Genocide as “Sanity and Cultural Health”: National Review on India

I’m working on an article about Dinesh D’Souza, during which I came across an old article from National Review that I thought are worth quoting. Here are some excerpts from Jeffrey Hart’s review of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of Saints, from National Review, September 26, 1975:

In this novel Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health. Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex. His plot is both simple and brilliant. The time is the not-so-distant future, and the long-anticipated has come to pass. The so-called Third World is an overpopulated, disease ridden outdoor slum. In Calcutta, as if seized by a last spasm, a million starving Indians take over whatever ships are at the docks and launch forth on the high seas. It is a wretched amorphous mass, a hundred dilapidated vessels inching around the Cape at ten knots, the mob cooking rice on briquettes of human feces, copulating in all possible combinations like a Hindu frieze come to life, stinking and undlfferentiated. Gradually it becomes clear that the destination of the armada is Europe, France in fact, the Cote d’Azur. It is a “floating slum,” the “vanguard of an anti-world bent on coming in the flesh to knock, at long last, at the gates of abundance.” Other such armadas are being prepared in Asia and Africa, awaiting the French response.

***

But what is racism? Most people do not now and have not in the past subscribed to esoteric theories regarding the superiority of this or that race. Most people, however, are able to perceive that the “other group” looks rather different and lives rather differently from their own. Such ‘racist” or “ethnocentric” feelings are undoubtedly healthy, and involve merely a preference for one’s own culture and kind. Indeed — and Raspail hammers away at this point throughout his novel—no group can long survive unless it does “prefer itself.” One further point is implicit. The liberal rote anathema on “racism” is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.

***

That Ganges anti-world slowly approaches by sea, like some viper sliding toward a bemused rodent, but the antiworld has long been at work in the bloodstream of the West. Raspail is a tremendous rhetorician, his disdain boiling from the page in a torrent reminiscent of Celine.

***

Two despised reactionary outposts close their gates to the Ganges horde. Australia tersely notes that the Immigration Act will be enforced. South Africa continues deflant: Q: “Are you suggesting, Mr. President, that you won’t hesitate to open fire on defenseless women and children?” A: “1 expected that question. No, of course we won’t hesitate. We’ll shoot without giving it a second thought. In this highminded raciai war, all the rage these days, nonviolence is the weapon of the masses. Violence is all the attacked minority has to flght back with. Yes, we’ll defend ourselves. And yes, we’ll use violence.” But, in Provence, only a few resist. Beau Geste-like, as the Ganges horde swarms up the beaches and takes over southern France.

Our Podhoretz Problem at 50

Norman Podhoretz: for the greater good he’ll accept swarthy grand-kids but won’t be happy about it.

Fifty years ago, Norman Podhoretz wrote a profoundly stupid article called “My Negro Problem – and Ours.” The article was published in Commentary magazine, which is marking the anniversary.

I say “profoundly stupid” advisedly because Podhoretz himself, despite his reprehensible politics, is not a dumb guy. In fact, he’s a gifted editor and polemicist. The article itself is sometimes praised for being an honest attempt to describe the seriousness of racism.

Yet, what other phrase than profoundly stupid can apply to an article that argues that the best solution to racism is miscegenation. At the end of the essay Podhoretz writes:  “I cannot see how [the dream of erasing color consciousness] will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation…. in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.”

The D’Souza File

The conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza is in the news lately for a number of reasons. His book Obama’s America , which purports to show the Kenyan anti-colonialist roots of the American president’s worldview, is a bestseller. Accompanying the book is a documentary entitled 2016 which has been been a great popular success, at least as far as polemical political films are concerned.

But aside from his public activities, D’Souza’s private life is now much talked about with the news that he offended his Christian evangelical fans last month when he was spoke at a South Carolina Baptist church. When he arrived at the event, for which he was paid $10,000, D’Souza came not with his wife of two decades but with a much younger woman who was introduced as his fiancé. (This so-called fiancé graduated high school in 2002, when D’souza was 41 years old and the author of nine books).  Further investigation revealed that D’Souza  hadn’t in fact initiated divorce proceedings against his wife when he gave the talk, but did so when he started being questioned about his behavior. (Sarah Posner has an fine rundown of the controversy here).

The Marty Peretz Situation

Marty Peretz: Twilight of the Bigot

I’ve been mulling over writing something about “the Marty Peretz situation” (as it has been called at Harvard University). The occasion for the current controversy is that there are plans to endow a research fund in Peretz’s name at Harvard. Many people, both at Harvard and elsewhere, are justifiably upset about these plans because Peretz has a long history of making bigoted comments about Muslims (exemplified by his recent statement, later retracted, that Muslims didn’t deserve First Amendment Rights) as well as equally heinous comments about various racial and ethnic groups (notably African-Americans and Hispanics).

