Tom: unfortunately, I don’t have time at the moment to go into this. (I’m preparing for the HL Mencken Club, and one minor personal emergency has followed another.) But I would just like to say that I don’t think the Anglican Church could have endured as long as she has if an irrational (groundless, do you think?) antipathy towards the Catholic Church were her foundation. It is true, of course, that Protestant identity has been intertwined with the development of modern national identity (and England is not alone in this regard.) But to suggest that a country’s independence from Rome makes its intellectuals more prone to atheism is a bit of a stretch. Moreover, Dawkins’s recent blog is embarrassing and conventionally leftist, to be sure, though the man is no buffoon as a scientist, nor I do think his work is a part of soccer hooliganism. I myself picked up the England-bashing paddle the other day, but in my mind, if Britain is worse than the rest of Europe, it’s only by a matter of degrees. And I’m not holding out hope that the West will be saved by Italy or Spain, or the Catholic Church, to be frank. Who knows what motivates the political Left? I am sure, however, that the contemporary Right is not well served by dwelling on ancient hatreds. 

Every mainstream figure who opposes illegal or mass immigration never tires of informing everyone who will listen that they’d never, ever do it because of race and ethnicity. It’s all about being a “nation of laws” and protecting citizens from unfair employment competition. Apparently, many of these immigration hawks don’t even think about race, or else are positively welcoming of a demographic transformation of fading Anglo-Protestant America, provided it’s done through proper legal channels, of course.

It’s certainly right to support the rule of law, and I agree that mass immigration doesn’t, in itself, raise anyone’s standard of living. But those concerned with immigration should take note that, as revealed by Andrew Neather’s recent tell-all column in the Evening Standard, when the Left, even the moderate Left, concocts immigration policies, it’s all about race. As a friend remarked to me this weekend, average conservatives may not be interested in race, but race is interested in them.   

On the heels of Nick Griffin’s appearance on the BBC comes this fascinating headline in the Telegraph:

Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser

In other news, Playboy subscribers have announced that they don’t read the magazine just for the articles.

The story continues: 

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote”.

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a “conspiracy” within Government to impose mass immigration for “cynical” political reasons.

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the “major shift” in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.

He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

In Monsieur Neather’s Evening Standard column, he positively revels in the little social experiment he helped concoct:

It didn’t just happen: the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February last year, when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.

The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners—although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.

Their place certainly wouldn’t be taken by unemployed BNP voters from Barking or Burnley—fascist au pair, anyone?

Translation: right-wingers and traditionalists are stupid and disgusting people who are rightly shunned from society. Those Third World migrants, on the other hand…

[T]his wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London’s attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.

It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it’s pretty much unimaginable for us to go back either to the past or the sticks.

Field and Soames complain about schools where English is not the first language for many pupils.

But in my children’s south London primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit.

My children have half- or wholly Spanish, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Congolese, Chinese and Turkish classmates.

London’s role as a magnet for immigration busted wide open the stale 1990s clichés about multiculturalism: it’s a question of genuine diversity now, not just tacking a few Afro-Caribbean and Bengali events on to a white British mainstream. It’s one of the reasons Paris now tends to look parochial to us.

If you had only read Neather’s column, and hadn’t, say, visited London, you might think your average refugee was a dashing and genteel flaneur with a famous Austrian Duke as an uncle and a habit of peppering his speech with foreign bon mots, to the delight and cultural enrichment of his hosts. And the rest are “Polish plumbers.” In Neather’s imagination, he and Tony turned London into a dazzling salon that puts old Paris to shame (a city which, by the way, has experienced much the same demographic transformation). Neather doesn’t dwell too long on who the immigrants actually are. (For your information, the vast majority of them come from the Pakistan region, followed closely by Africans and Afro-Caribbeans.) My impression upon visiting London recently was that it’s become a crime-ridden, vulgar, dysfunctional, generally unpleasant counterfeit of its former self. I probably should have stayed away and just read about “diversity” in the Evening Standard. 

Neather also makes no bones about the brazen deception involved in the scheme:

But ministers wouldn’t talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.

In part, too, it would have been just too metropolitan an argument to make in such places: London was the real model. [Tony Blair’s immigration minister Barbara] Roche was unusual in that she was a London MP, herself of east European Jewish stock.

But Labour ministers elsewhere tend studiously to avoid ever mentioning London. Meanwhile, the capital’s capacity to absorb new immigrants depends in large part on its economic vitality and variety. There’s not a lot of that in, say, south Yorkshire. And so ministers lost their nerve.

