Are Jews White? (Revised)

Posted by Rnl on September 03, 2007, 09:36 PM | #

“White” in Brazil, or even Argentina, means nothing like what it does in America. Genetic studies prove Brazilian and Argentinian “whites” have substantial non-Cauacasoid admixture.

Hopefully you’re smart enough to recognize your comment’s irrelevance to the subject. Spanish colonizers defined themselves as White. That was my point. The genetics of the Portuguese in modern Brazil has nothing to do with the self-definition of Spanish colonists in the Americas.

What is your ethnic background?

People on this board often ask about posters’ ethnic backgrounds. I think the question is stupid. But for what it’s worth, I’m German-American. My family has been here since the 1700s.

Now, do you disagree with me more or less than you did before?

Posted by ff on September 03, 2007, 09:59 PM | #

Spanish colonizers defined themselves as White. That was my point.

They also distinguished between “whites” born in the colonies and those born in Europe.

The genetics of the Portuguese in modern Brazil has nothing to do with the self-definition of Spanish colonists in the Americas.

The genetics of modern Latin American “whites” have everything to do with colonial definitions.

Anyway:

Spaniards in Latin America recognized themselves as racially distinct from Negroes and Amerinds.

Northwestern Europeans in North America recognized themselves as racially distinct from Negroes and Amerinds.

This does not mean Spaniards are racially identical to Northwestern Europeans or have ever been recognized as such.

Leave Americans to decide how they will use words in their own language.

People on this board often ask about posters’ ethnic backgrounds. I think the question is stupid.

Do you think it is stupid to attempt to ascertain posters’ racial backgrounds?

But for what it’s worth, I’m German-American. My family has been here since the 1700s.

If your family has been here since C18, I find it very unlikely you are unmixed German, and surprising that you would identify as “German-American”.

Now, do you disagree with me more or less than you did before?

You are wrong either way. But one likes to distinguish between misguided co-ethnics and hostile outsiders.

Posted by ff on September 03, 2007, 10:16 PM | #

Rnl,

Would you like to explain exactly why you think recognizing gradations of “white” is such a bad idea? Throwing around pejoratives like “toxic” isn’t much of an argument.

Posted by desmond jones on September 04, 2007, 02:58 AM | #

Canada had defined itself as a union of two founding peoples - French and English.

Not true. Canada, the nation, law, culture and institutions, has a British foundation built by British people. The French were no more influential in the political and cultural construction of this nation than the aboriginals.

Other White ethnic groups reasonably concluded that they should be recognized also.

Why is that a reasonable expectation? You sound like a liberal multiculturalist. Now we hear the same tome except it’s non-white ethnic groups that have the reasonable expectation. The best hope for Anglo-Saxons in Canada is to embrace the multi-cult. Become a distinct ethny, with a distinct culture and distinct needs. The problem is that Anglos don’t think of themselves as English/Scot/Irish people living in Canada, as many Italians, Greeks or Ukrainians do; they think of themselves as Canadian which only serves to further their undoing.

A core culture is difficult to defend if you already have two of them. Belgium, where voting is massively ethnic and regional, is another example.

And it is even more difficult to defend when other white ethnies join with the French, Jews, Africans, Sikhs, Chinese et al to diminish the founding ethny on the principle that they serve their own ethnic interest in so doing. The other issue that you, Jared Taylor and Scimitar and it appears, Americans in general, will not address is class. Whether the Jamaican riots, the Constitutonal Act in Quebec, or slavery in the South, the division amongst elite and yeomanry was essentially as strong as racial divisions. Thus the Quebec question was not dealt with after the conquest because English elites felt a greater bond to the French seignury class in Quebec, than with the yeoman English Protestant merchant class.

Quebec should have been either assimilated into English Canada or allowed to separate. Once a nation has conceded that it is two nations, each with a different language and a different founding people, it is difficult to argue that it shouldn’t become five or ten or more. The policy of multiculturalism, which is different from the fact of racial balkanization, must have been difficult to oppose in Canada, given Canada’s initial unsuccessful melding of two distinct and antagonistic peoples into a single bicultural and bilingual nation.

The product of multiculturalism is racial/ethnic balkanization and laid the ground work for the bicultural/bilingual nation. Until WWII Canada was most definitely British. It was the destruction of the Empire, aided and abetted by WWI/WWII and American politicians like FDR that broke that structure.

I realize you are an Anglo-Saxonist who isn’t especially fond of non-Anglo ethnic groups. You therefore want to cast Irish and Slavs as though they were white-colored versions of Nigerians.

Not true. The point is that those non-Anglo ethnic groups have always worked to diminish Anglo EGI in an effort to preserve their own. IMO, that’s an unreasonable position. It simply makes no difference if they are Irish Catholic, Slavs or Nigerians, the end result is exactly the same; an attempt to diminish Anglo EGI in an effort to further their own EGI. You see it in the US as well. Irish Catholics allying with genetically distant immigrant groups in an effort to preserve the distinct Irish Catholic ethny in the US.

But surely you can see a substantial difference between, say, importing Slavs and importing Muslims.

Objectively there is no difference because fundamentally the end point is the same, extinction for Anglo-Saxon people, institutions and culture. That is the point the restrictionists were making. One step leads to the other.

Posted by desmond jones on September 04, 2007, 03:09 AM | #

ff,

With all due respect, IMO, the point is moot. It doesn’t really matter if Serbs are whiter than Anglos, it simply matters to them that they are a distinct ethnic group and that their first instinct is to protect/further that distinct EGI. Yes, per Salter’s table they are closer, measured on a child loss basis than Nigerians, to the Anglo/Australian, however, it does not mean they will give up, more easily, the distinctiveness that thousands of years of evolution has bestowed upon them.

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 03:35 AM | #

The other issue that you, Jared Taylor and Scimitar and it appears, Americans in general, will not address is class. Whether the Jamaican riots, the Constitutonal Act in Quebec, or slavery in the South, the division amongst elite and yeomanry was essentially as strong as racial divisions.

No, I have addressed this argument. It is complete nonsense. The class division between the planters and yeomanry was as strong as the racial division between negroes and whites?

That’s an interesting perspective, Desmond. The negro was the property of white men like his home or cattle. No one “owned” an independent white yeoman farmer. He was a free man. The independent yeoman farmer in the American South, unlike his counterparts in Europe, had full voting rights, civil equality, and enjoyed a level of social equality in the old backcountry that was utterly foreign to Europe, in particular class ridden Victorian England.

What abou the Jim Crow South? Was the negro the equal of the working class white in those times?

