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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, organ version]
01 — Intro. Radio Derb on the air, ladies and gentlemen. This is your phlegmatically genial host John Derbyshire with all the news fit to send you back to bed and pull the covers over your head. Now I know you're looking forward to yet another negative, fatalistic rant about the debt ceiling. I shall not disappoint you. I shall, however, postpone what I have to say until my last segment, as I am even more pessimistic than usual this week, and don't want to cast a shadow over the entire broadcast. So curb your impatience, please. Let's deal with other news first. |
02 — Multiculturalism in Norway. So here's this Norwegian guy Anders Breivik, who's mad as hell at the way his country's leftist government has been letting non-European immigrants settle in the country. In this first segment, let me just fill in the demographic and political background here. Around seven percent of Norway's population consists of non-European immigrants, with Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Somalia, and Vietnam the main contributing countries. These non-European immigrants are of course concentrated in Norway's main cities, most of them in the capital, Oslo. Bear in mind that this is a country with a very small population — less than five million total. If Norway were a U.S. state it would rank 22nd in population, between Minnesota and Colorado. The population of Oslo, the capital, is less than 900,000 — that would put it between Jacksonville, Florida and San Jose, California. Bear in mind also that Norway is a proudly distinctive nation, with its own language, culture, and traditions going back continuously into the early Middle Ages. In a nation like that — old, proud, and set in its ways — a big influx of completely different people really notices, in a way it wouldn't to a nation with a cosmopolitan or imperial tradition. A generation ago a Norwegian could live out his entire life, even in a major city, without ever meeting a Muslim. Today the country is three percent Muslim on official figures; although if you count up the Pakistanis, Arabs, Turks, and Somalis in the demographic tables, it seems to me that five or six percent may be closer to the truth. Why did Norway open itself to such an influx of utterly different peoples? Well, because among the educated classes of the country, wellnigh everyone subscribes to the ethnic masochism that leftist white elites everywhere are in thrall to. If you want to see the canonical expression of this peculiar racial self-hatred, I refer you to Tom Hayden's speech at his son's wedding. Hayden, you'll recall, is the American leftist activist who was married to Jane Fonda for seventeen years. Tom and Jane had a son, Troy. In 2007 Troy married a lady named Simone Bent, who is black. At the wedding, Tom Hayden, as father of the groom, made a speech welcoming the union because it was, quote, "another step in a long-term goal of mine: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race," end quote. Pretty much all Scandinavian elites think like that. Seven percent non-European immigrants in Norway? It would be seventy percent if Norway's educated classes had their way. Recall that Oslo is the home of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, responsible for giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. (Who, incidentally, studied at Occidental College, where Tom Hayden is today an adjunct professor. See how it all hangs together?) However, Norway's educated classes do not have all their own way. Here's a BBC News report from April 2009, when the country was heading into a general election. Sample quotes, quote: Increasing tensions over immigration and Islam appear likely to play a significant role in the vote. Quote: Earlier this year, the Labor Party's governing coalition suggested it would allow police officers to wear headscarves with their uniform, in the hope that it would attract more Muslim women to the police force. But after widespread criticism of the proposal, the government dropped the idea. Quote: The significant success of the Progress Party has forced the governing Labor Party to react. Earlier this year, the government tightened asylum rules despite earlier pledges not to do so. And so on. In the event, Immigration-restrictionist parties got nearly half the popular vote, forcing the Labor Party into a coalition with Greens. So Norway's lefty ethnomasochists by no means have things all their own way. So multiculturalism in Norway is causing the same kinds of stresses and strains it causes everywhere else, though the smallness of Norway's population and the traditionalist conservatism of large numbers of Norwegians outside the elite classes make things worse. Among Norway's five million people there are hundreds of thousands who are seriously riled up about the cultural and demographic revolution being imposed on them by their ethno-masochistic elites, personified politically by the ruling Labor Party. So much for background. Now let's take a look at the perp. |
