act like old colonial powers. There was nothing in European history like Hitler’s Final Solution or his plan to kill and expel most Slavs, while using a portion as Slaves.
Finally Hadrianople would not have occurred if the Romans had kept the Goths on the other side of the Danube.
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This “article” is an incoherent rambling of liberal cliches. It’s not paleoconservative. Hell, it’s not even conservative. It’s probably the worst article I have seen at Taki’s Top Drawer—maybe one of the worst articles I have ever read. Is Gary Brecher on the payroll of La Raza?
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Indeed Brecher contradicts himself. The Magyar/ Hungarian invasion of Panonia was the end of the world for the Germans/Slavs who lived there, in that specific place. Likewise, the European invasion of Tasmania was the end of the world for the Tasmanians. It is only natural that an identifiable people want to remain a distinct/ identifiable people. It takes a lot of brainwashing, starting in kindergarten, to convince us otherwise. Brecher has had that brainwashing. Incidentally, it is rumored that the ‘War Nerd’ Brecher is in rumored to be Mark Ames, editor of exile.ru. I.e. Gary ‘I love mestizos’ Brecher is a guy that fled his increasingly non-white native Bay Area for the one place where leggy natural blondes without danger from much multicultural enrichment.
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Perhaps the West could win the demographic war without even firing a gun. Frank Miele
recently wrote an article on Vdare.com about ethnically-targeted weapons. Victory
through the womb/cradle may not be required.
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Gloria,
Frank Miele is not a skeptic, but an individual in need of mental help for his naivite.
The suggestion taht Israel is making an ethnic bomb is a dis proven communist lie.
Although I wish it were different, most Israeli Jews are genetically close to Arabs and many Palestinians are descended from converts (largey coerced) to Islam. There is no way to take out Arabs without killing most Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews.
It should be common sense, on the scale of the the French not creating a weapon against Germans.
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I was also thinking of Buchanan’s recent article which cites a report by The
National Policy Institute. The report claims that by 2060 Whites will be 9.8% of the
world’s population while Africans, for example, will make up 25%. Europe is apparently
tired of the sight of blood and may not wish to engage in conventional warfare to
protect her borders. More creative means might be considered.
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For what it’s worth, I was in Morocco in 1975 and I know that many participants in “La Marche Verte” had guns under their djellabah. And I recall that POLISARIO was perceived as a greater threat than the Spaniards.
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Dr. Becher:
I agree with the gist of your column: That people who acheive middle class status
limit their number of babies, whatever their culture or ethnic background. The go from
the paradygm of “have a lot of children, in the hope that some of them will survive and
grow to be adults” to “have few children, but take excellent care of them so that all of
them reach adulthood” The first paradygm is more careless and callous of individual
children, by the way, as they can be easily replaced.
Also the decline in the white race is due to the faulty math of those who only accept as
white those who have two white parents with no other race - so taht any mixed blood children
are counted in the non-white parent’s group. It is basic math. You can have black, you can
have white, and you can have grey. If you count grey as black, always, then of course,
white will continue to dwindle.
But we could easily count Obama or Tiger Woods as white, based on their ancestry, and
they we see that the white race, far from dwindling, keeps making inroads into others.
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Mr. Brecher,
Your article is too long and convoluted to comment on exhaustively, but I would like to
make a few points:
1. The central point of the article seems to be that people, once they become more
affluent, start having less babies. While there are certainly a lot of arguments to
support this point, I seem to remember that the largest generation in the US -
the baby-boom generation - was conceived when (and presumably because) their parents’
life improved considerably, hence their being called “the good times generation”. I would
like to propose that affluence (nowadays) equates less babies because it first leads to less
concern for matters of the soul, in the end with religion; Western Europe is notoriously
losing its faith, no wonder all they care about is “me” and “now”.
2. “Now, even though the balance in conventional warfare is if anything tilting further toward the first world, the technologically advanced and organized countries are in retreat, and the former victims are pushing back, not just claiming their old territories but infiltrating the former colonizers’ countries. What matters now is morale, national will.”
What is missing from this analysis is a reference to the undermining role of the western
world’s leftist elites, for whom ideology trumps everything - national identity, culture,
and so on. Morale and national will have not suddenly turned weak by an act of God or
simply because of wealth (wealth, if anyhting, motivates people to maintain their personal
and by extension their country’s status-quo), but by careful and prolonged erosion at
the hand of the PC activists. Even with a new Albanian majority in Kosovo, the Serbs
would never have had any issues had the “international community” not intervened - having
an ethnic group with a regional majority inside a country’s borders doesn’t automatically
mean that region must secede and become independent. PC arguments have always been dishonest and are used to promote
very different and often diametrically opposed ends.
