»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     Yes, Radio Derb is on the air! This is your seasonally genial host John Derbyshire with some highlights from the week's news.

Yes, the season of goodwill is upon us, listeners. We're a bit short on holly and ivy out here in the Aegean, but we do have lots of figs and olives, so we shall make the best of it.

I am under strict orders to hold the line at 30 minutes this week, so let's go straight to the opinionating.

First, that old fiscal cliff. Sounds a bit like a hymn, doesn't it?

On a hill far away stood an old fiscal cliff,
The emblem of suffering and shame …

Well, let's hope we can get through this without suffering; but shame we surely should feel. Permit me to elaborate.

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02 — Kill Boomer scum!     I've never been quite sure whether I count as a Boomer. Dictionary.com defines a Boomer as, quote: "A person born during a baby boom, especially one born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1965." Well, I was born 1945, and not in the U.S.A., so on that definition I'm not a Boomer, I'm the last of the pre-Boomers.

The Slang Dictionary, on the other hand, gives this, quote: "Someone born during the baby boom — from the last years of World War II until the early 1960s." There I get in under the wire, so maybe I am a Boomer.

This matters, because if I am not a Boomer, I can take part with a clear conscience in the bloody massacre of Boomers that is surely coming. On the other hand, if I am a certifiable Boomer, I shall be a massacre-ee, not a massacre-er. Naturally I'm anxious.

Oh, you didn't know about the coming massacre? Well, it's not a sure thing, but definitely a possibility. The oldest of the Boomers — think Bill Clinton — came into their inheritance in the mid-to-late 1960s, the youngest — think Barack Obama — in the early 1980s.

See, here's the thing. All of our politics — absolutely all our national politics, and a good big piece of our local politics, too — all of the controversies and squabbling and posturing and negotiating, it all comes down to one fundamental fact: We have systems of public expenditure in place that we can no way raise enough revenue to pay for.

OK, let's take that as a given, and ask the question why? Why did we get ourselves into such a dumb stupid situation?

The answer has many components. Some are demographic, some economic, some prudential, some technological.

An example of the demographic components would be increasing longevity, with geezers idling away on Social Security for thirty years. An example of the economic would be dwindling comparative demand for low-skilled labor, making more and more citizens unemployable and thus needing government support. An example of the prudential would be the increase in mass incarceration that followed the crime waves of the later 20th century. An example of the technological would be the explosion in expensive medical treatments keeping us alive longer, but often on government benefits.

That's the long answer. The short answer is: Because this is what the Boomers wanted. We have this huge, calcified establishment of government workers, entitlements, and programs because the Boomers wanted them. The modern American welfare-warfare state is a Boomer creation.

If our inability to go on paying for it drags us into a humongous crisis, blame the Boomers. Then, massacre them … us, whatever.

Here's a tragic story from England. Fifty-seven year old Mr Ibrahim Omar, married 35 years and a grandfather, ran up a quarter million dollars in debts he had no hope of paying. Seeing no way out, Mr Omar took his own life, using gasoline to set himself alight in his own home.

With no disrespect to the unhappy Mr Omar, that is one way out for an individual. But what's the way out for a whole nation? The Omar solution doesn't scale up. We don't have enough gasoline.

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03 — Allons enfants de la Patrie!     Those gloomy thoughts were inspired by a December 10th report on CBN.com about a French nationalist group, Génération Identitaire, which translates roughly as Identity Generation.

This is a group of young French people. Looking at their faces, I'd guess at least half of them are less than 20 years old. They had already gotten themselves in the news back in May when they occupied a mosque in Poitiers. That's close to the battlefield of Tours, where Charles Martel's army stopped the Muslim advance into Europe back in a.d. 732.

Now France is filling up with Muslims again, and Génération Identitaire don't like it. There are other things they don't like, as we shall see.

Oh, those faces? You can see them on a two-and-a-half-minute video clip the group has just put out. The video, which is very professionally produced, just shows 21 young French people talking into the camera, close-up and, in the best tradition of naughty French movies, black and white. I mean the cinematography is black and white, not the speakers: they are all white.

They're speaking in French, of course. I'll give you a translation. Here's the video:

[Video French soundtrack in background, low volume; me translating in foreground.]
We are Identity Generation.
We are the generation who get killed for glancing at the wrong person, for refusing someone a cigarette, or for having an "attitude" that annoys someone.
We are the generation of ethnic fracture, total failure of coexistence, and forced mixing of the races.
We are the generation doubly punished: Condemned to pay into a social system so generous with strangers it becomes unsustainable for our own people.
Our generation are the victims of the May '68-ers who wanted to liberate themselves from tradition, from knowledge and authority in education. But all they accomplished was to liberate themselves from their responsibilities.

That needs a little explanation here. The May '68-ers, in French les soixante-huitards, were the utopian leftist-slash-anarchist middle-class student revolutionaries who took to the streets of Paris in that month 44 years ago. They were basically protesting against the bourgeois lifestyle of their parents.

One of their slogans mocking that lifestyle went as follows: Métro boulot, métro dodo — "Commute to your job, commute home to sleep." That encapsulates the attitude of the soixante-huitards. That was the bourgeois lifestyle as they saw it: You lived to work. No time for fun.

It was all close in spirit to the street theater we had here in the U.S.A. that same year, 1968. It even had much the same result. French President Charles de Gaulle called an election for the following month, June. He won by a landslide, as Richard Nixon did over here five months later. It turned out, in both countries, that the great majority of citizens rather liked the bourgeois lifestyle.

Now, 44 years on, the soixante-huitards are, like our own '68-ers — think Bill Ayers — are all Professors Emeritus in some junk Humanities discipline, or senior government bureaucrats, or Directors of do-gooding NGOs, and/or close buddies of the rich and powerful.

To continue with the video:

[As before.]
We're rejecting your history books to re-gather our memories.
We no longer believe that "Khader" could ever be our brother; we have stopped believing in a "Global Village" and the "Family of Man."

"Khader" is a generic name for a Muslim, like "José" for a Latino.

We discovered that we have roots, ancestry and therefore a future.
Our heritage is our land, our blood, our identity. We are the heirs to our own destiny.
We turned off the TV to march the streets.
We painted our slogans on the walls. Cried through bullhorns for "youth in power" and flew our Lambda flags high.
The Lambda, painted on proud Spartans' shields, is our symbol.

The Greek letter lambda was indeed the symbol on Spartan shields. It stood for Lacedaemon, which was the Spartan name for Sparta.

Don't you understand what this means? We will not back down, we will not give in.
We are sick and tired of your cowardice.
You are from the years of post-war prosperity, retirement benefits, S.O.S Racism and "diversity," sexual liberation and a bag of rice from Bernard Kouchner.

Kouchner was a soixante-huitard who later became a leftist politician and internationalist do-gooder.

We are 25 percent unemployment, social debt, multicultural collapse and an explosion of anti-white racism.
We are broken families and young French soldiers dying in Afghanistan.
You won't buy us with a condescending look, a wretched state-paid job and a pat on the shoulder.
We don't need your "youth policies." Youth is our policy.
Don't think this is simply a manifesto. It is a declaration of war.
You are of yesterday, we are of tomorrow.
We are Identity Generation.

End of video.

Génération Identitaire has of course come under attack from the soixante-huitard geezers and the legions of ethnomasochist leftists who were educated by them in the colleges they came to control, and indoctrinated by them via the news media they came to dominate. The usual words have been thrown around: "hate," "bigotry," "supremacy," and the rest.

Génération Identitaire have responded by patiently explaining that there is a difference between loving your own and hating the Other. They don't want "supremacy" over anyone, they just want their country back.

Well, it's a refreshing change from the endless drizzle of multiculturalist propaganda we live through every day. I'll throw in just a pinch of salt, though.

These are youngsters, and youth is full of folly. Speaking personally, as a bourgeois geezer, when I hear someone say "Youth is our policy," my instinctual reaction is: "Hey, Jacques, get a job and start a family, then we'll talk policy."

But see, there aren't any jobs, and these kids' soixante-huitard schoolteachers told them the family is an oppressive bourgeois institution, a tool of the patriarchy. You can see their point of view.

And they naturally feel resentment at seeing their nation's ancient cities taken over by unassimilable aliens whose ancestors were on the other side in the Battle of Tours.

Whether Génération Identitaire can translate that resentment into useful, civilized political action, remains to be seen. Actually, I hope they can. Youth is full of folly, sure, but at least this is the right kind of folly.

And to return to my opening theme, it's the generational resentment that really caught my eye there. "Generation" is the first word of their name, remember. Re-quote: "You are from the years of post-war prosperity, retirement benefits, S.O.S Racism and 'diversity' …"

They are talking to the Boomers, and they're out to get them. Us, whatever.

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04 — Norks in space.     After all that sturm und drang, it's a relief to turn attention to a true democracy, a nation that actually has "democracy" in its name, and where the only time the streets are full of people marching, they are all in military uniform and marching the goose-step.

Yes, this is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea I'm talking about, a.k.a. North Korea, 64 years old and still going strong. And I was of course speaking sardonically. I have my own issues with democracy, about which I'll have things to say another time, but in its current, Western incarnation it's approximately a hundred thousand times better than the system North Koreans suffer under.

The fact that this horrible despotism has survived for 64 years, and for all I can see looks set fair for another 64, ought to prompt profound reflections on human nature, or at least on Korean nature.

Well, this week's news is of a missile launch the Norks conducted on Wednesday. It went quite well, actually putting a satellite into orbit. That makes North Korea only the eleventh nation to accomplish that.

This was a three-stage rocket that traveled three thousand miles.

North Korea, remember, is a completely failed state. There are periodic famines and chronic shortages, hospitals have no equipment or medicines, and fuel is strictly rationed in the severe Korean winters. There are vast concentration camps where whole families are sent on the slightest suspicion of disloyalty, and where people are born, live out their lives, and die. And it's been like this for decades.

North Korea watchers talk about a "Ceauşescu Moment" — an incident like the one that brought down the regime of that Romanian dictator in 1989, when people just started jeering and booing at him giving a speech.

Well, maybe. Maybe this time next week, or next year, we'll be treated to the sight of Kim Jong-un and his fashionista wife hanging upside down from lamp-posts, like Mussolini and his gal.

I'm not betting on it, though. This regime has legs. It makes you wonder what, exactly, is the human limit of tolerance for really, monstrously bad government. For all the horrors, the Kim family hasn't reached those limits yet; and that's a dark, terrible fact.

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05 — Anti-white triumphalism.     There seems to be no end to the triumphalism of the Left over Barack Obama's election victory last month. The lefties are so fizzed up they're letting their true feelings show, and it ain't pretty.

Prominent among those true feelings is hatred of white people. We got a good hot blast of it from movie actor Jamie Fox-x on Saturday Night Live last weekend. This is the same Jamie Fox-x (two x's) Radio Derb passed comment on two weeks ago, when he told the audience at some black award ceremony to, quote, "Give an honor to God and our Lord and Savior Barack Obama."

Well, on SNL Mr. Fox-x boasted of how in his new movie, quote: "I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?" The audience, who were mostly white, laughed.

Of course they did. One of my most-read columns on Taki's Magazine was the one I posted September 6th, title: "White People Are Pussies." Ain't it the truth.

A few years ago I was in conversation with white nationalist Jared Taylor, proprietor of the American Renaissance website. At that time Jared was doing a lot of radio talk shows. The hosts would generally put him on with a black guest, and let them go at it.

Jared said that once he'd got the hang of this format, there were some stock questions he liked to ask the black guest. One of them was: "Do you think all white people should be killed?"

Jared said the answer was always uncannily the same, almost word for word: "No I don't … but I know people that do."

Maybe white people should stop laughing.

They should definitely stop laughing at some point between now and 2043. That's the new date, according to a revised report from the Census Bureau, when whites will be in a minority in the U.S.A. The previous date was 2042.

New York Times black columnist Charles Blow noted that revised date in his column on Wednesday. He opened with a sneer, quote: "America's white majority just bought itself another year."

In the rest of the column he kept his triumphalism pretty well under control; but then he ended by wagging his finger at us.

After noticing a report on rising anti-black feeling among whites he says, quote: "The last thing we need is a racial and ethnic backlash in this country."

Actually, the last thing we needed was a situation where the founding majority of this country became a minority via criminally foolish immigration policies.

Charles Blow's colleague Maureen Dowd, still in high triumphalist mode, took a different view of the matter in her Sunday column. Being white herself, Ms Dowd limited her gloating to the fate of white males. Quote:

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Well, it makes a change from Ms Dowd's usual topic, which is, to judge from the few occasions I have looked at her column, whining about how nobody wants to go on dates with powerful, successful women like Maureen Dowd.

Harry Belafonte's gotten into the spirit of the thing, too. He was on MSNBC with Presidential tax adviser Al Sharpton Monday night. Referring to those who oppose Obama's policies, Mr Belafonte said, quote:

The only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third-world dictator and just put all of these guys in jail. You're violating the American desire.

End quote.

Well, at least he doesn't want to kill us all.

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06 — Unions take a hit.     Finally, just a brief Radio Derb round of applause [Applause] for the good people of Michigan, whose legislature this week voted sweeping changes to the way labor unions may finance themselves.

If you think of Michigan and unions, you of course think of the UAW, the United Auto Workers. That's not actually the main issue, though. The UAW's been on life support for years, thanks to foreign competition and the advance of robotics. The real enemy here is the public-sector unions.

Allowing public-sector workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining is a leading candidate for stupidest idea of the 20th century. If you doubt this, I urge you to read the report posted on Bloomberg News Tuesday, title: "$822,000 Worker Shows California Leads U.S. Pay Giveaway." The sum of money in the title was one year's remuneration for a state-employed psychiatrist.

The report is long — about 3,600 words — but well worth your trouble if you want to know how California got into the mess it's in by time and again yielding to the demands of public-sector employees like that psychiatrist, and the state legislators the unions have bought with funds raised from the taxpayer-funded salaries of union members.

In fact I'll give another round of applause to the reporters on that Bloomberg story: Mark Niquette, Michael B. Marois and Rodney Yap. Give it up, folks. [Applause.]

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07 — Signoff.     And there you have it, ladies and gents. I'll just add, thinking about that segment on the French nationalists, that it brought to mind my very favorite French apothegm, please forgive me if I've mentioned it before: Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. That means: "If youth only knew, if age only could." Truer words never spoken.

OK, wrapping up now. Notice how scrupulously I avoided double-entendres in this week's broadcast. I defy you to find even one.

If you noticed this, you may naïvely have imagined that I have been chastened by the listener complaints I referred to in last week's broadcast. If that's what you imagined, you little know me.

The actual reason for the absence of double-entendres in the broadcast so far is that I have been saving them up for a concentrated thermonuclear blast of double-entendre at the very end.

So here to see us out is the all-time world-wide great-grandmaster of double-entendre, the English comedian Kenneth Williams singing "The Marrow Song." You need to know that the marrow is a kind of English vegetable, a member of the squash family. Take it from there, Ken.

More from Radio Derb next week.

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