03 — Anders Breivik. Anders Breivik is 32 years old, upper-middle-class, high school graduate, a city kid who went into vegetable farming and, with a little boost from family money, made himself a millionaire by age 24. People who know him describe him as quiet, friendly, and unremarkable. He's very good-looking in the Nordic style, and apparently quite personable — by no means the twitching solitary loser you expect to find behind a grossly antisocial act like this. Breivik does, though, belong to the autodidact, self-educated species of psychopath. People are comparing him, fairly enough it seems to me, to Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber. He kept a diary, and has explained himself in a long rambling manifesto. I note with interest that my name turns up in that manifesto. I hasten to say that this is not a great distinction: some of my friends and colleagues are in there, too — Mark Steyn, for example. The manifesto is more than fifteen hundred pages long, and big slabs of it are just lifted from the writings of various anti-multiculturalist bloggers, all have whom have indignantly denied any affiliation with Breivik. The upshot of the manifesto is that Breivik thinks European civilization is under threat of being swamped by Muslims and other incompatibles. A great many people think that, including me and a lot of my friends and colleagues. Breivik further believes that Europe's ethnomasochist leftists, nursing as they do views like Tom Hayden's, are actively working to make this happen. I agree with that, too. So far as what's happening is concerned, and who's making it happen, I'm on the same page as Anders Breivik, and so are a great many Western conservatives. Breivik also thinks, however, that matters have gone so far that the only hope of stopping the trend is to start murdering those responsible for it, and members of their families, including their children. I don't think that, and neither of course does Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer, or anyone else I know in the anti-multiculturalist corner of the right. (I would just note in passing here that there is a faction among American conservatives — a faction to which I have loud and often made it clear I do not belong — that blames Western white ethno-masochism on the Jews. Just for the record, there are about 1,500 Jews in Norway. That's 0.03 percent of the population.) Well, on Friday last week Breivik detonated a bomb at some Labor Party offices in Oslo, then traveled 25 miles to an island where the Labor Party runs summer youth camps. On the island, he shot as many people as he could get to — 68 is the number being quoted as dead, though there may be more. The youngest of the dead was just 14 years old. Eight people died in the Oslo bombing. Plainly Breivik's main target was Norway's Labor Party, which he holds responsible for the ongoing Islamization of Norway. He sees himself as a vanguard fighter against the Islamization not just of his own country, but of Western Europe. He compares himself to the medieval Crusaders who fought to liberate the Holy Land from Islam. There's been some discussion among pundits — Bill O'Reilly has been making a meal of it — about whether Breivik is or is not a Christian. It seems to me from random reading in the manifesto — and no, I am absolutely not going to read all fifteen hundred pages — that it's highly unlikely Breivik believes in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, or even the Afterlife. He does seem to believe in God, and writes about praying to God, but that just makes him a Deist, not a Christian. Breivik is however a "cultural Christian," believing that Christianity is a key component of Western civilization, and sympathetic to Christianity in that degree. Winston Churchill once described himself in relation ot the Church of England as a "flying buttress" — that is, he supported the church from the outside. Breivik's a bit the same, as indeed am I. [A blooper: that was Lord Eldon (number 14 here) though it's more commonly attributed it to Lord Melbourne. Churchill, like Mark Twain and G.B. Shaw, attracts quote misattributions like flypaper does flies.] He seems to nurse the same suspicion as I do, though, that where multiculturalism and Tom Hayden-style white racial self-hatred is concerned, Christianity as presently constituted is more part of the problem than part of the solution. The leaders of all the big Christian churches are multiculturalist, and craven towards those who hate the West. That's the context in which I get quoted in Breivik's manifesto. Four years ago I reviewed Robert Spencer's book Religion of Peace? — Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't. You can read the review on my website. I made the rather obvious point that if push comes to shove between a pacifistic religion