And as is so often the case with disastrous government projects, Blair’s immigration policy can be traced back to some highly connected think-tank that’s accountable only to the Prime Minister (the Performance and Innovation Unit) and some unelected “minister” (in this case, the adorable Miss Roche.)

In another outburst of honesty, Neather correctly states that it’s not a case of the London economy needing tons of immigrants in order to be efficient and dynamic; it’s the other way ‘round: only a pre-existing dynamic economy would be able to “absorb” millions of Third World newcomers. I don’t think I’m overstating the matter when I write that Neather is arguing against most everything everyone always tells us about immigration. (We’ve always had the horse in front of the cart here at Takimag, however.)

The line from Neather’s column that will probably go down in anti-racist lore reads,

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended—even if this wasn’t its main purpose—to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.

It wasn’t only “the Right” who got their noses rubbed in diversity, and one hopes that the British people will make Blair, Neather, Roche, and the whole crew bewail the unintended consequences of their immigration policies. 

The response to the HL Mencken Club‘s second annual meeting (modestly entitled “We Are Doomed!”) has been tremendous. A week away from the event, well over 100 people have pre-registered. It’s sure to be a great crowd, and if you’ve ever wanted to see in the flesh many of the writers associated with Takimag (Pat Buchanan, John Derbyshire, Paul Gottfried, Kevin Gutzman, Tom Piatak, Steve Sailer, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., and Christian Kopff among them), you probably won’t have a better chance than this Halloween weekend. I don’t often boast, but in less than two years time, the HLMC board has created the largest alternative right-wing group in the country. The demand for such an organization is clearly high, and after this year’s success, we’ll be able to expand our programing in the coming years. 

I also have some mixed news to pass on. Peter Brimelow, pictured below, will not be able to join us this year.

The good news is that we’ve replaced him with this man:

Just in case you don’t recognize him, that’s John Brimelow, Peter’s twin brother. 

Peter and I considered just not telling anyone he couldn’t make it and have his twin brother impersonate him at the podium. This might have worked, but Peter worried that John might say something too radical and spoil Peter’s reputation for tolerance and moderation. 

John will be speaking on a very interesting topic: “The Rise and Fall of ‘Chimerica.’” He’ll discuss the importance of currency exchange rates and how Wall Street and Beijing have worked together to create an economic arrangement that’s been highly detrimental to Main Street and the American middle class. I greatly look forward to this talk! 

In future conferences, we might get both Brimelows to come, but only list one Brimelow on the program. This way, a Brimelow could end his speech by climbing into a magical-looking box on stage and then the other Brimelow could miraculously reappear in a flash at the back of the room.

As I said, we have big plans for the HL Mencken Club. Big plans. 

I like being right. And I also learned quite a bit from Dylan’s blog on the Front Porch Republic. (Daniel McCarthy has also done some good work critiquing these guys.)

I’ll be sure to needle Patrick Deenen about his “big government localism” when he comes to speak at the HL Mencken Club next weekend. As for “The ‘One Salvation’ of Ludwig von Mises”... The Front Porch Republic fact-checking department might want to look into John Médaille’s assertions about Tom Woods’s corporate funding and his friendship with Michael Novak and the gang at AIE. The story of Murray Rothbard’s conversion to Catholicism is also something I did not encounter in any of the major biographies… 

I became extremely skeptical of the whole “crunchy” second wave of social conservatism after I read that Alan Carlson had made a “conservative” case for the New Deal, a meme picked up by Ross Douthat, among others,  and after I heard Carlson speak at Yale last year at an ISI sponsored event. He used terms like the (state-directed) “re-distribution of property” and proposed government programs to increase home ownership among the lower and middle classes that sounded like wispy, Russell Kirk-y versions of the ones that created the housing debacle. I’m sure Deneen, Carlson, and I share a similar abiding respect for the Old America of strong, closely knit, and independent families, upright social and economic dealings, and a certain crusty skepticism I associate with my maternal grandfather. Unlike these two, however, I think getting the bureaucrats involved is the worst possible way of reviving this lost world. 