3. “Makin’em rich is the only way you’re going to settle the kind of conquest-by-immigration we’re seeing now in Europe and North America.” That depends: immigrants who don’t want to live in their
country often import the problems they are trying to escape. I’ve seen what many mexicans
do when they have money - but bigger plasma TVs. The same applies to every ethnicity in
the world, because no people is by definition barbaric or by definition refined. If only
the best educated and refined Mexicans emigrated to the US, would they bring over any of the current crime, healthcare and unemployment problems? Ah, but the US immigration system actually penalises
those who want to immigrate legally. If you are a middle-class (by education and aspirations)
Eastern-European who can’t live in your own country because of the post-communist
corruption and destruction, you have to put your entire life on hold for, say, 15 years.
At all the points in this process you are at a net disadvantage compared with any
American citizen - you get a much smaller salary, your credit takes time to build, you
can’t buy a house, and your situation is quite insecure. You basically have to resign
yourself to living and education your children as the lower class, although even they
reject you - you’re too “refined” for them. But should you want to sneak into the US and claim fraudulent
benefits? Why, nothing could be easier. Therefore, the whole situation that Mr. Brecher
presents as “inevitable” is the result of a system of incentives/disincentives that is
destroying America’s (and the world’s) middle class. Just because we can’t see clearly
how it works (sometimes), doesn’t mean it’s not there.
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When the majority of Hispanics finally assimilate, it isn’t to middle-class Protestantism as Mr. Brecher asserts without any evidence, but to the ghetto culture as Steve Sailer and others have documented with a lot of evidence. Do we want more and bigger ghettoes and less and smaller good neighborhoods? I think not. Immigrants may want their new country to be better than the hellhole they left as Brecher asserts, but wanting something and having the ability to make it a reality are two very different things. As for face fascism, it’s just as irritating to me to see a white person who looks like me, wearing his hat sideways and trying to act like some kind of ridiculous gangsta because that’s what MTV and the rest of the media/education complex tells him is cool.
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“The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making” Huh? Birth control and abortion for the third world is a favorite pet project for the left.
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1. Labor was the motivation behind the “one-drop rule.”
2. The replacement of family by strangers is not a consoling thought.
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1. Labor was the motivation behind the “one-drop rule.”
Nonsense. Ethnic Genetic Interests were the motivation behind the one-drop rule. Google “one-way gene flow” or read up on evolutionary psychology.
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Sorry, Google doesn’t have much for that string. Try this instead:
http://tinyurl.com/6z6tve
Nutshell, ingroups with viable evolutionary strategies (Jewry is the quintessential historical example) erect barriers to genetic inflow, while maximizing genetic outflow; e.g., keep their men away from your women, and sire as many bastards as possible with theirs.
The one-drop rule is a good example of this kind of thing in action.
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Jewish matriliny (combined with a careful watch on female behavior) is a another good example (it’s a racial cuckold barrier).
A sane person on Brecher’s article:
http://tinyurl.com/58r5tu
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“...five years after they come north from Guadalajara they’ve got the big truck with Republican bumper stickers on it.”
Perhaps those in Moscow do so; but here in the upper heartland, where it’s winter 6 months out of the year and a government-mandated public vernacular in Espanol abounds, they adorn their bling-laden trucks with rear-window sunshades bearing either the Mexican flag or their Spanish surnames.
Bumper decals; like “Support our Troops” and “Bush 04” or those denoting membership in the Shriners, the local Union or the NRA (or Greenpeace or some Rainbow variant or one’s pro-abortion affiliation) are puny relics of a once White-dominated civic culture.
By the way, Mr. Brecher, you come across not as a warrior or a nerd, but a resentment-filled (judgmental) bigot.
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If Kosovo is the classic case that should confirm the theory under consideration, then this is a very bad theory. Consider the following claim from the text:
“At least that’s the way the naïve American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it.”
Who is naïve here, Clinton or Brecher? That the Clinton administration decided to spin things this way does not mean anyone saw things this way. There is a big difference between marketing one’s foreign policies and intention behind them.
However, the key correction of the content of this article with respect to Kosovo requires recognizing that the communist regime (and I mean this as a positive thing) provided superior health care services throughout Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. Albanians continued to have more or less the same birth rate, but this time with negligent infant mortality. So, the talk of some sort of “new war” through eugenics a la Rockefeller, Wilson, Hitler etc. is not really applicable in Kosovo as the outcome is hardly a result of some plan to spread their biological material, but rather of certain historical circumstances in communist Yugoslavia where Serbs became victims of the communist successes (in health care, education, etc.).