and a militant one, you should bet on the militants. Quote from my review, quote: Christianity got its start as a religion of slaves. Perhaps it is fated to end the same way. End quote. Look, I like my religions militant. I have no problem — not the slightest, merest problem — with WW2 bomber pilots murmuring prayers as they rain destruction on the citizens of Hamburg. I do have a problem with Christian charities shipping tens of thousands of Somali fake refugees into American small towns. Those WW2 bomber pilots were operating in circumstances of declared war, though, and it is a key tenet of our civilization that war is a collective national enterprise, the waging of which is such a terrible thing, it needs the collective approval of the whole nation. It is not for individual private citizens to declare war. That way madness and chaos lie. A citizen who privately declares war, is a criminal. Anders Breivik, irrespective of his opinions, is a criminal. |
04 — The Great White Terrorist. To the multiculturalist left, however, Anders Breivik is much more than a criminal. He is a Great White Terrorist. Remember Captain Ahab pursuing the Great White Whale? Remember the Bronx District Attorneys in Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities spending day after day after day processing endless numbers of black and Hispanic perps, longing desperately for the chance to nail a Great White Defendant. Western multiculturalists are in the same gloomy frame of mind. The Portland Christmas Tree Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, the Underwear Bomber, Nidal Hasan, the Virginia Tech shooter, the Beltway Snipers, the Shoe Bomber, the London Bus Bombers, Colin Ferguson, Ramzi Yousef … Multicultis hear of the the latest terrorist atrocity and they're whispering to themselves: "Oh please let it be a white Christian guy!" Occasionally is it; it's a Jared Loughner or a Timothy McVeigh. Considering that the vast majority of Westerners are still white and Christian, though, the multiculturalists' prayers aren't answered anything like often enough. Time and again, when the media can't hold off any longer on identifying the killer, it turns out to be a Muslim, or if not a Muslim, a black, or occasionally some other ethnic minority. So along comes Anders Breivik, who looks like the neo-Nazi terrorist in every politically-correct movie, and the multicultural left is breaking out the champagne. For the record, Breivik dislikes Hitler for giving nationalism a bad name; and far from being antisemitic, seems to admire the state of Israel. Never mind that, though: The guy is white and blonde and near-enough Christian — he'll do! THIS IS THE REAL THREAT! So the leftist money-making racket that calls itself the Southern Poverty Law Center already has a fund-raising letter out to all the little old Jewish ladies in Miami who think the Cossacks are saddling up for a pogrom. Quote from that letter: The problem is just as grave in our country. For the first time, hate groups here have topped 1,000, and the potential for widespread damage is mounting. End quote. But who gets to say what is a "hate group"? Why, the Southern Poverty Law Center! Last year they designated the Family Research Council a "hate group" for saying that homosexuality is antisocial. Another case of gleeful leftist piling-on concerned Rep. Peter King's congressional hearings, currently in session, on the recruitment of U.S. and Canadian Somali refugees by the Islamic terror group Al Shabaab. The lefties hate these hearings. How dare Peter King suggest that black, Muslim American Somalis are more likely to become terrorists than white Christian kids! Columnist Roger Cohen in the New York Times seemed actually to be saying that Peter King, along with Newt Gingrich and a slew of European conservatives Cohen names, are, quote, "enablers" of Anders Breivik. Cohen even works Amy Winehouse into his argument somehow, though I confess I had lost the thread of his logic by that point. All over the political left, joy is unconfined. They have harpooned the Great White Terrorist. THIS IS THE REAL THREAT! Personally I'd say the real threat is a suffocating conformity of opinion, ferociously enforced by left multiculturalists, that leaves no lawful outlet for perfectly reasonable and normal instincts of patriotism, cultural conservatism, and the desire on the part of the native ethny in an old, proud nation to limit foreign settlement. If reasonable opinions have an outlet in public debate, they won't fester into homicidal rampages. From that point of view, the real enablers here are the multicultural Thought Police who shut down debate, stick the label "hate group" on peaceful associations, ban conferences, and ostracize thoughtful patriots. You want enablers? Those are the enablers. |