Also, Deneen and Carlson seem to be fellow travelers with those “pragmatic” and “moderate” conservatives and neocons who feel that it’s probably impossible and undesirable to shrink government, and thus we should work on reforms that promote a “conservative” (or in this case, “localist”) welfare state. I have a very different take. With 12 trillion in debt and 50-100 trillion of unfunded entitlement liabilities, I think it’s near certain that in the coming decade the American welfare state will collapse in a big hyperinflationary Götterdämmerrung. It would seem more “pragmatic” to start developing alternative, independent institutions outside the state that can endure, and not just work to be yet another Beltway rent-seeker. 

In other news, George Hawley of “post right” picked up on my post about this horrible Edmund Burke Institute in Washington, DC, and made an observation worth repeating: 

When Big Government liberals tell conservatives they need to be more like Burke, they mean conservatives should be gracious losers – this is hardly an accurate description of Burke himself, but I digress. In their mind, a “Burkean” Right is one that provides only minor speed bumps on America’s road to a centrally-planned utopia; to them, the ideal conservative is an erudite gentleman who pontificates for a few minutes, and then gets out of the way. They prefer conservatives like George Will, who bristle at any perceived “populism” on the Right, and they despise figures who would channel conservative anger into an effective political movement that actually threatens the present state of affairs.

This is very much the impression I got reading Sam Tannenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism, in which William F. Buckley is praised for offering nifty free-market solutions to urban problems, like wider bicycle lanes, during his mayoral run in New York City. In Tannenhaus’s mind, this is the greatness of “American conservatism,” a movement that’s sadly “dying” due to Sarah Palin, talk radio populists, and free-market fundamentalists.

There’s something about reading Sam Tannenhaus that makes me want to defend Rush Limbaugh… 

Of course, from another angle Sam Tannenhaus is himself a Burkean conservative—and we should treat him as such—in that he is an active defender of America’s ruling class and left-liberal establishment, of its education system, civic values, and public religion. I don’t support anything of these things. I’m not a conservative. And in our current situation, the Alternative Right can find better intellectual heroes than Edmund Burke. 

I’m glad we had a discussion about “Game” at Taki’s Magazine. As some might know, Taki himself once considered writing a one-man play about his life’s work. But he abandoned the project after he learned that the title “Vagina Monologues” had already been taken. 

Nick Griffin appeared on the BBC’s Question Time last night, prompting the inevitable hand wringing about “tolerating the intolerant” and the like across Britain. (Highlights from the evening can be seen here).

A friend of mine who knows lots of grassroots envelop-stuffers and cold-callers for the Labour party reported to me that his friends generally loathe Blair & Brown, their primary motivation for supporting them being the feeling that they’re standing tall against a potential BNP Machtergreifung of England and the European Union or something. Truly, if Nick Griffin didn’t exist, then the UK’s degenerate ruling class might have had to invent him. For the mainstream Left and Right seem to acquire much of their legitimacy from just not being him. 

This is not to say that the brunt of the BNP’s platform isn’t perfectly sensible and patriotic. I obviously have no qualms with the party’s central objective of restricting mass immigration and guarding the British people and culture (though its “aboriginal” requirement for party membership is awkward and unnecessary.) I think the party should be criticized mainly for resembling “old Labor” in sticking up for the National Health Service and making noises about major nationalizations and the like. In this line, I find the Ron Paul Revolutionairies (even if many of them are silly libertarians on the immigration issue) to represent something more dangerous to the Establishment in that they talk openly of eliminating whole bureaucracies and institutions, the Fed Money Machine being the most important of all. But of course, antagonism towards the BNP has nothing to do with socialized healthcare and everything to do with Western leaders’ obsession with stamping out even the faintest flickering of national-ethnic-racial identity among white people. 

I’ve often wondered why average Americans are so taken with the Brits. It’s almost as if one can recite the most conventional opinion imaginable, but do with a posh accident, and Americans start swooning as a Pavlovian response. We’ve imported a great many tedious prigs due to our weakness for long vowels. Clearly, people who think that England is one big episode of Masterpiece Theater have never travelled to the country. My impression is that England reproduces every American vulgarity—only more so. Thus while normally staid young people from the Midwest turn themselves into out-of-control fools for spring break, a great many Brits of all ages one up them while on “holidays” and act like buffoonish sluts the rest of the year, too. I’ve also read that social engineering and left-wing indoctrination in British schools is, if it’s possible, more intense than what we go through here in the States. I certainly sensed this when I heard the following question asked by an audience member on Question Time: 

Being that the the Second World War was fueled by the need to disarm racist and oppressive regimes, is it fair that the BNP has hijacked Churchill as its own?