“As punitive and prejudicial as Jim Crow laws were in the North, they never reached the intensity of oppression and degree of violence and sadism that they did in the South. A black person could not swim in the same pool, sit in the same public park, bowl, play pool or, in some states, checkers, drink from the same water fountain or use the same bathroom, marry, be treated in the same hospital, use the same schoolbooks, play baseball with, ride in the same taxicab, sit in the same section of a bus or train, be admitted to any private or public institution, teach in the same school, read in the same library, attend the same theater, or sit in the same area with a white person. Blacks had to address white people as Mr., Mrs., or “Mizz,” “Boss,” or “Captain” while they, in turn, were called by their first name, or by terms used to indicate social inferiority — “boy,” “aunty,” or uncle.” Black people, if allowed in a store patronized by whites, had to wait until all white customers were served first. If they attended a movie, they had to sit in the balcony; if they went to a circus, they had to buy tickets at a separate window and sit in a separate section. They had to give way to whites on a sidewalk, remove their hats as a sign of respect when encountering whites, and enter a white person’s house by the back door.”

Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), pp.xi-xii

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 04:06 AM | #

It was the destruction of the Empire, aided and abetted by WWI/WWII and American politicians like FDR that broke that structure.

How exactly did FDR destroy the British Empire? That seems a bit counterintuitive. After all, it was the U.S. Navy and USAF that won the Pacific War and saved Britain’s imperial possessions in the Far East from Japan. It was U.S. material aid that kept Britain’s war effort alive in Europe. Later, the U.S. would intervene militarily in the Second World War - the culmination of a long British espionage campaign to manipulate the American press and get America into the war.

Yes, FDR did not care much for imperialism, but so what? FDR died in early 1945. His policies were never enacted. Name for me a single British colony that became an international trusteeship after WW2. You can’t. It didn’t happen. Truman and his successors propped up the declining European empires and caught enormous flak for it in the U.N. This was necessary at the time because the British, French, and Belgians were NATO allies and the fight against communism was the overriding priority of American foreign policy after Keegan.

It is hardly the fault of the United States that an indigenous nationalist movement existed in India. That had long been the case. It is not the fault of the United States that the British dominions themselves, in particular your native Canada, had been agitating for years for a loser relationship with Britain. It is not our fault that the British were already engaged in decolonization before the Second World War - see the independence of Ireland. The stated objective of British colonial policy had long been eventual independence. In this respect, the Gold Coast (or Ghana) had long been the apple of Britain’s eye - the model it wanted to impose on the other colonies.

It is truly ridiculous that Canadians of all people would blame Americans for the dissolution of the British Empire. Probably no one in the Empire played more of a rule in weakening it and encouraging decentralization than you did.

Not true. Canada, the nation, law, culture and institutions, has a British foundation built by British people. The French were no more influential in the political and cultural construction of this nation than the aboriginals.

That’s interesting. The Québec Act which 1.) extended civil equality to French Catholics in Québec and 2.) put the American Midwest under Québec’s administration was cited as one of the Intolerable Acts that justified the American Revolution. The French-speakers of Québec had nothing to do with the founding of Canada?

The problem is that Anglos don’t think of themselves as English/Scot/Irish people living in Canada, as many Italians, Greeks or Ukrainians do; they think of themselves as Canadian which only serves to further their undoing.

Doesn’t this call into question your theory that ethnicity is immutable? Is it possible that the Anglos of Canada have lived in Canada for so long that they can justifiably call themselves Canadians?

You see it in the US as well. Irish Catholics allying with genetically distant immigrant groups in an effort to preserve the distinct Irish Catholic ethny in the US.

Pat Buchanan is an Irish Catholic. George W. Bush is an Anglo Protestant.

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 04:40 AM | #

Few white immigrant communities desired a common culture. They desired preservation of their culture and ethnicity.

This stretches the truth. Honestly, how many “German-Americans” now speak German? My mother is an Austrian immigrant and even I can’t speak fluent German. What about “Irish-Americans”? Are these people even really a distinct group? What about the Scandinavians who settled the Upper Plains? All of these groups have been considerably “Americanized” over the past several generations. This is even true of a lot of “Italian-Americans.” There has been a lot of intermarriage over the past two generations, especially within religious groups (Catholic Irish and Catholic Italians, Protestant Anglos and Protestant Scandinavians).

It would be inaccurate to compare European immigrants to America with, say, the weird ethnic problems of Canada or Belgium. There is no movement in the United States for Louisiana to secede and establish a separate nation affiliated with France. The most notorious population that resists assimilation would be, of course, the Jews, but even this most clannish of peoples are being absorbed now, unfortunately.

As for “Anglo-Americans,” I can speak here from experience living in the South. The sense of being an “Anglo-American” is close to non-existent. Southerners think of themselves as “whites” and “Christians” and “Americans” and “Southerners,” but almost never as “Anglos.” That makes sense. They have lived here for so long that they are “native” to North America. As it should be.

The problem with Canada is that its thin identity as a nation is based largely on Anti-Americanism. Traditionally, Americans have practiced Anglo-conformity and racial nationalism when dealing with immigration populations: racially compatible “white” immigrants were accepted and expected to assimilate to American norms. Canadians define themselves in opposition to America and thus embrace what is called “multiculturalism” which is an official government policy in Canada, but not in the United States. Defining themselves against “America” enables English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians to unite around something they have in common. Also, the sense of racial identity is much weaker there, so ethnic problems are naturally more salient. The same is true of “Europe” today.

Here in the United States, the existence of Canada along our northern border has played only a minor role in our sense of common nationality. Americans defined themselves racially as “whites” in opposition to the Indian and the negro and also in terms of republican political principles against the monarchies of Europe. The typical American doesn’t give much thought to Canada because, relatively speaking, it is such a small nation. In contrast, Canadians tend to be very aware of the hundreds of millions of Americans living to their south.

Posted by Rnl on September 04, 2007, 04:47 AM | #

ff wrote:

Note: this is the fantasy not only of anti-WN “silver”, but of several self-consciously Med racialists I’m aware of.

In the only statement he made about his sexual tastes Silver told us he doesn’t especially like Nordic women. You interpret that to mean that he prefers them, and you then start generalizing about the alleged preferences of Mediterraneans, not Slavs.

Med racialists

The smartest poster on this blog is a “Med racialist.”

Do you think it is stupid to attempt to ascertain posters’ racial backgrounds?

No.

If your family has been here since C18, I find it very unlikely you are unmixed German,

That would be _my_ point. It is incredibly unlikely, very close to impossible.

and surprising that you would identify as “German-American”.

You asked me. I answered.