James J. Kilpatrick: Death of a Bigot

James J. Kilpatrick

I’ll be curious to see what the obituaries are like for James Jackson Kilpatrick, the newspaper columnist who died last night. Although his name has lost its luster in recent years, Kilpatrick was a very important figure in the 1960s and 1970s, ranking only behind William F. Buckley as the nation’s leading conservative writer. Kilpatrick was also an unabashed racist, who owed much of his fame to his willingness to attack the Civil Rights movement.

 

Conservatism as a Family Affair

 

Jonas Savimbi: A Black African worthy of Peter Worthington's respect.

Over at Vanity Fair, James Wolcott is puzzled by the presence of Peter Worthington at the Frumforum site. Wolcott quotes a Worthington column on the World Cup which includes this observation, “And as a reflection of African ethnicity, well, maybe the vuvuzelas are the apex of cultural achievement.” Wolcott rightly describes Worthington’s column as a “moldy crumb of racial condescension” and doubts that it “will make FrumForum a lot of friends in the African community.”
As a cultural commenter Wolcott is dauntingly erudite. He can write with informed verve about everything ranging from the film noir classics of the 1940s to the novels of Norman Mailer to the peculiar humour of Benny Hill. But even Wolcott can’t be expected to understand the genealogy of Canadian conservative journalists.

 

Reagan Versus the Neo-Cons

Mikhail Gorbachev: More dangerious than Stalin, according to Commentary magazine

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the tendency of neo-conservatives such as Norman Podhoretz to celebrate Ronald Reagan as a great president is more than a little disingenuous. Back when Reagan was actually in power, the neo-cons supported the president against his liberal and leftist critics but had their own problems with the Gipper, who they regarded as a weak appeaser all too willing to negotiate with an implacable enemy, Soviet Communism. This neo-conservative critique of Reagan was especially virulent in President’s second term when he came to the conclusion that Gorbachev was a sincere reformer worth doing business with.

In his book The New American Militarism, Andrew Bacevich acutely sums up this phase of neo-conservatism:

Podhoretz found much to like in Reagan’s rhetoric, but he warned against confusing words with actions. The two differed, often drastically. To take Reagan’s famous condemnation of Moscow’s “evil empire” at face value was “to fall victim to a campaign of disinformation.” In practice, Reagan had proven himself “unwilling to take the political risks and expend the political energy” to break with the Nixon-Ford-Carter policy of détente. Like his immediate predecessors, the president seemed obsessed with making the world safe for Communism, thus implementing “a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire.” Indeed, to Podhoretz, Reagan appeared “ready to embrace the course of détente wholeheartedly as his own.”

For all of his high-sounding talk, the fortieth president of the UnitedStates, Podhoretz reluctantly concluded, lacked backbone. Although he “seems to have a few strong convictions,” wrote Podhoretz in 1985, Reagan “invariably backed away from acting on them” if they threatened to “cost him more political approval than he might gain by tacking and trimming.” As late as 1986—three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall—Podhoretz was still insisting that “‘the present danger’ of 1980 is still present today, and the question of whether ‘we have the will to reverse the decline of American power’ still hangs ominously as it did then in the troubled American air.” As the end of the 1980s approached, the threat posed by Communism was becoming, if anything, greater than ever. That Reagan was apparently falling victim to Mikhail Gorbachev’s charm offensive was almost unbearable. In Podhoretz’s eyes, to parley with the enemy was to appease him.

 

“A foul anti-Israel polemicist of uncommonly repellent vintage”

Over at Commentary, John Podhoretz responds  to my earlier post where I contended that the magazine had compared President Obama to Hitler.  Mr. Podhoretz argues that my post was based on “a patently deliberate misreading” of a post written by Jennifer Rubin. I’ve already responded to Mr. Podhoretz’s clarification of the original Rubin post in the comment section of my own earlier post, but I thought the issue is important enough to deserve its own separate statement. 

 

Obama, Hitler, and Commentary Magazine

Does this picture hang on the walls of Commentary magazine?

In his 1979 memoir Breaking Ranks, Norman Podhoretz, then the editor of Commentary magazine, told the story of his political shift from left-liberalism to neo-conservatism. A key reason for his political rethinking, Podhoretz asserts, was the intemperate attacks on legitimate political leaders by the New Left and its fellow travelers. As an example, we’re told about an argument Podhoretz had with his old friend Jason Epstein, the book publisher and eminence grise behind the New York Review of Books.

Kristol and the Uses of Religion

In my previous posting, I noted that Irving Kristol had a utilitarian attitude towards religion, viewing it as a necessary instrument of social control. For readers who might want more detail, I recommend this review of Kristol’s book Neoconservatism by Steve Vieux in New Politics.