05 — The U.S.A. has terrorists, too! Here in the U.S.A., we have our own home-grown terrorists, too. Here's one: A U.S. military serviceman has been arrested in Killeen, Texas on suspicion of terrorist intentions. That's right near Fort Hood, where Major Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded 30 others two years ago. In fact at the time of his arrest this guy was attempting to make a purchase at Guns Galore, a gun shop in Killeen, the very same store where Nidal Hasan bought his weapons. The FBI spokesman tells us they found firearms and bomb making components inside this soldier's motel room, as well as printed material. Couple of questions here. One: What's a soldier doing stockpiling stuff in a motel room? Turns out the guy had been absent without leave since July 4th from his base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He was under investigation for having child pornography on his computer. All right, Question Two: What kind of printed material did they find? Was it a Gideon Bible? The Book of Mormon? Science and Health? Dianetics? One of my book reviews? Nope. The printed material was jihadist literature and al-Qaeda bomb recipes. You might want to sit down while I tell you this, as I know you're going to be deeply shocked, especially if you're Roger Cohen; but the arrested soldier is a Muslim. A home-grown Muslim, born in the U.S.A. to a Muslim father and a Christian mother. Name is Naser Jason Abdo, rank of Private First Class. Yes I know, you could have knocked me down with a feather, too. Not only is Private Abdo a Muslim, he also declared himself a conscientious objector when they tried to deploy him to Afghanistan, said he wouldn't fight fellow Muslims. Until I read that, I thought the concept of "conscientious objector" only applied in times of conscription. What a conscientious objector is conscientiously objecting to is being drafted into the military, isn't it? That's what I always supposed. How do you square being a conscientious objector with serving in the United States Army? Beats me; but in multicultural America, I guess anything is possible. (To their credit, Private Abdo's superiors at Ft. Campbell denied his request for conscientious objector status when he asked for it, but they were overruled by Pentagon bureaucrats. No doubt the Pentagon brass said to each other that as stupidly irrational as it is to give conscientious objector status to a serving soldier in a volunteer army, if our diversity becomes a casualty, that would be worse.) |
06 — Obama addresses La Raza. Our President addressed El Consejo Nacional de La Raza, a lobbying organization for Mexicans in America. The name of the organization translates into English as "The National Council of the Race," but for reasons I simply cannot fathom at all it promotes itself here as "The National Council of La Raza." Well, what did our President say to these proud racists? He said the following thing, inter of course alia. Quote: Every day, National Council of La Raza and your affiliates hear from families figuring out how to stretch every dollar a little bit further, what sacrifices they've got to make, how they're going to budget only what's truly important. So they should expect the same thing from Washington. End quote. So our President thinks The Race should expect Washington to, quote, "budget only what's truly important." OK, let's consider the eleven million dollars that the National Council of the Race got from U.S. taxpayers in fiscal 2010. Was that eleven million dollars "truly important," Mr President? Another quote from Obama's speech to The Race, quote: I've already said I'm willing to cut spending that we don't need by historic amounts to reduce our long-term deficit. End quote. Do you think the eleven million dollars going to The Race, and the tens of millions going to its affiliate organizations, belong in the category of "spending that we need," Mr President? If so, what exactly is the nature of the "need" there? If not, will you cut them? And then, the same weary old sleight of mouth. Quote: In recent years, one in four high-tech startups in America — companies like Google and Intel — were founded on immigrants. One in six new small business owners are immigrants. End quote. Once again, just once more: here, courtesy of Duke University, are the top twenty countries of origin for immigrant non-citizens filing patent applications between 1998 and 2006: China (including Taiwan), India, Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Russia, Korea, Japan, Australia, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ireland, Greece, Iran. |
07 — Debt limit negotiations endgame. All right, all right, I'll say something about the debt limit negotiations. Talk this week was all about the Boehner Plan. This is some scheme the leader of the House cooked up promising to cut 22 billion dollars in spending next year and, of course lots and lots more in years to come. It's picayune and bogus of course, as a solution to our fiscal problems, and everyone knows it, but as a political gambit it has lots of support from mainstream Republicans. Let me just clarify that "picayune and bogus."