Would you like to explain exactly why you think recognizing gradations of “white” is such a bad idea? Throwing around pejoratives like “toxic” isn’t much of an argument.

Anything that excludes or seems to exclude people of European descent weakens White nationalism. Our strength is in our numbers. We are still the majority. Fractious Nordicists turn us into a series of related minorities.

The various European ethnic groups are culturally and racially compatible. There has been significant intermarriage. We meaningfully form a single people, and in most cases we have no difficulty identifying one another. There is no good reason to transform the category White, which is socially recognized by almost everyone, into a dozen or so squabbling sub-groups.

You apparently dislike Italians. You think they’re lusting after Nordic women, so you’ll toss them out of the category White, despite their own self-identification. Others might eject the Irish who, as Desmond Jones has documented on several occasions, have played an important role in fostering anti-Anglo politics. There won’t be much left at the end of this process.

No one frets about Irish-Americans marching about and dressing in green on St Patrick’s Day. Ethnic particularism doesn’t threaten multiracialism. Multiethnic whiteness does threaten multiracialism. It is the most powerful weapon we have, but it is worthless if we are divided.

I was just speaking to someone who is Irish and Slovak. It would never occur to him that there are racialists who don’t think he is White or assume that he is less White than someone with different European ancestry. None of this Nordicist esoterica occurs to anyone until they arrive on racialist webforums. It is socially meaningless and politically destructive.

Most people of European descent think they are white, though they may attach no political significance to the fact. We have no interest whatever in sending non-racialists back into their family trees to figure out whether their ancestry is optimal or non-optimal. White should be good enough. 

***

16. Q. Why do you use the term “European-American”?

A. All Whites are descended from European immigrants. The term European-American has political significance for two reasons. First, it recognizes that most people in the U.S. of European extraction have intermarried to such an extent that it is no longer possible to identify American Whites as “Irish” or “German” or “Italian”. But more important, use of the term “European-American” is intended to recognize that white elites in the United States have exploited differences based on religion and European national origin to divide European-Americans, with the intention of rendering us unable to defend ourselves against non-white demands.

Yggs’s WN FAQ
http://www.whitenationalism.com/wn/wn-06.htm

... although the success of the intellectual movements reviewed in this volume is an indication that people can be induced to be altruistic toward other groups, I rather doubt such altruism will continue if there are obvious signs that the status and political power of European-derived groups is decreasing while the power of other groups increases. The prediction, both on theoretical grounds and on the basis of social identity research, is that as other groups become increasingly powerful and salient in a multicultural society, the European-derived peoples of the United States will become increasingly unified; among these peoples, contemporary divisive influences, such as issues related to gender and sexual orientation, social class differences, or religious differences, will be increasingly perceived as unimportant. Eventually these groups will develop a united front and a collectivist political orientation vis-a-vis the other ethnic groups.

Whither Judaism and the West?
http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/whither.htm

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 04:57 AM | #

I’m sure some of you remember Mynydd’s soap opera cyber-romance with that chubby redhead, as well as “Jose Medina’s” breathless tale of how a blonde girl let him sit by her and even gave him her phone number (no follow-up on whether it actually worked; I got the impression this was the first time “Jose” had talked to a female since before puberty). [/quote[

Ah yes, I remember. I have a long history with “Mynydd.” The American girl you are speaking of was the owner of the Skadi forum which was about Germanic racial and cultural preservation. I want to say she was from California. “Mynydd” once told me that he was some kind of fugitive on the run being persecuted by the Spanish government on account of his nationalism.

Have you browsed the “Stirpes” forum, Anon? “Colonials” there are set to an “Alien” usergroup and not allowed to post. They have an especially intense hatred of “Anglos,” generally. “Pan-Europeanism” is a phenomenon endorsed almost exclusively by American White Nationalists. It stems from the well-known “outward gaze” of Southern culture and the tendency of Americans to think of themselves in racial terms. In my experience, “pan-Europeanism” is rarely reciprocated. It is a noble idea to wish other “whites” in Europe well. Unfortunately, very few of these people have any awareness of being “white” or any appreciation for this fancy of American racialists.

Posted by desmond jones on September 04, 2007, 05:13 AM | #

That’s an interesting perspective, Desmond. The negro was the property of white men like his home or cattle. No one “owned” an independent white yeoman farmer. He was a free man. The independent yeoman farmer in the American South, unlike his counterparts in Europe, had full voting rights, civil equality, and enjoyed a level of social equality in the old backcountry that was utterly foreign to Europe, in particular class ridden Victorian England.

Bolton’s scholarship, the letters of Lee and Grant are compelling evidence to the contrary. It’s only your opinion.

david cannadine ornamentalism

In October 1865, a local rebellion by peasantry in Jamaica was put down with the utmost ferocity by the island’s governor Edward John Eyre. Eyre’s actions generated considerable debate in Britain. Most of those who defended his viciousness did so on the grounds, not that Jamaicans were black, but that they were no different from English workers. ‘The negro’, observed Edwin Hood, ‘is in Jamaica as the costermonger is in Whitechapel; he is very likely often nearly a savage with the mind of a child.’ The liberal Saturday Review suggested that ‘the negro is neither ferociously cruel nor habitually malignant. He often does cruel and barbarous things, but then so do our draymen and hackney-coachmen and grooms and farm servants, through want of either thought or power of thinking.’

How exactly did FDR destroy the British Empire?

Roosevelt’s understanding of the threat posed to world peace by the continuation of imperialism, was recorded by his son Elliott in his book, As He Saw It. FDR told his son,

``The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements--all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you’re doing is negating the value of any kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.’’

At the Casablanca conference in January of 1943, Roosevelt was even more emphatic:

``I’m talking about another war. I’m talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery! Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again? Your son will be about the right age, fifteen or twenty years from now.’’

Roosevelt was trying to bring Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi into an alliance against the Japanese in return for support for India’s independence. Churchill was doing everything in his power to prevent that, making it impossible for U.S. diplomats to even speak with the Indian leader. Churchill considered independence for India a “criminally mischievous” proposition. The Indians, he had written, were “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” And he was not prepared to allow Roosevelt to interfere with British India. “The concern of the Americans with the strategy of a world war was bringing them into touch with political issues on which they had strong opinions and little experience,” Churchill complained. In this project too, Roosevelt probably figured he would have the support of Stalin.

Matra posted a similar quote earlier.

Probably no one in the Empire played more of a rule in weakening it and encouraging decentralization than you did.

Allegations with no evidence. It appears a common component of your rhetorical style.

The Quebec Act had nothing to do with the founding of Canada, but then one wouldn’t expect a foreigner, especially an American, to have that knowledge.