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As with blacks, the problem isn’t the faces per se, Senor Brecher, but what the faces signify: that Mestizos, Zambos, and pure Amerindians from Mexico are 3-4 times more likely to commit violent felonies, 19-times more likely to belong to gangs, 4-times more likely to kill people in drunk driving accidents, etc., than white Americans. To say nothing about IQ and rates of illegitimacy, poverty, illiteracy, etc.
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Put differently, the problem isn’t skin color per se, but what skin color and so forth reveal about the behavior of a group of people with such physical characteristics. If caucasions with violet eyes and curly red hair committed murder and assault and rape and robbery at 4-10 times the rate of all other caucasoids -and if such behavior was not only culturally but also biologically determined- who in their right mind would want this group of people entering their nation by the millions and moving into their states and cities and neighborhoods? And what if this group was also driven and inflamed by historical grievances,real and mythical, and revanchist hatred of the dominant group?
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<i>Also the decline in the white race is due to the faulty math of those who only accept as
white those who have two white parents with no other race - so taht any mixed blood children
are counted in the non-white parent’s group. It is basic math. You can have black, you can
have white, and you can have grey. If you count grey as black, always, then of course,
white will continue to dwindle.
But we could easily count Obama or Tiger Woods as white, based on their ancestry, and
they we see that the white race, far from dwindling, keeps making inroads into others. <i>
This is silly. Tiger Woods and Obama are not white, they are mixed-race. It makes more sense (and is more respectful) to have a separate “mixed race” group for people who are mixed race than it does to just arbitrarily assign them to whatever group you want to increase numerically.
Having said that, I do think that U.S. Hispanics in coming generations will become more white, as they interbreed with the majority white U.S. population. The child of a typical Mexican (50% American Indian and 50% Spanish) mixing with a typical Anglo-American will produce a kid who’s around 3/4 white, and who will most likely look white, if perhaps a bit exotic--like a lot of white kids in the South who have one quarter cherokee ancestry. Such people will no doubt identify racially as white first, with a secondary Indian ancestry to trot out when they want to feel unique. :-)
But that’s a very different thing from assigning truly bi-racial individuals “white” status for the sake of boosting white numbers.
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Well it seems I can’t italicize worth beans. Sorry, everyone, a tad hung-over.
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This is an awful essay. “The faces are going to change,” is just another way of excusing ,ethnic cleansing.
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I have to agree with Marc: Biracial is the future. The white race is the most mixed with race in the world. Most of the blacks, american indians, and increasing numbers of asian americans are mixed with the white race. Most the mestizos, mullattos, and other types of half breeds,come from voluntary mixing by white people for the last 500 years.
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Having said that, I do think that U.S. Hispanics in coming generations will become more white, as they interbreed with the majority white U.S. population.
There are some things wrong with this. First, both Mexicans and the Mexicans here are becoming more Indian. Mexicans in Mexico city are about 2/3 Indian. And anyone who has seen the latest crop of immigrants in Southern California knows that they are a lot shorter and darker than Mexicans of two or three generations back—those tended to come from Northern Mexico, while now we get them from the Indian heartlands. And I totally ignore Guatemalans. So your base is wrong.
Second, with continued immigration, the 3/4 white kid will become the 3/8 white kid and 3/16 white kid. In fact the blogger Old Atlantic Lighthouse has been toughting the “island model” of immigration which shows, Mathematically, that immigration into an Island population with a stable population eventually results in the replacement of all the original population’s genes. I.e. literal genocide.
http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/population-genetics-island-model-one-way-migration/
Take a look at Obama’s daughters—does anyone really see a trace of their white grandmother?
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There are some things wrong with this. First, both Mexicans and the Mexicans here are becoming more Indian. Mexicans in Mexico city are about 2/3 Indian. And anyone who has seen the latest crop of immigrants in Southern California knows that they are a lot shorter and darker than Mexicans of two or three generations back—those tended to come from Northern Mexico, while now we get them from the Indian heartlands. And I totally ignore Guatemalans. So your base is wrong.
The top three sending states in Mexico in 2000 were Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guanajuato. These are all central or central-western Mexican states, which is where the majority of Mexican immigrants have always come from. Jalisco is actually one of the whitest states in Mexico. None of them belong to Mexico’s Indian heartland.
There has been a recent upsurge in Mexicans coming from heavily Indian states like Veracruz, but they remain the minority. It will hearten you to know that in 2000, the northern states of Chihuahua and Durango combined contributed 10,000 more emigrants to the U.S. than the heavily Indian State of Veracruz--despite the fact that Veracruz has nearly twice as many people as Chihuahua and Durango put together.
I think people notice the Indian-looking Mexicans more because they are more different, but plenty of the old school looking Mexicans that one sees are fresh across the border themselves.
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