One would think the PC line on Churchill would be that he was a Victorian Dinosaur: an open imperialist who bragged about mowing down future subjects in battle, an admirer of the Duce, and even the Führer for a time, who was so anti-progress that after the First World War, he pressed for an Allied invasion of Bolshevik territory. What is clear is that Churchill wanted war against Germany because he saw it as a rival, as a nation-state that threatened British power and world supremacy (or what was left of it.) The old bastard couldn’t have cared less about intolerance and racism. (And, of course, in order to disarm the Germans, he aligned Britain with a regime that was more oppressive than the Third Reich.) But it seems that in Cool Britannia an obviously reactionary figure like Churchill can be reconstructed into a force of multiculti tolerance (though, I’m sure, the time will come when Churchill, too, will need to be denounced and discarded as usable national hero.)

The British school system’s obsession with the Nazis reached a point that even the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority started to complain. When I was at grad school, I met a dumb woman who once taught at a British public school and told me that for a summer project, she had her students make evil “Nazi” advertising posters in which the ultimate form of beauty was light skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. It was, of course, drilled into the students how absolutely immoral and disgusting it would be to value these distinctive features of Northern Europeans. Only Nazi bogeymen would do that! Such stories indicate to me that we’ve reached some advanced stage of liberal nihilism in which no one is willing or able to affirm any left-wing value or commitment outside of the utmost necessity of crushing all wicked intolerant Nazis.         

At any rate, who could gainsay Nick Griffin when he said that if Churchill were alive today, he’d be on the side of the BNP? For, among reasons, “no other party would have him,

for what he said in the early days of mass immigration into this country, for the fact that “they’re only coming for our benefit system,” and for the fact that in his younger days he was extremely critical of the dangers of fundamentalist Islam, in a way that would now be described as Islamophobic.

Regarding the facemask question, a reader writes:

You made a really good point about facemasks.  I played rugby in college and law school.  Because we don’t wear pads and helmets, we don’t fly through the air at each other like human spears.  Nobody want to hurt himself in the process of delivering a massive hit.
That said, rugby is boring to watch and football rules.  Long live facemasks!

Republican out-reach reaches a new low…

[ht: Richard Hoste]

Like Kevin Gutzman, I, too, grew up playing football in Texas, though, granted, I attended a small, elite private school—replete with dorky uniforms and compulsory Episcopalian chapel—so my experience wasn’t exactly made of the same stuff as Friday Night Lights.  (My legendary high school had quite an equivocal reputation: St. Mark’s was sneered at as a frufy institution of science geeks and preppy faggots by its public school detractors, called “the military academy on Preston Rd.” by its envious private school competitors, and written up as an Eton for the sons of JR by the gawking D Magazine.)

Anyway, I have many fond memories of busing out to places like Pilot Point, TX, where the football stadium would emerge off in the distance like a great cathedral at the center of quaint Texan village. These memories are fond now, at any rate; at the time, I was shaking in my pads in the face of those tough-as-nails Pilot Pointers, all whom wanted to teach the prep boys from Dallas a hard lesson. If you want a picture of what’s its like for a “Marksman,” as we were called, to play real Texas High School Football, just imagine a cleat stamping on a human face—forever. 

But that’s all history. While Kevin makes the case that football has become less difficult and more wussy over the years, through various rule changes and the like, the rest of the country is expressing its concern that pigskin is too barbaric and dangerous. Just this week, America’s favorite public intellectual, Malcolm Gladwell, argued in the New Yorker that football might be morally equivalent to dogfighting due to all the concussions, and even brain damage, that result from those viscous crask-back blocks. Gladwell suggested such injuries aren’t “incidental” to the game but “inherent” in it:

Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

Just so I might one day command six-figure corporate speaking fees, as does Herr Doktor Gladwell, let me offer this modest proposal for making the game of football both tougher and less head-injury prone.

Remove the facemask. 

In order to make football safer, everyone wants to make the helmets more elaborate and sophisticated, with perhaps rear airbags being the logical culmination of the trend. But let’s not forget, a free-safety is willing to launch himself horizontal to the ground in order to deliver a thunderous blow to a wide receiver who dared go out over the middle only because he knows that his head—or, more likely, his visage and grin—will be reasonably well protected by his polycarbonate alloy plastic helmet and vinyl-coated steel-alloy facemask. The unintended consequences of better helmets are more head-first hits. Remove the facemask, and overnight good, solid form tackling will be back in style. Here’s a preview of what we could look forward to: