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Questions Questions

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Under the title Whiteness and the Jewish Question Prozium writes:

Jews are a Semitic ethnic group like the Syrians or the Palestinians. “Ethnicity” is also a muddle of kinship and cultural factors. Jews have defined themselves as a distinct people for thousands of years. Until very recently, European Christians treated Jews as an alien element within their societies. Jews remain to this day painfully aware of their history and distinctiveness and do not identify with the American majority like other groups.

The debate over the “whiteness” of the Jews is unique to America. With few exceptions, Europeans have never cared much about “whiteness” because they have traditionally lived in racially homogeneous societies. Even in America, “whiteness” has never been synonymous with Caucasian. “White” was originally a synonym of “English” and was later refined into “Nordic” by the early twentieth century. The Italians were finally accepted as “white,” but are still thought of (accurately, in my view) as being less “white” than Scandinavians. The whiteness of Levantines like the Jews is even more suspect.

Most racialists find the “whiteness” debate interesting but consider it less important than other questions. Even if the Jews were “white” by some genetic proxy, it would not absolve them of the unique role they have played in undermining white racial consciousness in the United States. The fact remains that the organized Jewish community has treated white racialists as “the enemy” ever since the end of the Second World War.

They are the ones who started to antagonize us, not the other way around. Up until the 1960s, American racialism wasn’t associated with anti-Semitism. This changed in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement when it became clear that Jews had played a vanguard role in pushing the racial and cultural changes in America that we dislike. Their actions are what generate “anti-Semitism” and sympathy for the Third Reich.

It is completely rational to exclude a hostile, antagonistic minority from your living space. One can easily imagine an alternative timeline in which Jews showed respect for the customs and traditions of their host and presented themselves as defenders and admirers of Western civilization. I doubt there would be any resentment against Jews if their behavior was of this sort. No one spends their time fretting over the “Mongolian Question.”

In reality, Jewish behavior confirms many of worst stereotypes about their race. They are avaricious, inconsiderate, duplicitous, condescending, materialistic, and aggressive. They cry foul when they endure the slightest criticism, even when they are in the process of destroying others like in their recent attack on Lebanon, or egging on Bush/Cheney to attack Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

Not all Jews are of this sort. The Jewish community is divided on all sorts of issues. Aside from the neocons, American Jews are more concerned with domestic policy than foreign policy. Jewish wealth and the disproportionate representation of Jewish voices in academia, government, business, and the news and entertainment media has created a pro-Jewish bias in American culture and public policy that would otherwise not exist. This has come at the expense of other groups like the Palestinians and racially conscious white Americans whom Jews count amongst their ethnic enemies.

It doesn’t suit us as Whites for Jews to continue to enjoy privileges like their immunity from criticism or their vast fortunes. This is the gist of the Jewish Question.

To which I responded:

The US has the Latino Question, and Europe has the Muslim Question. Both are really the Immigration Invasion Question, which is: whose interests are served by permitting millions of impoverished, uneducated, hostile aliens to flood any nation? These questions trace back and are in fact subordinate to the Jewish Question. Which is how I became aware of it.

The question “are jews White” is exactly what you need to consider to understand why there is a JQ to begin with, and to contemplate answers. That these questions are taboo, while the anti-racist questioning of Whiteness is not, reveals at least two prongs of anti-White aggression. So I cannot agree that there are more important questions to consider.

Excellent analysis otherwise.

The question “are jews White” was new to me and still fresh in mind when I wrote Committing PC’s Most Mortal Sin. I was exposed to it by an article written by E. Michael Jones called Francis’s Legacy:

The last time I saw Sam Francis, it was at a meeting in Washington. Sam was the moderator at a talk given by John Tyndall, a leader of the National Front in England. Mr. Tyndall was trying to get us enthused about being white guys, and so he launched into a peroration about the glories of Elizabethan England. Since Elizabethan England was the place where Catholic priests, like Edmund Campion, SJ, could be hanged until not quite dead, drawn and quartered and have their entrails thrown into boiling oil for the crime of saying the Mass, I was less than enthralled by the picture Mr. Tyndall had painted for us. In fact, if his intention was to bring us all together, his talk had the exact opposite effect. Since both Father Campion and Lord Burghley and his henchman Walsingham were all white, just what meaning did this fact possess?

My friend Gerry Bruen must have been entertaining the same thoughts because after Mr. Tyndall finished his speech, Gerry asked him whether “the Irish are white.” The question annoyed Mr. Tyndall, who got a disgusted look on his face and said, “Of course, the Irish are white. My mother is Irish.”

At this point, Sam Francis broke into the discussion, and turning to Mr. Tyndall, he asked, “Are Jews white?” Mr. Tyndall was taken aback by the question. After a long pause, he turned to Sam and said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” So today I’d like to honor the memory of Sam Francis by trying to answer his unanswered question: “Are Jews White?

Jones believes that the root of America’s cultural divide is not race, but religion. Besides Sam Francis the story intertwines Catholics, Leo Pfeffer and the Neoconservatives, Kevin MacDonald, the NAACP, Mearsheimer & Walt, and the SPLC. Jones ends with an appeal to spirituality and Logos I find moving but unconvincing:

In the end, when Father Scalia entered his hospital room and asked him if he wanted the sacraments of the Church, Sam Francis chose the Higher Logos, and we can honor him by choosing the cause of Logos as we enter the next phase of the culture wars. Both Sam Francis’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism and the persecution of John Sharpe are symbolic of a shift in the culture wars. The offensive launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center is the best indication I can offer that the main front in the culture wars is now the confrontation between Jews and Catholics. The Enlightenment is finally dead. There are no more quasi-Masonic movements, where each of us can rise above whatever sect he belongs to and join the Lodge known as “conservatism” or liberalism, or whatever. I think we, no matter what our religious or ethnic background, should rejoice at this development because in this confrontation 1) the Church has both a history and a set of beliefs that will lay to rest forever the charge of anti-Semitism and destroy it as a tool of political oppression and 2) because no matter how much they want to finesse the attack by focusing on what they consider fringe groups, the Jews have taken on a considerable group of people, who will react eventually to the attack. The situation in Hungary now is a case in point.

And finally, we should be happy because the attack clearly defines the terms of engagement, all of which are all spiritual. The revolutionary Jew is our enemy because he is a rejecter of Logos, not because of his DNA. We are not anti-Semites because we oppose the machinations of the revolutionary Jew. No, we are true Christians because of that, as the Church from the time of St. Peter onward has proclaimed. Like St. Peter and St. Paul, we are suffering at the hands of the Jews, “the people who put the Lord Jesus to death, and the prophets too. And now they have been persecuting us, and acting in a way that cannot please God and makes them the enemies of the whole human race” (I Thess 1:15).

We are now engaged in a battle which has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, but the sides in this battle have not changed. What has changed are the odds. The Jews have never been stronger; the Catholics have never been weaker, but the outcome of spiritual battles–and the battle for the soul of the West, as Tolkien knew, is a spiritual battle–no matter what the odds, is rarely predictable. If St. Paul, representing the Christian position, has to say, “When I am weak, I am strong.” Then the revolutionary Jew, representing the opposite position has to say, “When I am strong, I am weak.” We are outgunned on every front in the culture wars, but that is no reason for despair, if we follow the Logos that St. Paul followed, because he was outgunned by the Jews too, outgunned but not undone, saying, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down but not destroyed.”

The Catholic heirarchy and broader Christian leadership stand alongside the vast majority of jews in support of the immigration invasion and, by implication, the liquidation of Whites. So I disagree with Jones’ claim that the main confrontation is between Jews and Catholics. The confrontation I care about is between Whites and the people actively demoralizing, displacing, dispossessing, and disenfranchising them.

Jones is wrong about DNA. DNA is more important than anything else in determining low-level personality traits. Traits that ultimately express themselves in higher forms as ethics, morals, and culture. There is some feedback flowing the other direction, but the driving force is DNA. Some races, ie. genetic clusters, produce more morons, and some produce more geniuses. Likewise sociopaths who crave infinite wealth or totalitarian power and to best achieve these aims gravitate toward, foment, and revel in revolution.

The denial of such truths is akin to Lysenkoism, both in contradiction of biological reality and in the dependence on repressive political and social tactics. We call these tactics Hate Laws and Political Correctness, which suppress truth primarily by suppressing questions.

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Race Realism Meets Tribal Denial

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Mencius Moldbug has taken up my challenge to explain the immigration invasion.

"A theory of the ruling underclass" is flawed, but in an interesting way. Like Lawrence Auster, Mencius criticizes liberals (which he prefers to call universalists or progressives). And like Auster he has a curious blind spot. The difference is that Mencius has been more willing to argue about it, and I have yet to see him dissolve into unhinged anti-anti-semitism ala Auster.

Triggered by the obtuseness of Obama-supporting progressives who shrug off black nationalism while despising White nationalism, Mencius begins by pointing the glaring inconsistency in liberal anti-racist logic:

Which is the incontrovertible fact that the vast majority of chauvinist ethnocentrism in America today is not of the vanilla flavor that disturbs them so. If they can explain this, they can explain anything, and we should probably just surrender – if they’ll let us.

For example: one of the most popular radio stations in San Francisco, at least to judge by the billboards I see, is called The Race. I am especially fond of the URL. “I am race!” Yes, this means exactly what you think it means.

Ethnic pride is one thing. Hostility is another. But – as progressives often observe – they tend to travel together. It strikes me as quite incontrovertible that if an alien anthropologist were to visit Earth and collate expressions of hostility toward human subpopulations in Western culture today, the overwhelming majority would be anti-European. Anti-Europeanism is widely taught in schools and universities today. Its converse most certainly is not.

So here is my challenge for progressives, multiculturalists, “dynamists,” and the like: if your antiracism is what it claims to be, if it is no more than Voltaire 3.0, why do non-European ethnocentrism and anti-European hostility not seem to bother you in the slightest? Do they maybe even strike you as, um, slightly cool? How do you feel when you watch this video?

Please try to express your answer in plain English, not Stalinist boilerplate. Trust us – we know the boilerplate answer.

What’s interesting, at least to this antisocial reactionary (if you’re looking for another R-word, I also answer to “realist”), is that anti-Europeanism is almost as hard to explain from the other side of the table. I am reasonably, if not comprehensively, familiar with modern racist and white nationalist thought. I must say that it tends to leave me quite unsatisfied – especially as regards the real psychological motivations of Messrs. Wilkinson, Ghertner, et al.

Are they, for instance, in the pay of the Jews? While I certainly cannot disprove this or a variety of similar conjectures, I tend to doubt them. Occam’s razor suggests that even if some multiculturalists are tools of the Mossad, surely the vast majority are perfectly sincere in their beliefs. The Rothschilds just don’t have that much cash. If we work under the assumption that our opponents believe exactly what they say, we should account for at least most of them. Then we can watch Stormfront go head to head with the Elders of Zion, which should be entertaining if nothing else.

I have an explanation. You may not like it. Feel free to offer your own.

Mencius goes on quite a bit about black and white tribes before reviewing his personal class warfare vocabulary:

Early in UR I suggested a five-caste taxonomy of American society, and described the conflict of American politics as a struggle of three of these castes (Brahmins, Dalits, Helots) against the other two (Optimates, Vaisyas). For those whose time is short, Brahmins are intellectuals, Dalits are what Marx called the lumpenproletariat, and Helots are unskilled laborers. Optimates are the old “upper-crust” aristocracy, and Vaisyas are the petty bourgeoisie.

These castes correspond to social status, not tribe. However, each of the top three castes is more or less tribeless – classic ethnic tribalism is a sure mark of Dalit or Helot status. As far as I can tell, in 2008 there is very little chauvinism even among Vaisyas. Among Dalits and Helots, race matters again. Obviously, despite certain Jackie Chan movies, there is no such thing as an interracial gang.

Mencius then attempts to argue how black (and presumably white) tribes don’t really matter because they are divided by class.

He inexplicably confounds this argument by recounting the melodramatic story of a sociology student’s naive trek into a black housing development and his interactions with the tribal militia there. If for some reason you need an introduction to what desegregation and civil rights of the 1960s “liberated” in every city, read the full post. Or watch this if you’d like to hear it from the militiamen themselves.

One of the many negative consequences of the invasion is that it brings in whole new tribes and militias, many of which are more organized, ruthless, and mobile than the indigenous black militias. If you happen to cherish multiculturalism and think diversity is a strength please go read that link. The last paragraph contains a special message just for you.

After much verbiage Mencius finally comes to his point:

The progressives no longer need muscle. They are in the saddle. There are no more Grayson Kirks, let alone Bull Connors. What they need now is votes, and the biggest vote bank of all is just south of the border. Immigration will keep the progressives in power for the next century. They always have been the American PRI, and they always will be.

And I haven’t even stated my theory yet.

Fortunately, it’s not my theory. It is a very old theory. Perhaps it even predates Mencius himself. It comes from China, so he would recognize it, and it has a catchy name: yi yi zhi yi.

This roughly translates as “using the barbarians to control the barbarians.” Typically the implication is that when you have a problem with some tribe of barbarians, what you need to do is look for a bunch of even nastier barbarians, and sic them on the original barbarians. Ideally, the nastier barbarians are so barbaric that they are not conceivably a threat to you, the sophisticated mandarins of the Middle Kingdom, but still nasty enough to distract your real enemies on the frontiers, who may have learned to read and write or something. When the Romans unleashed the Huns against the Germans, it was a classic case of yi yi zhi yi.

Does this remind anyone of the real meaning of diversity? I’d like to think it’s obvious. But perhaps I should just spell it out.

Basically, the Brahmins have every possible Machiavellian interest in encouraging an invasion of Third World barbarians. The more, the nastier, the better. Their real hereditary enemy is the native barbarian – the half-civilized Vaisya, the ignorant megachurched Okie redneck, the Huckabee voter, the Bircher and McCarthyite, America Firster and Coolidge voter. In the dim, distant past, the spectre of Davis and Lee and Ben Hill looms grimly up.

They will take all the Huns they can get against this breed of barbarian. They are quite aware that if their real enemies ever seize real power, it’s lamppost time. Huns are not available these days, but J.T. is. And if the nationalist, nativist American right ever regrows some little pocket of testicular tissue, he is one more speed bump they’ll have to go through on their way to DC. It never hurts to have a few more well-armed thugs on your team. At least not if you’re a progressive, and you believe in peace and love and hugs and puppies. Yes, we can!

Of course, I’m not saying that the people who believe in peace and love, etc, actually thought up this strategy and have secret meetings where they gloat about how well it’s all working. They don’t need to. However they explain it to themselves, yi yi zhi yi is what they’re doing. And you can’t exactly call it a failure.

Did you watch that Mandela video? The man next to Mandela is Joe Slovo. One of South Africa’s leading progressives active in the liberation struggle. Or, as some might say, Communist terrorists. Do you wonder why this pasty-faced fellow is comfortable in a crowd full of people chanting “kill the whites?”

Actually, the captions on the video are mistranslated. The word in the song is amaBhulu, a Xhosa racial slur which refers not to all whites, but specifically to Afrikaners. Which Slovo (being a cosmopolitan Anglophone) is most definitely not. So the crowd is essentially chanting “kill the rednecks,” ie, Slovo’s hereditary tribal enemies. No wonder he has a smile on his face. Yi yi zhi yi.

No, I don’t like Mencius’ explanation. It’s certainly less politically correct than anything to be found in the mainstream, but there are several flaws.

The first and least important criticism is that I wish he would put more effort into fleshing out the analysis than weaving so many too-clever phrases. He writes in a way only brahmin are likely to understand, or afford the time to read. Judging from his commenters his eak-way ode-cay is not deflecting their isapproval-day.

A more substantial flaw is that with all he has to say about tribes he pretends as if the most powerful tribe of all doesn’t exist:

However, each of the top three castes is more or less tribeless – classic ethnic tribalism is a sure mark of Dalit or Helot status.

Come now. No tribalism amongst the upper classes? Between this and his euphemistic description of Joe Slovo as a “cosmopolitan Anglophone” Mencius has a prominent blind spot. The hand-waving about the Rothchilds and Elders of Zion fails to explain. Perhaps he can try waving away the ADL and the Israel Lobby.

Another somewhat related gap is his neglect of the corporatist/globalist/economic angle.

Yes, the cosmopolitan progressives Mencius likes to focus on certainly are addicted to the frisson of stirring shizzle from the safety of their ivory towers. I’ve sent more than my share of ridicule their way. A thinking person can only do this so long before they begin to wonder why such flimflam, no matter how ridiculous, persists.

For some reason, and despite his considerable economic savvy, Mencius doesn’t like to focus on that other, less ridiculous type of one-world universalist. The sober, ultra-rational cosmopolitan globalists. You know, the financial wizards who transform chaos into profit. The ones whose lackeys claimed we needed millions of savages to build all those houses we didn’t really need. The ones whose brilliant “industry” boils down to pyramid schemes and government bailouts. The name Soros might ring a bell, though his high profile is rather exceptional.

Without the powerful backing of economic revolutionaries the social revolutionaries would have swung from lampposts long ago. But with the proper financial backing it hardly matters whether a flimflam artist’s “logic” makes any sense.

Here’s what makes sense to me.

Yes, White elites are certainly betraying their lower-class kinsfolk for both social and financial reasons. They support the invasion over the objections of their kinsfolk. Mencius downplays or ignores the jewish tribe but their elites are obviously less conflicted on this issue. Their kinsfolk are financially and psychologically better prepared to surf the invasion’s waves, and they overwhelmingly favor the invasion. Besides the profits of an ever-growing pyramid they also have perfectly understandable sociobiological motivations to dispossess, displace, and ultimately liquidate their de-tribed competitors.

Auster prefers to euphemize the invasion as “liberals” warring on “the Christian majority”. He seems not to notice that the invaders are overwhelmingly Christian and the invasion is openly abetted by church leaders. Mencius portrays the invasion as class warfare, and seems not to notice that naming the tactics doesn’t explain why his “brahmin” should want or need to attack what he calls “[t]heir real hereditary enemy … the native barbarian – the half-civilized Vaisya, the ignorant megachurched Okie redneck, the Huckabee voter, the Bircher and McCarthyite, America Firster and Coolidge voter”.

Caste/class make us “hereditary enemies”? Sorry, for my part it’s the fact that they’re trying to ethnically cleanse me. For their part it’s clear that the universalist ideals of egalitarianism and tolerance are a steaming pile of hooey. The genocidal maniacs appear to be motivated by a combination of greed and deep-seated sociobiological passive-aggressive survival instinct.

We don’t need to look to Chin for precedents. As any well-educated jew should know, two thousand years before Machiavelli the Assyrians and Babylonians knew how to kill nations by flooding them with aliens.

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Samuel Francis

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Sam Francis died in 2005. From a memoriam on vdare.com:

With the end of the Cold War, he emerged as a type of white nationalist, defending the interests of the community upon which the historic United States was, as a matter of fact, built. This position, of course, is as legitimate as Black nationalism, Hispanic nationalism, or Zionism. It is, indeed, the inevitable result of multiculturalism that is being imported through public policy.

Although VDARE.COM is not a white nationalist site, we regarded him as an important part of the VDARE.COM coalition. And we will miss him very badly.

The Establishment, left and right, wasn’t ready to listen to Sam. The logic of their own policies, however, means that eventually they will be forced to.

It was only some 18 months ago, but the very first bit of Francis’ writing I encountered, Poll Exposes Elite-Public Clash On Immigration, had a profound effect on my understanding of the immigration invasion. After a lifetime spent marinating only in the sanitized worldviews of “polite society” I found Francis’ explanation of the gap between the elites and the public on immigration both more shocking and yet more sensible than anything I had ever read. Referring to this poll he wrote:

Probably nothing in public life in recent years shows so clearly the vast differences between how elites and the public at large view mass immigration. It goes far to explain why nothing is ever done to control immigration: The people with power and influence don’t regard immigration as a threat.

And indeed, why should they? The main problems that mass immigration brings are not those of terrorism but rather crime, job loss, educational chaos, cultural erosion and language barriers. Those are problems that middle class or working class people have to face every day, not those of the ruling class.

Elites, simply because they can afford to isolate themselves from the impact of these kinds of threats, don’t feel them and don’t see them even when they look at them. They can move to high-security, crime-free neighborhoods and dump their kids in well-protected private schools.

To them, the main impact of mass immigration is that it creates lots of cute little ethnic restaurants and cute little ethnic nannies that allow the up-scale young parents of the ruling class to dine regularly on Nepalese and Ethiopian cuisine.

As for the ethics of mass immigration, the ruling class has long since convinced itself that "we’re a nation of immigrants," "the first universal nation," a "proposition country" or a "credal society" that has a duty to let in anyone who wants to come here, and that anyone who opposes mass immigration is a bigot, a nativist, a xenophobe.

The elite has managed to coin an entire vocabulary to demonize and discredit anyone who disagrees with its preferences and interests on immigration.

The poll shows that there is a vast gulf between the elite and the public at large on immigration, but more than anything it also shows that if the American majority that favors reducing mass immigration because they see it as a "critical threat" to themselves and their nation really wants to meet that threat, then they must first remove from power the entire class of "leaders" who are unable to perceive the dangers of immigration even when its dangerous consequences literally blow them out of their own skyscrapers.

One of Francis’ most important observations was to recognize our society’s ongoing slide into anarcho-tyranny:

. . . a combination of anarchy (in which legitimate government functions—like spying on the bad guys or punishing real criminals—are not performed) and tyranny (in which government performs illegitimate functions—like spying on the good guys or criminalizing innocent conduct like gun ownership and political dissent).

The result of anarcho-tyranny is that government swells in power, criminals are not controlled, and law-abiding citizens wind up being repressed by the state and attacked by thugs.

Ten days ago Jared Taylor’s Introduction to Sam Francis’s Essential Writings on Race was, for me, a timely reminder and review of Francis’ thoughts. From the links in Taylor’s article I’ve exerpted two that seemed particularly insightful.

From Why Race Matters – The assault on our race and culture must be met in explicitly racial terms, American Renaisance, September 1994:

We see the transfer of power in almost every dimension of public and private life. Thus far, the transfer is more cultural than it is political or economic; it is clear in the rise of multiculturalism, Afro-centrism, and the other anti-white cults and movements in university curricula, and in the penetration of even daily private life by the anti-white ethic and behavior these cults impose. It is clear in the ever-quickening war against the traditional symbols of the old civilization and the elevation of the symbols of the new peoples who aim at their displacement.

It is routine also to display almost all criminals — rapists, murderers, robbers — as whites, though the statistical truth, of course, is that violent crime in the United States is largely the work of non-whites. A few years ago, political scientist Robert Lichter showed in a study that while during the last 30 years, whites were arrested for 40 percent of the murders committed in the United States, on television whites committed 90 percent of the murders.

The erasure and displacement of official cultural symbols and the similar process in elite-produced, mass-consumed popular culture represents the expropriation of cultural norms, the standards by which public and private behavior is legitimized or condemned and a culture defined. While the traditional norms that are being attacked and discarded were almost never explicitly racial, the new norms that are being constructed and imposed are, and they are not only explicitly racial but also explicitly and vociferously anti-white.

This is a calculated tactic aimed at seizing cultural legitimacy and cultural hegemony and ultimately coercive political power on behalf of non-whites at the expense of whites. At the most extreme, the anti-white racialist movement resembles the ideology of German National Socialism. It offers a conspiratorial interpretation of history in which whites are systematically demonized as the enemies of the black race, and a myth of black racial solidarity and supremacy. “Afro-racism” is the ideological and political apparatus by which an explicit race war is prepared against the white race and its civilization, not as part of “rage” nor as a response to “injustice” and “neglect” but, like any war, as part of a concerted strategy to acquire power. It is not confined to blacks but extends also to other non-whites who care to sign up.

Yet the war against the white race and its civilization is not new. It is part of a world-historical movement that began in the late 19th century, perhaps not coincidentally, around the time of the battle of the Little Big Horn, and which the American racialist writer Lothrop Stoddard called, in the frank language of the 1920s, “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” and which Oswald Spengler a few years later called the “Coloured World Revolution.”

The fraudulence of the liberalism espoused by the leaders of the racial revolution was clear to Spengler himself. “The hare,” he wrote in his last book, The Hour of Decision, “may perhaps deceive the fox, but human beings can not deceive each other. The coloured man sees through the white man when he talks about “humanity’ and everlasting peace. He scents the other’s unfitness and lack of will to defend himself… The coloured races are not pacifists. They do not cling to a life whose length is its sole value. They take up the sword when we lay it down. Once they feared the white man; now they despise him.”

What is happening in our interesting times, then, to summarize briefly, is this. A concerted and long-term attack against the civilization of white, European and North American man has been launched, and the attack is not confined to the political, social and cultural institutions that characterize the civilization but extends also to the race that created the civilization and continues to carry and transmit it today. The war against white civilization sometimes (indeed often) invokes liberal ideals as its justification and as its goal, but the likely reality is that the victory of the racial revolution will end merely in the domination or destruction of the white race and its civilization by the non-white peoples — if only for demographic reasons due to non-white immigration and the decline of white birth rates.

In the universalist world-view, there is neither history nor race nor even species, neither specific cultures nor particular peoples nor meaningful boundaries. Therefore there are no concrete duties to race, nation, community, family, friend or neighbor and indeed no distinctions to be drawn between neighbor and stranger, friend and foe, mine and thine, us and them.

In the happyland of universalism, we owe as much to the children of Somalia — indeed, more — than we do to the hapless citizens of Los Angeles, and Marines who could not have been sent from Camp Pendleton to Los Angeles during the riots of 1992 and who are not ordered to prevent violation of the Mexican border adjacent to their own installation in southern California are speedily dispatched to Somalia. Even to invoke “our” identity, our interests, our aspirations is to invite accusations of all the “isms” and “phobias” that are deployed to prevent further discussions and to paralyze the formation or the retention of a common consciousness that might at some point swell up into actual resistance to our dispossession. The principal white response to the incipient race war thus far, manifested in neo-conservative critiques of “Political Correctness” and multiculturalism, is merely to regurgitate the formulas of universalism, to invoke the spirit of Martin Luther King, and to repeat the universalist ideals of equality, integration, and assimilation. The characteristic defense of Western civilization by most conservatives today is merely a variation of the liberal universalism that the enemies of the West and whites also invoke. It is to argue that non-whites and non-Westerners ought to value modern Western civilization as in their own best interests. It is to emphasize the liberal “progress” of the modern West through the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of non-whites, the retreat from imperialism, the achievement of higher living standards and political equality, etc.

Instead of invoking a suicidal liberalism and regurgitating the very universalism that has subverted our identity and our sense of solidarity, what we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. The reassertion of our solidarity must be expressed in racial terms for two major reasons. In the first place, the attack upon us defines itself in racial terms and seeks through the delegitimization of race for whites and the legitimization of race for non-whites the dispersion and destruction of the foundations of our solidarity while at the same time consolidating non-white cohesiveness against whites.

Secondly, we need to assert a specifically racial identity because race is real — biological forces, including those that determine race, are important for social, cultural, and historical events. I do not suggest that race as a biological reality is by itself sufficient to explain the civilization of European man — if race were sufficient, there would be no problem — but race is necessary for it, and it is likely that biological science in the near future will show even more clearly how necessary racial, biological, and genetic explanations are to understanding social and historical events more fully.

In 1994 Sam Francis already saw clearly the anti-White regime – that the many slights putative conservatives have alternatively fought, ridiculed, and averted their eyes from are in fact just pieces of an agenda they dare not see as a whole. For recognizing and writing about the racial dimensions of this assault Sam Francis was banished from “polite society”.

In An Infantile Disorder, Chronicles, February 1998 he argued for unity in facing the threat, and to set aside distractions such as neo-confederate secession:

But even if secession were possible, it would be a bad idea. Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain in columns in this magazine and many other places for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultiara1 dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard. Today, the greatest immediate danger to Middle America and the European-American civilization to which it is heir lies in the importation of a new underclass from the Third World through mass immigration. The danger is in part economic, in part political, and in part cultural, but it is also in part racial, pure and simple. The leaders of the alien underclass, as well as those of the older black underclass, invoke race in explicit terms, and they leave no doubt that their main enemy is the white man and his institutions and patterns of belief.

The only prospect of resisting the domination of the ruling class and its antiwhite and anti-Western allies in the underclass is through Middle American solidarity, a solidarity that must transcend the differentiations of region, class, religion, party, and ideology. White Southerners are a vital part of the Middle American core, as are their Northern counterparts, and neither is the enemy of the other. Both regional sections of Middle America face the same threats, experience much the same problems, and ought to be joined in the same political-cultural movement to meet the threat together.

These are observations I find extremely useful as I struggle to understand the West’s revolutionary transformation. Francis recognized that race matters. In such a world my kith and kin would be wise to realize: White matters.

UPDATE 13 Feb 2008: From Steve Sailer’s review of Francis’ book Race and the American Prospect:

In the Victorian era, the Great Taboo was sex. Today, whatever the label we attach to our own age, the Great Taboo is race. The Victorians virtually denied that sex existed. Today, race is confidently said to be "merely a social construct," a product of the imagination, and of none too healthy imaginations at that, rather than a reality of nature.

Sailer, like my commenter Flippityflopitty, is not hostile to White consciousness, but is certainly pessimistic about White nationalism and separatism. In their stead Sailer advocates citizenism, which he describes as being based on the belief that:

Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners.

This was the rationale for US immigration policy until 1965. Forty years of influx have pushed the population from 200M to over 300M, growth of more than 50%, most of it non-white and upwards of 10% of it illegal.

Unfortunately, citizenism will not keep the US from becoming a banana republic shithole. In fact, as the invasion continues citizenism, or at least the deracinated sentiments that label aptly describes, has actually lent the transformation credibility. The legal immigration and many amnesties since 1965 have introduced more anti-White citizens.

Just like those who only oppose illegal immigration, citizenists play right into the hands of the open border advocates who have shown great skill in subverting and twisting our laws to their desires. The US senate, for example, brazenly tried to elect a new citizenry last May. They continue to work on behalf of their prospective zitizens by amending all and sundry legislation with bits of stealth amnesty. By hook or by crook they will eventually legitimize the invasion. They will do so by declaring the invaders legal. President Obama will almost certainly do even more for the invaders than Bush has. We will find that the constitution’s “separation of powers” has an entirely different meaning when liberal judges are asked to interpret a liberal president’s executive orders. If they are even asked.

The dispossession of Whites has so far been accomplished by double-talk and trickery, without plebiscite, without legitimacy. It is becoming a fait accompli, trumping the too-little too-late fearful indignation of deracinated White citizenists. They think White consciousness is folly, doomed to failure. Well what then of their own deracinated, citizenist arguments? Have they not failed? From this point on aren’t they likely only to serve the invasion status quo?

Francis’ insight is that other groups do not hesitate to advocate policies they believe to be in their own interests, despite the ill consequences for Whites. Whites must recognize this hostility and counter it directly with their own race-conscious advocacy. Duty does not calculate the chances of success. Right and wrong are not determined by the laws of usurpers. The legacy of slavery and forty years of non-white immigration are clear: race trumps citizenism.

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White Advocate Robert Griffin

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From a review at Amazon:

Robert Griffin’s Living White offers solid reportage, analysis, and counsel for racially conscious American whites interested in effective thought and action on behalf of their beleaguered kind and country. Griffin, a professor of education at the University of Vermont, is that rarity: a knowledgeable student of contemporary American white nationalism who is an emphatic and empathetic partisan of his people. He is the author of two valuable books on white America’s fledgling racial-nationalist movement, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds, based on interviews with the late William Pierce and One Sheaf, One Vine, which gives voice to ordinary European-Americans who have embraced racial consciousness in ways currently acceptable for nonwhites and for Jews in this country, but long since taboo for whites.

In Living White, Griffin brings well-honed critical skills to addressing questions of individual demeanor and conduct that the committed very often neglect: the search for self-knowledge, the struggle for personal effectiveness, the resolve to act in the public arena, and the ability to communicate racial concerns to other whites. The score of essays included in Living White encompass the wide range of Griffin’s observations of the racial right, observations sharpened by his learning in the psychology of education and by his comparative detachment as a latecomer to white racial politics. The pieces collected here run the gamut from practical advice for activists to meditations on the careers of men as disparate as Stanford University president and eugenics enthusiast David Starr Jordan and American Nazi agitator George Lincoln Rockwell, demolitions of books by academic denigrators of white people, and valuable personal vignettes of his own path to self-fulfillment in service of his people.

Besides being uncommonly objective, Robert Griffin is unusually thoughtful, and much of his thought has been devoted to gaining knowledge of himself. This self-knowledge, and his observation and experience of life, make Griffin a sympathetic listener and a sound adviser on the challenges of living white in today’s America. His essay on how to educate one’s children to live honorable white lives is notable for his grasp of the essential issues: too many white parents (and not just nationalists) still believe that it suffices to remove their offspring from minority milieus, neglecting the tentacles of the education industry and the entertainment media. He is particularly good on the loss of community and on considerations of how to rebuild it, in writing free of both lamentation and cheery assurance of easy restorations.

In just a few years Robert Griffin has emerged as an author, analyst, and public spokesman for white Americans, despite his very public status in the fishbowl of campus life at a state university. The fact that he has tenure has not preserved him from wounds to the ego and the heart, wounds which he wears openly and bravely. The deafness which afflicted Griffin suddenly after he had completed his second book on white nationalism has been if anything a goad to his work and action: It lead him to write, here, “While–for me–there is still time, in my life, I want, day to day, hour to hour, in my own unique way, to live as an honorable white man,” thereby giving body and soul to Friedrich Nietzsche by now hackneyed “What does not destroy me makes me stronger,” and reminding that, as George Eliot wrote, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

Perusing Griffin’s web site the synopsis for the essay On the New McCarthyism caught my attention:

The topic here is the current attacks on racially conscious and active white people by those who would marginalize, silence, and punish them for their beliefs, expressions, and actions. I use a memoir on the McCarthy era, as it was called, in the 1940s and ‘50s, written by Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Black List, and an encounter I had in late 2006 with the Southern Poverty Law Center to frame an analysis of this phenomenon, drawing parallels between what went on in the McCarthy years, and at other points in history, and what’s going on now. I offer some suggestions on how racially committed white people can deal with attacks against them.

The following exerpts really struck a chord:

Bernstein was a member of the Communist Party. He was also a morally upright person who cared deeply about the welfare of his fellow man and economic and racial justice. But all that was immaterial to his inquisitors. It didn’t matter what he was like. It didn’t matter what his commitments were. And it wasn’t a personal assault on Bernstein, because he was no longer a person: he was type, a concept, he’d been objectified, de-humanized. Bernstein could be fit into a category that had been set up as evil and threatening, Communist, and that made him the enemy and fair game.

Bernstein was like the Jap in World War II. You don’t acknowledge a Jap’s humanity. You don’t bother distinguishing one Jap from another. You don’t try to figure out what a Jap is thinking, or hear him out, or dialogue with him. You certainly don’t care a whit about what happens to a Jap. You kill a Jap, period. You drop firebombs on Jap women and children in Tokyo—after all, they are all Japs, the same ones that attacked our ships in Pearl Harbor, no difference. You drop atomic bombs on civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—why not, they are Japs, they deserve to die. Bernstein was a Jap.

I’ll offer some thoughts on how you can get good people to commit or go along with a bad thing and feel good about it: up to persecuting, and even slaughtering, other people they don’t even know. Here’s how you do it:

Control their information, images, and ideas. Make sure they only hear your side of the story.

Couch what you want in the highest sounding language. Tell them its defending freedom, on the side of justice, combating hate, something like that.

Give people language they can use to tell themselves how virtuous they are when they destroy the people you want destroyed or go along with it. People like to think of themselves as a being good, morally upright, having good character, and so on.

De-humanize and objectify the other side. In Germany, Jews were depicted as vermin and as being all alike. Racially conscious whites are all KKK members. Nazis are evil and all the same. “White males” are all privileged, boorish, and oppressive. Keep people from looking at the particulars about individuals and just focusing on the pejorative category you’ve set up. Categories are easier to attack and kill than individual human beings.

Let people know that if they go along with you they will be acknowledged and approved and respected by others and included in the group. And the stick to complement the carrot, point out examples of people who didn’t go along with you—how they were condemned, ignored, disrespected, marginalized, or shunned.

Distribute some tangible perks to people who play ball with you. Thinking your way and doing your bidding is a way to get and keep a job, get a promotion and a raise, get praise and an award, get an article or a book published, a project funded, etc. And alternatively, get across that crossing you is the way to get negated, fired, and your house on the auction block.

And then turn the dogs loose. Even the sweetest of dogs, to continue that metaphor, will go for the throat, and more, they’ll honestly believe in what they are doing. Depending on whether they live in Germany or England, they’ll put Jews on freight trains or incinerate 130,000 civilians in Dresden in a bombing raid.

And notice where it starts: Making sure that only the information, images, and ideas favorable to your side gets to the masses. Controlling what gets published, what films get made and what gets on television, what is lectured and read and said in the classroom, who gets to participate in the public discourse and who gets silenced. Clamping down hard on anybody who doesn’t mirror the current orthodoxy, the current creed. Joseph Goebbels knew all about this, and so do modern thought managers.

Reading Bernstein’s account, I was struck by parallels between what was going on in the 1940s and ‘50s and what’s happening in our time now with the attacks against “hate.” My research and writing on race has brought me into personal contact with this contemporary inquisition. I’ve seen what has happened to people I’ve encountered, and I’ve tasted a bit of it myself. My transgression is that I wrote about white separatists, white advocates, white activists, and yes, white supremacists, without condescendingly smearing them as ignorant, anachronistic, and malevolent racists and bigots. I didn’t do that because it wouldn’t have been truthful to do that.

I care about the wellbeing of all people on this planet, and that includes European heritage people, white people. Most of my writing on race has been reportage and analysis, but increasingly as time has gone on, I have written from a position of white advocacy. I’m an advocate for whites for the same reasons that others support blacks and Hispanics and other groups. I’ve spent my adult life around secondary schools and universities and I’ve seen first hand how young whites are put down in schools. Their ancestors are trashed as oppressors, they are conditioned to feel guilty about their heritage and race, and they are taught to defer to and serve the interests of other races and pay no attention to the welfare of their own people. They are shut up if they express racial pride and commitment, they are beaten back if they even think about forming organizations or engaging in collective action, and they are the victims of racial discrimination in school admittance. If the children of any other racial or ethnic group were treated this way in schools there would be hell to pay.

If I advocated for any other group but whites, using the exact same language and rationale, I’d be applauded and rewarded. I find it fascinating that nobody seems to notice this contradiction. Say you care about white people these days and it’s called hate, and people buy into that.

Here’s an unvarnished truth the anti-White “hate speech” goons don’t want deracinated Whites to hear:

It is more accurate to call the people and organizations I have studied and written about this past decade as white advocates or white separatists rather than white supremacists. They are concerned about the status and future of white people and their heritage and, many of them, want whites to be able, if they choose, to live among their own and to determine their own destiny. That said, some racially conscious whites do believe that, given their values, the white race has been, and continues to be, more accomplished; superior, if you will. They hold that if you objectively assess the races on the bases of their achievements in philosophy, ethics, the arts, architecture, civilization building, mathematics, science and technology, and business acumen, whites are at the top of the list, or at least compared to blacks and Hispanics. They contend that knowing a community is white allows you to predict that with great deal of certainty that it is clean and orderly and safe, and that its children are cared for and educated well, and that life is liveable there; and that the same cannot be said for a black or Hispanic community. They claim that when there is an infusion of blacks and Hispanics into a white area to the level of a critical mass—say, 30%–you can predict that the area will deteriorate physically, become politically corrupt and more dangerous, that educational standards will become lower, and that it will be an area that decent people will want leave, not enter.

I believe in freedom of conscience. It a free society it should not be a crime or punishable to believe one’s race or religion is superior. Rather than forbid assertions of white superiority, we should allow it to be part of the public discourse. If it is empirically false, that will be demonstrated by counterargument. The truth will set us free, or at least it will set us on the right direction. We need to ground ourselves in reality, whatever that reality is, and even if that reality is unpalatable. To operate on high-sounding but false premises is a ticket to distress and failure.

You might think a diverse, multiracial, multicultural society is demonstrably best, and preferable as a setting in which to live. Others, however, have the right to ask you to provide concrete examples to support your perspective and preference rather than just rhetoric. Other than the fictions on television and in the movies where are these multi-racial, multi-ethnic paradises? In Lebanon? In the old Yugoslavia? In Rwanda and the Sudan? In Chicago and Detroit and Cincinnati and Los Angeles? In London? Paris? Where exactly? And what gives you the right to tell white people who want to live peacefully among their racial kinsman that they can’t do that and they must live your way? Back to human nature, there is a tendency for people to think their way is the best way and the only way, and to force that on other people. I think that is a predilection we all need to overcome in ourselves.

Contrary to the image that has been painted of them, the vast majority of the racially conscious whites do not want to harm blacks and Hispanics or rule them. Rather, they simply want to get away from them. And they are not racists as we usually define that term: they don’t harbor a deep-seated, irrational animosity toward minorities. What is called racism and hate is actually disapproval and disdain. With blacks, white racialists disapprove of, and have contempt for, their illegitimacy rate, their violent crime rate, the way they fail to keep up the areas in which they live, their educational and work performance, their welfare dependency, and their tendency to hold others responsible for their negative conduct and demand double standards and racial preferences. These whites point out that that 90% of interracial crime is black on white, and are enraged that blacks rape 20,000 white women a year (versus a couple hundred the other way around), and are convinced that these realities are suppressed by those who control the information flow in America.

His advice for fellow White advocates:

I’ll end with some suggestions to people who may find themselves a target of the today’s McCarthyites. In particular, I’m speaking to white racially conscious people of whatever stripe: white analyst, white advocate, white activist, white separatist, or white supremacist. I want to underscore that what I offer here is my best thinking, but it could be off the mark. Take it as simply my side of a conversation. With that disclaimer on the record, here’s my advice to those who care about white people and their future in a culture that is committed to shutting you down hard and making you pay.