Doesn’t this call into question your theory that ethnicity is immutable?

How does that change there ethnicity?

Pat Buchanan is an Irish Catholic. George W. Bush is an Anglo Protestant.

Which proves what? The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform is make believe?

Posted by desmond jones on September 04, 2007, 05:49 AM | #

The problem with Canada is that its thin identity as a nation is based largely on Anti-Americanism.

It’s unclear what Americanism, however, it is little wonder that Canucks are suspicious of American intentions. Let’s see, there is the Fenian Raids, Wilson’s turning a blind eye to German Embassy in Washington, organising attacks on Cdn bridges during WWI (mustn’t upset the neutrality, you know) Ogdensburg, the nuke-tipped Bomarc missiles (according to McNamara pieces of shit used only to draw potential Soviet fire away from US targets) and of the CIA’s involvement in ousting the Canadian PM who considered Kennedy’s attempt to bring the world into over Cuba puerile nonsense.

With friends like the Yanks, who needs enemies.

By R.B. Bennett
Leader of the Conservative Party 1927-38, Prime Minister of Canada 1930-1935
House of Commons Debates, June 7, 1928, pp. 3925-7.

. . . Read the history of the United States, read what is written in every magazine in that country by thoughtful men, and you will find that the principle of the melting pot has failed; and they are quite apprehensive. Every thoughtful man in the United States, every keen observer, every man who travels, every author, everyone who shapes and moulds public opinion in the universities and in the great foundations-all these are bewailing the fact that uncontrolled immigration has been permitted into that country, to such an extent that there is now in the United States a polyglot population, without any distinctive civilization, and one about which many of them are in great despair . . . it is because we desire to profit by the very lessons we learned there that we are endeavouring to maintain our civilization at that high standard which has made the British civilization the test by which all other civilized nations in modern times are measured . . .

. . . These people [continental Europeans] have made excellent settlers; they have kept the law; they have prospered and they are proud of Canada, but it cannot be that we must draw upon them to shape our civilization. We must still maintain that measure of British civilization which will enable us to assimilate these people to British institutions, rather than assimilate our civilization to theirs. That is the point; that is all that may be said with respect to it, and it is the point I desire to make at this time. We earnestly and sincerely believe that the civilization which we call the British civilization is the standard by which we must measure our own civilization; we desire to assimilate those whom we bring to this country to that civilization, that standard of living, that regard for morality and law and the institutions of the country and to the ordered and regulated development of this country. That is what we desire, rather than by the introduction of vast and overwhelming numbers of people from other countries to assimilate the British immigrants and the few Canadians who are left to some other civilization. That is what we are endeavouring to do, and that is the reason so much stress is laid upon the British settler, not upon the Englishman as the hon. member for Southeast Grey (Miss Macphail) said, but upon the British settler as indicating that standard of civilization on which we build our institutions and to which we hope to be able to make those who come to us not conform but assimilate, so that they may play the part in it that we ourselves play, that they may realize that the same conditions exist as in days gone by, when the people said “wherever the king’s writ ran, there was freedom and liberty of conscience.” So everyone who lives under British institutions in that part of the Empire which we call Canada may have freedom and liberty, regard for law and order and a desire for an ordered government of which they and we may well be proud. That I say to my hon. friend is our reason, rather than the reason which he suggested this afternoon.

As far as I can see it is the purpose of all governments to maintain that position; that is the intention of all governments, but we do say that there has been a singular lack of appreciation of that position during recent years by the present government. In various sections of western Canada they have planted colonies from far-off lands, who have settled upon the soil and maintained their own peculiar civilization rather than become assimilated to that British civilization which should prevail in this country, because there has not been a sufficient leavening of it to ensure that result. That is one of the complaints we make . . .

Antii-Americanism...the CNN version is so much simpler.

Posted by Matra on September 04, 2007, 05:49 AM | #

Pat Buchanan is an Irish Catholic.

From his autiobiography Right From The Beginning:

My father’s people on his father’s side are Scotch-Irish; they came out of the Ulster “Plantation,” and before that the Scottish Highlands…

He goes on to say some of his ancestors were in Virginia before 1776 and were slave-holders and secessionists. Some of them went on N Carolina and others to Mississippi and some were rabidly anti-Catholic.

So Buchanan has old stock ancestors. That may, at least in part, explain his lack of Ellis Island romanticism compared to other Irish Catholics.

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 05:58 AM | #

Rnl,

Silver is an Australian. You mistakenly concluded that he lives somewhere in the former Yugoslavia.

I’m going to throw in the towel here. If I recall, he was at first something else. Then he became a Serb. Now he is an Australian? Or is he a Serbian-Australian? I haven’t been following the comments of this troll with any real interest.

But let’s assume he is a Serb living in Serbia. It is for Serbs, not you, to decide whether whiteness is a valuable concept in their country. Perhaps it isn’t.

My comment was descriptive. As an American, I can describe the religion of the Serbs, their complexion, facts about their culture which are widely available. Of course I would like the Serbs to think of themselves as “whites.” Maybe that would innoculate the “silvers” of the world against endorsing miscegenation with their own families. I’m simply observing that at the present moment that is not the case. “Whiteness” has not played a similar role in the history of Serbia that it has in the United States.

Croats are just as white as Serbs. Whiteness, as a physical fact, fails to distinguish Serbs from most Albanians, whereas Christian vs. Muslim does. But that’s much different from saying Serbs aren’t White.

I was saying above that the Serbs are not “white” in the sense as that they conceive of themselves as being “white.” Being “white” is not really an important aspect of their identity in the way that Orthodox Christianity is. The Serbs are not “white” in the same sense that I am not a Serbian communist.

GW doesn’t say he isn’t White. He believes that race is not a category around which interests and sentiments coalesce in his country. From that we don’t conclude “he isn’t ‘white’ in any meaningful sense of the word.” As an English nationalist he doesn’t, rightly or not, attach the same significance to race that we do.

I haven’t figured GW out yet. I’m sure he accepts the existence of racial differences, but it would be more accurate to describe GW as an “ethnonationalist.” That’s fine. Is he a “White Nationalist?” I don’t think so. I’m still not clear on whether or not he is a British nationalist or a Little Englander. I get the impression that he thinks of himself as “white” and “English.” So yes, GW is “white” in both the physical and self-identification sense.

Re: the bombing of Serbia. I am already on record expressing my revulsion at that.

One advantage of White nationalism is that it helps us to see commonalities.

This is true. I have written previously about how racial identity has muted class and ethnic antagonisms in America.

Spanish colonizers also made the distinction White vs. non-White. It wasn’t a special American invention, though Americans enforced it more rigorously.

That’s true. I have written about this myself. Like the United States, Latin America also developed racial hierarchies, albeit more complex ones not based on the one drop rule. I’m not saying that “whiteness” was a unique American invention. Indeed, South Carolina was founded by “whites” from Barbados who brought their racial doctrine with them from the Caribbean. It would be more accurate to say that this feeling of the importance of “whiteness” is more pervasive in the U.S. than elsewhere.

The fact that Whites form a group different from other racial groups came to the attention of Europeans as a natural effect of the Age of Discovery. The non-Whites the colonizers encountered were generally primitive and militarily inconsequential. They seemed backward in contrast to the nations of Europe, and when they were not backward their cultures were brutal and sanguinary (e.g. the Aztecs). To the distinction White/non-White was therefore understandably added the distinction civilized vs. uncivilized (savage), which may have been unfair but which nevertheless reflected a reasonable inference, given normal ethnocentrism. None of these common generalizations about the Other(s) were exclusively American. The distinction White/non-White was, moreover, a _discovery_ of racial differences, not a construction of differences where no meaningful differences existed. Dutch and Spaniards have more in common with each other than they do with Bantus or Amerindians. That visible physical fact, assisted by the obvious cultural fact that both Dutch and Spaniards inhabited European Christendom and the Others didn’t, could become widely recognized only after Europeans had came in significant contact with Africans and Amerindians.

I agree with all of this.

At any rate, even if all of the above is false, the discoverers of a fact shouldn’t declare their ownership of it, even if they make greater use of it than others. 

I don’t recall saying that Americans owned the concept of “whiteness.” Again, I have been writing extensively about another case of this in the Belgian Congo as of late.

I see nothing wrong with your earlier observation, in another thread, that Westerners on the periphery of the West may have a better understanding of its racial contituents than Europeans. In other words, we’re right to look at whiteness and they’re wrong to ignore it. We see more clearly.

Yes, I am still very careful about this, though. “Whiteness” took an importance in the United States, especially in the Jim Crow South and Jim Crow West, that was not the case elsewhere, at least to the same extent. I know less about Canada, but I believe that “whiteness” was considered important to a lesser extent there as well. In Latin America, of course, there were racial hierarchies, but more complex ones. The Afrikaners combined ethnonationalism, racial nationalism, and Protestant nationalism. The Belgian Congo had a policy of racial segregation based on “whiteness.”

Generally speaking, “whiteness” tends to show up much more in what I call the “periphery” than the “core”: the regions that Europe colonized, not Europe itself. The colonials who lived amongst non-whites drew a racial distinction and often enough defined themselves in opposition to them. The history of Australia would be worth researching here. To what extent has “whiteness” been important to Australians? Wasn’t there a “White Australia Policy”?

I think this paragraph is misleading. Black is bad in many languages, including some African languages. The underlying distinction is likely dark vs. light, night vs. day. Hence blackness is dangerous and frightening. It is also easily associated with the idea of dirtiness. The negative connotations of blackness would, I suspect, appear in an historical dictionary of almost any language, not only English. It is present in Latin, for example. It seems unlikely that the English sense of blackness was unusual, as Winthrop Jordan believes.

That excerpt is taken from the very beginning of the book. Jordan is outlining the preconceptions of the English about “whiteness” and “blackness” before they developed extensive colonial possessions. He does a good job of showing how “whiteness” evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

When the English first established themselves in Jamestown, “whiteness” was not a major aspect of their identity. “Christian” and “English” and “free” were more often used and carried much of the same racial content. Later, this would change. As negro slaves were imported into Virginia and the other colonies in incredible numbers, as the colonists fought against the Indians, and as non-English settlers began arriving around 1700, the “Englishmen” of Colonial America became “whites.”

The reason this is so important is that “whiteness” would become a dominant theme in American culture. It was the first real marker of an emerging American ethnos.

We’d be much better off without it.

The problem with that is that “white” is a pre-scientific term which generates considerable confusion. Thus, we have debates like “Are the Jews White” or “are Italians white?” The term “white” was originally used to refer to the fair complexion of the colonial settlers. By that standard, viz the Italians or Serbs, the English are objectively more “white,’ and vice versa, Northwestern Europeans are objectively less Mediterranean, brown, tawny, tan, what have you.

White = person of European descent. Whether Southerners in 1820 or colonists in 1620 would have agreed or disagreed is irrelevant. Anything that suggests a hierarchy of whiteness is toxic today.

That’s a novel definition of “white” that creates all sorts of ambiguity and endless debates about the subject. The Italians and Greeks really are less “white” in complexion than most Americans, and vice versa. “European” is a geographical designation.

I can see your point: you want to avoid sub-racial conflicts between “white” Americans. I have no objection to that. Even Anon agrees that Americans of Northern and European ancestry share a common interest viz the negro, mestizo, Jew, and other Asiatic immigrants.

Why not simply use “American” instead? “American” could be used with the understanding that it is synonymous with “white.”

Why should that be the true measure? We don’t live in history; we live now.

Historically speaking, it is the true measure of “whiteness.” Why should it be the true measure, today? That’s not what interests me. I was trying to show that “white” is a pre-scientific term and that to the extent American racialists have adopted it as the locus for “White Nationalism” it will create problems of definition. I was in explaining mode, not advocate mode above.

I advocate downplaying sub-racial conflict. It is a distraction from more pressing issues. My view on that has been stated clearly numerous times.

Posted by Matra on September 04, 2007, 06:28 AM | #

Rnl:Anything that excludes or seems to exclude people of European descent weakens White nationalism. Our strength is in our numbers. We are still the majority. Fractious Nordicists turn us into a series of related minorities

So what about fractious non-Anglo-Saxons living in Canada, Australia, and the US buying into the “nation of immigrants” myth and siding with non-whites against the founding peoples? Personally, I don’t care about Nordicists - I’ve never even met one! But I have met plenty of ethnic Europeans who don’t sound much different from non-whites when it comes to the alleged injustices of the past.

I used to think that the darker our societies got the more Europeans would find they have in common but it would seem that the Irish, Italian, Polish, etc, chip on the shoulder isn’t going away any time soon. It wasn’t Nordicists who forced Italians and Irish to join forces with Asians, Latinos and blacks for baseball’s recent Heritage Week. Nor do Nordicists force European ethnic organisations in Canada to lobby for more immigration and more guilt money for things that happened decades ago. Apparently the incentives to join the multicultural parade are too great to turn down.

I should also point out that it isn’t just Anglo-Canada that ethnic Europeans have a problem with. They are actively undermining Canada’s other founding nation in Quebec. In the 60s the Italians even rioted over their kids being sent to French schools and today their descendants vote overwhelmingly against the interests of the founding nations of Canada no matter which part of the country Italians happen to be living.

How is that kind of intra-European diversity a strength?

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 06:48 AM | #

Bolton’s scholarship, the letters of Lee and Grant are compelling evidence to the contrary. It’s only your opinion.

No, it is not only my opinion. It is a fact that the white yeomanry was not on the same civic, political, or social level of the American negro. That you would even suggest that was the case - when negroes were chattel slaves - speaks volumes about your ignorance of the matter. Even anti-racist historians of the Antebellum South don’t make that argument.

How exactly did FDR destroy the British Empire?

Your excerpt doesn’t answer my question. Neither India, Vietnam, Gabon, Nigeria or any Western colony was placed under one of the U.N. trusteeships that FDR advocated. Thus, the argument that FDR destroyed the British Empire is absurd. The British themselves long been planning to grant independence to their African colonies, as they never ceased to remind everyone.

As noted above, FDR died before the end of WW2. Truman became president and repudiated one by one FDR’s policies. It was Truman who started the Cold War with the USSR, got the U.S. entangled in NATO, and supported the French effort to hang onto Indochina. It was also Truman who threw the weight of the executive branch behind desegregation. Crybabies in the U.N. like the USSR were making much of “racism” in America at the time.

Allegations with no evidence. It appears a common component of your rhetorical style.

Really quick. I’m going to throw you a football. Who was William Lyon Mackenzie King?

The Quebec Act had nothing to do with the founding of Canada, but then one wouldn’t expect a foreigner, especially an American, to have that knowledge.

Nope. The French-speakers of Quebec had nothing to do with the founding of Canada. It just so happens that Quebec was given control of the American Midwest and Catholics were put on a level of equality with Protestants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Act

The Quebec Act of 1774 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain (citation 14 Geo. III c. 83) setting procedures of governance in the area of Quebec.

Principal components of the act:

Expansion of territory to take over the Canadian portions of the Indian Reserve (1763) that had separated Quebec from Rupert’s Land including much of what is now southern Ontario

Expansion of territory to take over land that is now in the United States (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota).

Replaced the oath of allegiance so that it no longer made reference to the Protestant faith.

Guaranteed free practice of the Catholic faith.

Upheld the continued use of the French civil law for private matters while maintaining the use of the English common law for public administration, including criminal prosecution.

How does that change there ethnicity?

Because, as you have said yourself, they are ethnically “Canadians” now, not “Anglos.”

Which proves what? The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform is make believe?

What is the Irish Lobby?

It’s unclear what Americanism, however, it is little wonder that Canucks are suspicious of American intentions. Let’s see, there is the Fenian Raids, Wilson’s turning a blind eye to German Embassy in Washington, organising attacks on Cdn bridges during WWI (mustn’t upset the neutrality, you know) Ogdensburg, the nuke-tipped Bomarc missiles (according to McNamara pieces of shit used only to draw potential Soviet fire away from US targets) and of the CIA’s involvement in ousting the Canadian PM who considered Kennedy’s attempt to bring the world into over Cuba puerile nonsense.

Okay, you have listed all sorts of obscure incidents that 99% of Americans have never heard of. None of these things are really markers in American history. Our sense of identity tends to be based on more significant incidents like the conquest of the American West or the Civil War.

With friends like the Yanks, who needs enemies.

Canada doesn’t have enemies because it sits comfortably under the American nuclear umbrella with a military Get Out of Jail Free card like all sorts of other parasites in NATO. It has always been sort of a hanger on, whether it was with Britain during the early twentieth century or with the United States today. Aside from Ireland, which eventually was ceded independence, Canada was the disrupting force with the Empire advocating more autonomy and decentralization.

During the early twentieth century, the British had many of the same problems with Canadians that Americans now have:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyon_Mackenzie_King

Canadian autonomy

Throughout tenure, King led Canada from a colony with responsible government to an autonomous nation within the British Commonwealth. During the Chanak Crisis of 1922, King refused to support the British without first consulting Parliament, while the Conservative leader, Arthur Meighen, supported Britain. The British were disappointed with King’s response. After the King-Byng Affair, King went to the Imperial Conference of 1926 and argued for greater autonomy of the Dominions. This resulted in the Balfour Declaration 1926, which announced the equal status of all members of the British Commonwealth (as it was known then), including Britain. This eventually led to the Statute of Westminster 1931.

In the lead up to World War II, King played two roles. On the one hand, he told English Canadians that Canada would no doubt enter war if Britain did. On the other hand, he and his Quebec lieutenant Ernest Lapointe told French Canadians that Canada would only go to war if it was in the country’s best interests. With the dual messages, King slowly led Canada toward war without causing strife between Canada’s two main linguistic communities. As his final step in asserting Canada’s autonomy, King ensured that the Canadian Parliament made its own declaration of war one week after Britain.

King’s government introduced the Canadian Citizenship Act in 1946, which officially created the notion of “Canadian citizens”. Prior to this, Canadians were considered British subjects living in Canada. On January 3, 1947, King received Canadian citizenship certificate number 0001.[6]

Posted by Al Ross on September 04, 2007, 11:03 AM | #

Settle down ,chaps, we’re Aryans. after all.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 04, 2007, 12:12 PM | #

“Pat Buchanan is an Irish Catholic.”

Buchanan is half-Irish, half-German:  his Irishness is diluted by half, by genes conferring better sense.  (Forgive me if someone has pointed this out — haven’t had time to read the whole thead this morning; will later.)

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 06:18 PM | #

Al Ross,

I don’t want anyone here to get the impression that I am “anti-Canadian.” That’s not the case at all. I’m pro-Canadian, pro-Anglo, pro-British Empire. My website is about racial and cultural preservation in North America. Aside from the United States, Canada is the only other country subsumed under that rubric. Obviously, the cultural preservation part implies that I believe Anglo-Canadians and French-Canadians have the right to preserve their own cultures and chart their own destinies. That’s fine with me.

It is not true that American White Nationalists (and I consider myself an American racialist, not necessarily a WN) want to homogenize Canada or any European country. Rather, Americans tend to be well-wishers of our racial kin abroad, especially the Anglo-Saxons. “White Nationalism” is simply the notion that we share a common racial struggle and that we should support each other in the goal of racial and cultural preservation. What racialist could object to that?

What irks me is the notion that the United States is somehow responsible for the fall of the British Empire. That isn’t true. I know that to be false. Ireland, for example, had long been a disintegrating force within the Empire. It won its independence without American assistance. Aside from Ireland, it was Canada that was the leading voice for the decentralization of the Empire and the principle of equality of the dominions. Canadian nationalism was a constant source of irritation for the British who favored closer, more hierarchial cooperation between the colonials and the metropole. In the end, Canadians got what they wanted and became an independent country altogether with Canadian citizenship.

Now, how on earth am I to blame for that as an American? How am I to blame for Gandhi and his crowd of agitators? And what of the African colonies? It had long been British policy that the African colonies were eventually to be granted independence. The British spent decades preparing Ghana for just that.

Posted by Scimitar on September 04, 2007, 06:22 PM | #

@Anon,

“Mynydd” has resurfaced and is sharing some thoughts about us at Stirpes. Was in a malicious mood this morning. I busted some knee caps.

http://blog.occidentaldissent.com/2007/09/04/stirpes-part-two/

Posted by Guessedworker on September 04, 2007, 06:39 PM | #

“I haven’t figured GW out yet. I’m sure he accepts the existence of racial differences, but it would be more accurate to describe GW as an “ethnonationalist.” That’s fine. Is he a “White Nationalist?” I don’t think so. I’m still not clear on whether or not he is a British nationalist or a Little Englander. I get the impression that he thinks of himself as “white” and “English.” So yes, GW is “white” in both the physical and self-identification sense.”

That’s an irresistible invitation.

Self-definition is inevitable.  We all do it.  But it is done, naturally enough, with conscious thought - a “passing presence” and a quite rough and inadequate implement for capturing and analysing something as elusive as the self.

I am more interested in who and what I actually am, rather than how I perceive myself.  Personality is a liar, but blood and bones are honest.  They dictate allegiances - that’s the main reason I am interested in Salterism - and make a fool of damned choice.

Trying to be a bit more factual, then, and not having availed myself of a genetic assay, these are the roots of the four family names of my grandparents according to one genealogy site on the web:-

First grandparent: patronymic from the medieval personal name Hobb(e), a short form of Robert.

Second grandparent: from a Middle English personal name, Elyat, Elyt. This represents at least two Old English personal names which have fallen together: the male name A{dh}elgeat (composed of the elements a{dh}el ‘noble’ + Geat, a tribal name.

Third grandparent: English (of Norman origin): nickname for a lazy man or a sleepyhead, from Old French dormeor ‘sleeper’, ‘sluggard’.

Fourth grandparent: Old English topographic name for someone who lived near the gates of a walled town, or a metonymic occupational name for a gatekeeper.

Based on these four ancestral names I have Saxon antecedents, then, and Norman French.  But, of course, the further one goes back, the wider one’s connections to the ethny.  There is no such thing as pure blood.  However, insomuch as the English are a particularised Northern European people, I am of that tribe.

In EGI terms, my interest ripples out from the circle of my family to other English men and women, in whom copies of my genes are present.  The next concentric circle is the Northern European root-stocks of Saxon Germany and Norse France.  Among them are people in whom I can sense a strong connectivity - I am a firm believer that we can identify kind phenotypically with great assuredness.

The concentricity carries my sympathy outwards, enveloping Europeans of ever more distant kind, such that by the time I arrive at The Hot Gates it’s culture that weights my preference.  By the time I find myself ally to the Bantu it’s because the Martians have invaded.  Actually, I am not sure even then.  Uma Thurmin looked pretty good as a Martian.

Politically, of course, it’s more complex.  There is the small matter of the universal nature of liberalism, and the necessity of an equally universal replacement.  England’s survival is dependent on Serbia’s, and vice versa.  So I am and am not a Little Englander.  I desire the survival of an ethnically secure England, and know it cannot be obtained in isolation.

Posted by ff on September 04, 2007, 07:03 PM | #

Rnl,

In the only statement he made about his sexual tastes Silver told us he doesn’t especially like Nordic women. You interpret that to mean that he prefers them, and you then start generalizing about the alleged preferences of Mediterraneans, not Slavs.

Pay attention. 

I was never particularly interested in Nordic girls.  I never raved about or craved “blonds”.  But now, I think in the interests of fighting WN, I’m simply going to have to procreate with a Nordic blond.  Pardon the immodesty, but I’m a rather attractive male specimen, so the one I ultimately select will be a hot little number—the kind I’m sure will make WNs puke at seeing such a beauty with “that wog”.

I wrote nothing about what type of women silver “prefers”. Indeed, the common refrain from Meds who openly fantasize about obtaining Nordic women is that they are not particularly interested in Nordic women. If we take this claim at face value, it only underlines their extreme hostility and/or inferiority complex toward Nordics. How mentally fucked-up do you have to be to seek out (or imagine seeking out) women you are not particulary attracted to in order to spite your perceived ethnic or political enemies?

Silver self-identifies as a swarthy wog. That sounds pretty Med to me.

The smartest poster on this blog is a “Med racialist.”

Unprovable. Irrelevant. Rienzi is bright enough, but I’ve seen nothing from him to suggest he’s smarter than any number of other posters here. And I know some smart jews, but I don’t think they’d be assets to MR.

I think Rienzi agrees with me that intra-European genetic differences must be respected. However, he has in the past promoted ideas I find destructive (e.g. proclaiming “Nordicism” responsible for the death of the white race and pushing DNAprint tests).

No.

“Ethnicity” typically has a significant racial basis and is a major point of identification for most people. I find it bizarre that you acknowledge “racial” differences, but apparently not intra-European “ethnic” differences.

That would be _my_ point. It is incredibly unlikely, very close to impossible. . . . You asked me. I answered.

You are, like Linder, identifying as German based on your surname, or what?

Anything that excludes or seems to exclude people of European descent weakens White nationalism. Our strength is in our numbers. We are still the majority. Fractious Nordicists turn us into a series of related minorities.

Boas’ “scientific” anti-racism started as anti-Nordicism. Convincing Americans intra-European racial differences are environmentally determined started the slide toward the denial of black-white differences.

Intra-European racial variation exists and must be acknowledged by the consistent racialist. Period. If acknowledging differences causes hurt feelings and prevents Europeans from working together where they do share common interests, then any potential coalition is probably not very strong to begin with.

The various European ethnic groups are culturally and racially compatible. There has been significant intermarriage. We meaningfully form a single people, and in most cases we have no difficulty identifying one another. There is no good reason to transform the category White, which is socially recognized by almost everyone, into a dozen or so squabbling sub-groups.

Europeans are not all equally culturally and racially compatible. America has an ethnic core, composed mainly of mixed Northwestern Europeans. Long Island guidos, Albanian refugees, and “white” Miami Cubans are not part of this ethnic core.