[Another blooper: that 0.058 should of course be 0.58. Those damn dots!] We have a systemic problem. It's deep. Congress can't control its addiction to spending, ever-increasing spending. It's not Barack Obama's fault, though he sure isn't helping. It's not George W. Bush's fault, though he sure didn't help either. It's not even Congress's fault — we the people elect them, don't we? Back in the 1930s when Chiang Kai-shek ruled China, he faced two great problems threatening his nation. One was Japanese aggression, the other was communist insurrection. Chiang concentrated his efforts on the communists. When people criticized him for this, he explained: "The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the communists are a disease of the bowels." Whatever you think of Chiang Kai-shek's judgment in that particular matter, something similar applies here. The U.S.A. has a disease of the bowels. Repeated applications of Clearasil won't help. It's in the nature of democracies — especially optimistic ones like ours, where wishful thinking is the common approach to events — that deep systemic problems of this kind don't get properly addressed until the pain they cause is widespread and undeniable. I'm afraid that's what has to happen. As with the Civil War, as with the Depression, we have to pass through some great crisis; and postponing the crisis will only mean it's worse when it finally happens. That's not fatalism. I'm not saying there is nothing we can do. There's plenty we can do. We can shut down pointless and unnecessary federal departments. We can repatriate the 56,000 troops we have stationed in Germany. We can raise the Social Security eligibility age to 70. We can end the ethanol subsidy, in fact all farm subsidies. There are a hundred things we can do. We just don't have the will to do any of them; and we won't have that will until pain is real and widespread. In the meantime, what you're seeing in the headlines is just political make-work, just pointless busy-ness, that will all be forgotten when the storm hits. Which it will, sooner or later; and the later it hits, the worse it'll be. |
08 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Item: My Get a Government Job mantra is looking a bit thin, as our flat-broke states and municipalities are laying off workers. It still holds true at the federal level, though. An analysis by USA Today covering the last fiscal year showed that only one federal employee in 180 was fired, as against a normal private-sector annual rate of one in 30. Employees in most federal departments are in fact more likely to die on the job than be laid off or fired. Among the 35,000 federal attorneys, for example, there were just 27 firings, no layoffs, and 33 deaths. So I'm going to adjust that mantra slightly, if you don't mind: Get a FEDERAL Government Job Item: When I was a lad back in England fifty years ago there was an epidemic of thieves stealing the lead from church roofs. Everybody shook their heads sadly and said it was a symptom of Britain's decline in the world: "The country's being broken up and sold for scrap," was the black-humor joke going round. Well, get ready to hear that joke again, this time applied to the U.S.A. This last few weeks there's been a rash of stories about the stealing of copper wire. A guy was electrocuted in Kentucky earlier this month stealing copper wire from a utility substation. The latest trend is stealing bronze memorials from cemeteries. In Abington, Mass., 18 memorial grave markers were stolen from the veterans area of a cemetery. Same thing in Idaho, where nine bronze vases were stolen from a veterans' memorial. This strikes me as a particularly low kind of crime, and I hope there are some exemplary prosecutions. Can't get the symbolism out of my head, though. "Broken up and sold for scrap." Please let it not come to that: I've been through it with one nation already. Item: Do you know what a samosa is? It's a little triangular stuffed pastry snack. I associate them with Indian restaurants, and indeed the word itself comes from Hindi, but apparently the samosa is popular all across southwest Asia, into Arabia, and across the Red Sea into north and east Africa. Well, not in Somalia, not any more. The militant Islamist group al-Shabaab that controls big swathes of Somalia has banned the samosa because they say its triangular shape might put people in mind of the Christian Trinity. What it might also put Somalis in mind of is that tens of thousands of their fellow-countrymen are starving — there is a terrible famine raging in the country. I guess when you're as full of religious zeal as the al-Shabaab fanatics, you don't notice a little thing like famine. Item: Dominique Strauss-Kahn's accuser has come into the open to declare that she has been wronged, wronged. Nafissatou Diallo gave interviews to Newsweek and ABC News, and addressed the congregation plus 200 media folk at a Brooklyn church, squeezing out tears and putting on a trembly voice. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you would have to have had a heart of stone not to laugh at the performance. Ms Diallo is playing the race card, the sex card, and the class card. She's black, female, and poor, she wants us to know. I'm sure she'd play the immigrant card if she could, but that might be hazardous, as it's clear she lied on her asylum application and is therefore subject to deportation. My suggestion to Ms Diallo is that she get together with Crystal Gail Mangum and Tawana Brawley and form a singing trio along the lines of the Andrews sisters. What could they call themselves? The Three … the Three … Well, never mind. Oh wait a minute, that idea won't work: Ms Mangum is in jail on a homicide charge. Ah heck, just deport the woman. |
09 — Signoff. That's it, ladies and gents. As you may have perceived, I am not in the best of spirits. Observing the follies of the world, and coming up with commentary on them, can be awfully depressing. I shall do my best to bring some good cheer to next week's broadcast. In the meantime, here is some suitable mood music to see us out. |
[Music clip: Erik Satie, "Gnossiennes No. 1."]