First of all, cover your ass. They’ll do anything to you they can get away with, and it makes no difference whether you have done anything wrong or not. And you have to assume that you are all alone, that there is nobody covering your back. Somebody might bleat on an Internet discussion list that you got screwed, but that’s about as far as it will go, or at least you better not count on any more support than that. You have a career going and bills to pay and perhaps a wife or husband and children to guide and support and parents to care for, and as far as I’m concerned, those are your first obligations. Until you are sure about what you are going to do and its consequences, don’t create a paper trail that can be used to get you. If you write, use a pseudonym. Keep your name off membership lists. Don’t write anything in an e-mail you wouldn’t mind being a front page story in the newspaper. If you are going for a job or a promotion, tell them what they want to hear. If you are up for tenure as an academic, lay low until that comes through. Stay underground until you are clear you want to go above ground.

Get in the best shape you can. Figure you are in a war. Get battle-ready. Put your mind and body in the best condition possible. If you have some physical or mental issue, habit, addiction, whatever it is, that is getting in your way, get it out of your way, starting now.

Don’t buy what the crap they tell you about yourself. The people doing the talking in this country tell you that being for minorities is good but being for whites is bad, that you are bad, that they are the action and you keep your mouth shut over in the corner, and so on. Constantly tell yourself another, more positive, story.

Find some likeminded people. You aren’t alone. There are people that think as you do, and who will like and encourage you. They may be right around you or they might be on the Internet. You might have to contact them on the sly. Bernstein in his memoir wrote: “When I was with other blacklisted people, I felt what I had felt in the war [WWII], a comradeship based on common purpose. . . . What I felt was unjustified by my social condition. Bitterness and despair were more appropriate. But with these people the scream stayed dormant in my throat. What I felt was a kind of happiness.”

Don’t assume that explaining and placating will do you any good. When they come after you, there is always the tendency to try to talk your way out of it. “See, I’m not really a racist, and actually, some of my best friends . . .” It is temping when they get on your case, or to prevent them from doing it, to suck up to them, come off as a nice guy, a benign guy, a no-threat-to-anybody guy, an I’m-really-on-your-side guy, etc. I suppose those kinds of things can work, but you have to assume that reason and logic and whether you are a good guy doesn’t cut it for anything; no matter what you say, no matter how much tail you kiss, as soon as they can, they’ll slit your throat.

Play to your strengths. And what might they be?

  • Legal recourse. People don’t like to get sued. The first person to contact if someone dumps on you for your racial beliefs or actions is an attorney. Don’t say or do anything until you do.
  • Use the system. What they want to do is keep it just you and them. They call you into a room, hit you with the charge. You reason and beg (it feels really good to them to have somebody prostrate themselves like you are doing). Then, after waiting you out with a patronizing slight smile on their face, they fire you or whatever it was they had in mind when they called you into the room. Make it about more than you and your oppressor; get it out of that room. Kick it upstairs. Take it to his boss. Invoke the grievance or review system. If you have a union, get it involved. Knowledge is power: know the system, the organizational chart, everything that is written down. Nobody should know more about how the system works than you do.
  • Go public. Most often, they want to mess you over without anybody finding out. And most often, you go along with that because you are embarrassed, or you feel helpless, or deep down you think you are as bad as they say you are, or you’re scared, or they’ve promised you a positive recommendation or some extended insurance coverage if you keep things inside. And perhaps it is your interest to go along with playing it that way. All I can offer is my sense that the ones coming at you usually don’t like it when outside people know what they are doing. The thought of what’s happening to you getting on TV and in the newspapers, you trashing them publicly, or it actually happening, is most often a very aversive experience to the ones trying to do you in; and the threat to do that, or the impression that you will do that if they attack you, could get them to back off or cut a favorable deal.
  • Counterattack. It’s makes sense when people hit you to defend yourself, but while you are doing that be thinking about how you can attack them and put them on the defensive. Just as it was on the playground when you were a kid, letting the bully know that you aren’t just going to roll up in a ball and take his abuse, and that you are going to do your best to break his nose if he touches you, is a good way to present yourself. And the key is, don’t be kidding; if you can, break his nose. Bernstein, bless him, just took it. At least we can go down swinging.
  • Keep in mind where this ends up. At the end of our lives we make a fundamental judgment about ourselves: that we lived an honorable life or we didn’t. An honorable life doesn’t mean we did the right thing every time, but basically we did. Basically we didn’t sell out. Living an honorable life doesn’t mean we were never lived irresponsibly, but basically we lived responsibly. Living an honorable life doesn’t mean we never shortchanged ourselves and other people, but basically we did our best. I think we always have to keep in the back of our minds that there will be a time when there is only the past and what we have done with it; and that what will someday be the past is now and tomorrow and the next day and the next month and the next year. The question today and tomorrow and next month and next year is what is the honorable thing to do? It may take a while to get ourselves to the place where we are doing the honorable thing, but I think if we keep plugging the best we can we have a good shot of someday, down the road, smiling peacefully and saying “Yes.”

I would prefer he write White instead of white, but I’m happy to have found another likeminded person.

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“Whether you declare war or not, we are in a societal conflict”

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The following was excerpted from an 8-page story titled L.A. Gangs: Nine Miles and Spreading posted on December 12th at laweekly.com.

I took the liberty of eliding large sections of “human interest” narrative to focus more closely on the statistics and statements of public officials. I also bolded certain sections I find particularly insightful or alarming.

The meat begins on page 2:

Nationwide, juvenile gang homicides have spiked 23 percent since 2000. There are six times as many gangs in L.A. as there were a quarter century ago, and twice as many gang members. But as important as the gang activity itself is what’s different about the violence. In America’s urban ganglands, and in L.A. in particular, the ferocity of the thuggery has surged; gang members, their victims and police long on the gang beat tell me the fighting has become more codeless, more arbitrary and more brutal than ever.

And it is everywhere. According to the Department of Justice, today America has at least 30,000 gangs, with 800,000 members, in 2,500 communities across the United States. (Gang experts at the University of Southern California claim the number of American jurisdictions with gang problems has reached 4,000.) Federal, state and local law enforcement across the country agree that street gangs connected to or mimicking the L.A. model have become a national epidemic.

Last January, a report on gang violence commissioned by the Los Angeles City Council found that the gang epidemic is largely immune to general declines in crime nationwide. In other words, gang crime is surging just as other violent crime is decreasing. And unlike other categories of crime, gangs and gang-related crime are spreading to formerly safe middle-class communities, or, “to a neighborhood near you,” says the report’s author, civil rights attorney Constance Rice.

What this means is that the communities gangs come from are pulling away from mainstream society more than ever, and the gangs that plague them, like storm systems, are growing and feeding on themselves, gathering destructive strength. In Los Angeles, law enforcement officials now warn that they have arrived at the end of their ability to contain gangs to poor minority and immigrant hot zones.

From page 3:

Last January, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa cried uncle, saying that it was time for government and law enforcement to admit they have failed to stop gangs or even understand what they are. He appealed for federal help to make a Marshall Plan–style push to tackle what’s been an intractable problem.

“Los Angeles is the epicenter of the nation’s gang crisis, and an effective assault on gang crime will require increased suppression, intervention and prevention measures,” Villaraigosa said after Rice’s report was released. “Street gangs are responsible for the majority of all the murders in Los Angeles and nearly 70 percent of all the shootings. We must work to address gang violence in a truly comprehensive way.”

The problem is that for the most part traditional (and failed) models of gangs and gang suppression do not apply, because not only are gangs better armed and more ferocious, but they look different. The accelerating current of gang violence is colliding with a growing wave of Hispanic migration from Mexico and Central America into the United States. Hispanic gangs now dominate the hardcore narcotics business nationwide, and they are physically pushing historically entrenched black gangs out of their territories.

Squeezed by a shrinking share of the drug market, desperate for new business, gang members and their families are retreating out of the city, establishing new street gangs where they land. According to the FBI, gangs are showing up and spreading in suburban and rural America, in counties like Westchester and Suffolk in New York, and rural parts of North Carolina and Virginia, places that have no experience with street gangs and organized crime, and police who don’t know how to fight it.

From page 4:

“Most of what we’re seeing in the east are L.A. street gangs,” says Special Agent Alec J. Turner, the director of the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center, a joint effort with the U.S. Marshals, the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “We are seeing influence from MS-13 [Mara Salvatrucha] cliques getting some direction from higher-level MS-13 people in L.A.”

The migration of gang members out of L.A. is an even spray pattern, the FBI says. Gangs have coalesced most heavily in the Northeast, the country’s most lucrative narcotics market, but they are also moving to the Northwest (San Francisco and Seattle) and across the Midwest and South (Little Rock and Charlotte). “And it’s not just national migration,” Turner says, “but also from urban settings to rural settings, based on gangs’ knowledge that law enforcement in rural and suburban areas has less scrutiny. The police are softer.”

Once migrant gang members claim virgin drug territory for themselves, L.A.-style gang chaos and murder is inevitable. “It’s a power struggle between new gangs,” Andre told me. “Who’s running what? Who has more money? Who’s got more squad? That’s what it all comes down to, whose squad is willing to kill. And that is when the young kids come in, because they don’t give a fuck. They come in, and they kill other kids.”

The cycle is hard-wired into the gang dynamic. And because it’s not geography specific, and is spreading through an expanding population of potential recruits, the federal government is making a paradigm shift toward thinking of street gangs under the rubric of domestic terrorism. “There’s an analogy to modern terror organizations,” says the Rand Corporation’s Jack Riley. “The members are not persuadable in any regular sense.”

Some Los Angeles gangs are strictly robbery crews, others jack cars, Vietnamese gangs specialize in identity theft, Russian and Armenian gangs do mostly extortion and human trafficking. At last count, Los Angeles County had more than 714 gangs and 80,000 gang members. That makes one of every hundred county residents either a hardcore soldier in a gang or an “associate” — the getaway drivers, lookouts, “cookers” (people who know how to turn cocaine into crack) and “hooks” (people who direct customers to drug houses) — or an “affiliate,” a gang member with no specific duties. But no section of L.A. is more defined by gangs than the nine square miles of Watts terrorized by the Bounty Hunter Bloods and Grape Street Crips: the Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs housing projects, along with Imperial Courts and Gonzaque Village, and the streets that connect them.

Every yard, doorway, shop and parking lot is the fiefdom of one of Watts’ 65 gangs and their roughly 15,000 hardcore gang members. In that area alone, gang members shoot 500 people a year, and kill 90. Nearly every citizen living there is enjoined by membership or affiliation; those who try to stay out of the life incur their local gang’s wrath, sometimes with fatal consequences. The average American has a 1-in-18,000 chance of being murdered. In this area of Los Angeles, the chances are 1 in 250.

On New Year’s Eve so much automatic weapons fire pours into Watts’ airspace that LAX air traffic control must divert the flight path of incoming planes. The U.S. military sends its medics to train at local trauma hospitals because the conditions in their trauma units so resemble live warfare. At a community meeting I attended in March 2006, LAPD Chief William Bratton declared the Jordan Downs–Nickerson Gardens area “the most violent community in the country. This is now the most dangerous place in America,” he said.

From page 5:

It wasn’t always this way.

Originally, L.A.’s street gangs were social and support organizations for immigrants and packs of neighborhood pals. Mostly their crimes were petty, and scores were settled with fists. Latinos and blacks generally stayed out of each other’s way.

All that changed forever in the late 1980s, when crack cocaine hit Los Angeles and neighborhood affiliation became secondary to what all the gangs now really wanted: a piece of the drug business. By then, Colombian cartels, looking to reduce the risk of American prosecution, had transferred the bulk of the trafficking part of the drug business to Mexican and Hispanic-American gangs. Now in control of the cocaine supply, and suddenly flush, many of them squared up into efficient, vertically integrated, multilevel organizations.

“They quickly understood the benefits of economic diversification, and that the real money is in wholesaling drugs coming over the border to other gangs,” Luis Li, a former assistant U.S. attorney and chief of the Department of Justice’s L.A. organized-crime division, told me.

Mexican gang leaders from Los Angeles jailed in Tracy State Prison banded together to retain control of their narcotics business on the street. The Mexican Mafia — or Eme — was born, and has replaced the Cosa Nostra as the most powerful single criminal entity in the country.

The truth is that gangs are merely reflections of their communities. America’s huge pool of poorly educated urban black men was being pushed farther than ever to the fringes of mainstream society. New studies by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions show how the numbers of young black American men without jobs climbed relentlessly during that period. By 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s were jobless — unable to find work, not seeking it or in jail. By 2004, the number had climbed to 72 percent (compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts). Today, 75 percent of Watts’ adult black male population will at some point go to jail or prison.

The differences between black and Latino gangs are stark. And the black gang members I spoke with readily admit that the difference is fatal. Damien Hartfield, the former Bounty Hunter, explained, “Blacks do what they want. When Latinos go gangbanging they have a solid plan. Blacks don’t go to war like that. It’s spontaneous. Something just happens. Latinos make a call, make a plan. They have a structure.”

LAPD Chief Bratton admits he is bewildered by how anarchic L.A.’s black gangs have become.

“African-American violence is totally out of proportion to their numbers,” he said. “With Latinos, there is so much more family structure, while it’s not as if blacks rally around the African-American community just because they are black. They associate more with their gang colors than they do with their own color as African-Americans. It’s almost as if they lost identities as African-Americans.”

From page 7:

Gangbangers call the innocents among them “mushrooms” because they pop up in the way of their bullets.

From page 8:

Lieutenant Sullivan, the intelligence analyst for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, has started to track a demoralizing parallel between the way street gangs are changing in the United States and the inception of home-grown terror cells in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as child soldiers in Africa. “There is debate as to whether gang members are child soldiers because they are not in a declared war. But I think functionally it is the same thing. Whether you declare war or not, we are in a societal conflict.”

I asked De’Andre Perry what he’d do if someone gave him a one-way ticket out of Watts and enough money to start a new life. He paused and looked around at the desolate buildings. “I am not going to die for these bricks,” he said. But the gang was more state-of-mind than geography. “Wherever you put me I am still going to be me. I am still going to have Bounty Hunters on my arm, embedded in my brain. Wherever you put me I am going to be hood. Wherever I am at, I am going to make it my hood.”

The next time someone tries to tell you how much we need immigrants, how wonderful and hard working they all are, that our economy would collapse without them, that we are a nation of immigrants, or that we should celebrate diversity because it is our great strength, please point them here.

It’s not that I expect anyone dishonest or deluded enough to spout such nonsense would actually face the facts at this late hour and change their tune. I’d just like to take this opportunity to sincerely and emphatically invite them to go fuck themselves.