There are not many southern Euros in the U.S., relatively speaking. Those who are here are concentrated in the Northeast, plus a handful of urban areas elsewhere in the country. I’m interested in advancing the interests of the American ethnic core, not coddling minority whites (who are unlikely to reciprocate your altruism in any event).

You apparently dislike Italians. You think they’re lusting after Nordic women, so you’ll toss them out of the category White, despite their own self-identification.

You don’t have very good reading comprehension.

No one frets about Irish-Americans marching about and dressing in green on St Patrick’s Day. Ethnic particularism doesn’t threaten multiracialism. Multiethnic whiteness does threaten multiracialism.

Wrong. See Boas. See “The Melting Pot”.

Read “The Dispossessed Majority”.

Minority (including minority white) ethnic particularism is encouraged. Majority ethnic particularism is attacked. Majority institutions and holidays have been universalized. You won’t see a miniseries on PBS celebrating “WASPs”. You will see celebrations of the Irish, Italians, Jews, and negroes.

None of this Nordicist esoterica occurs to anyone until they arrive on racialist webforums.

Quite the opposite. It’s natural for people to identify more with those who resemble them more closely. Telling people not to notice that Southern Italian’s year-round tan is unnatural. Telling people everyone up to the borders or Greece and Russia (but not one mile further) should be accepted as a brother is unnatural.

That sort of ascientific “Pan-Aryanism” is a rather recent innovation. George Lincoln Rockwell was one of the first to try the approach, with interesting results.

“The guy in charge of the print shop--and remember this name
--was John Patler. While I was around there, I had a chance to observe
Patler. His real name was Yanacki Patsalos. He was this dark, greasy-looking
little guy from New York, and he felt bad he was Greek instead of
Swedish or German. It really bugged him. He tried to disguise his origin
by changing his name. He had this feeling of inferiority, and he had an
envy and hatred for people with light eyes, hair, and complexion. I don’t
know exactly where this came from. Maybe it was because he had grown
up in New York and he was from a poor immigrant family and was at the
bottom of the pecking order, and at the top around where he was from
were the English, Irish, and Germans. Anyway, he was organizing the
darker members of the party against what he called the blue-eyed devils.
He was a very aggressive little turd. It was wild, surreal. . . .” (pp. 105-106)

(William Pierce in The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce by Robert S. Griffin)

Rockwell was assassinated by “Patler”.

re: Yggdrasil

I seem to recall Yggdrasil used to promote the “Jews are white” idea, as well.

First, it recognizes that most people in the U.S. of European extraction have intermarried to such an extent that it is no longer possible to identify American Whites as “Irish” or “German” or “Italian”.

Yes, for the American ethnic core (formerly known simply as “Americans"). But I don’t think this is true for Italians. And I find that even mixed Italians tend to identify as “Italian” (see Artie Lange—half-German but calls himself “Italian").

Anyway, Americans in general certainly are not inextricably mixed with Southern Euros.

But more important, use of the term “European-American” is intended to recognize that white elites in the United States have exploited differences based on religion and European national origin to divide European-Americans, with the intention of rendering us unable to defend ourselves against non-white demands.

Not really. In general, I can think of few examples of “white elites” “exploiting differences” between European-Americans specifically to weaken whites in relation to nonwhites.

re: MacDonald

Not seeing how you think the quote from MacDonald supports your position. MacDonald gives a prediction, not a prescription.

More from MacDonald:

In addition, there may well be negative genetic consequences for the European-derived peoples of the United States and especially for the “common people of the South and West” (Higham I 984, 49)--that is, for lower-middle-class Caucasians derived from Northern and Western Europe--whose representatives fought a desperate and prolonged political battle against the present immigration policy. Indeed, we have seen that a prominent theme of the New York Intellectuals as well as the Authoritarian Personality studies was the intellectual and moral inferiority of traditional American culture, particularly rural American culture. James Webb (1995) notes that it is the descendants of the WASPS who settled the West and South who “by and large did the most to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite often suffering educational and professional regression as they tamed the wilderness, built the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a democratic way of life that later white cultures were able to take advantage of without paying the price of pioneering. Today they have the least, socioeconomically, to show for these contributions. And if one would care to check a map, they are from the areas now evincing the greatest resistance to government practices.” The war goes on, but it is easy to see who is losing.
[. . .]
The effort to develop an intellectual basis for immigration restriction was tortuous; by 1920 it was based on the legitimacy of the ethnic interests of Northwestern Europeans and had undertones of racialist thinking.

MacDonald is obviously aware that America has historically been a Northwestern European country.

Posted by ff on September 04, 2007, 07:51 PM | #

Scimitar,

“Mynydd” once told me that he was some kind of fugitive on the run being persecuted by the Spanish government on account of his nationalism.

That’s hilarious. I seem to recall he made up several different stories about himself.

Have you browsed the “Stirpes” forum, Anon? “Colonials” there are set to an “Alien” usergroup and not allowed to post. They have an especially intense hatred of “Anglos,” generally.

I haven’t looked at Stirpes since around the time it went online. From reading your post today, it sounds like nothing has changed. I’m sure there are some decent posters there (I’ve had people invite me), but from the beginning it seemed to me the forum’s main purpose was to provide an outlet for the founders’ hangups about Americans and Northern Europeans.

“Pan-Europeanism” is a phenomenon endorsed almost exclusively by American White Nationalists. It stems from the well-known “outward gaze” of Southern culture and the tendency of Americans to think of themselves in racial terms.

Perhaps. One still finds people like Norman Lowell and CvH in Europe, with their own strange pan-European visions.

In my experience, “pan-Europeanism” is rarely reciprocated. It is a noble idea to wish other “whites” in Europe well. Unfortunately, very few of these people have any awareness of being “white” or any appreciation for this fancy of American racialists.

From reading Skadi and similar forums, I got the impression of a core Northwestern European group interested in racial preservation, surrounded by sniping fringe Europeans with their own axes to grind. Stirpes was the fringe Europeans breaking off and creating their own forum.

Posted by Rnl on September 04, 2007, 08:53 PM | #

Not seeing how you think the quote from MacDonald supports your position. MacDonald gives a prediction, not a prescription.

He is predicting Euro-American unity. I favor it now.

MacDonald is obviously aware that America has historically been a Northwestern European country.

A fact that isn’t in dispute.

Posted by Rnl on September 04, 2007, 08:57 PM | #

Fred Scrooby wrote:

Buchanan is half-Irish, half-German: his Irishness is diluted by half, by genes conferring better sense.

That’s the sort of comment we don’t need.

***

The Wikipedia articles on Buchanan and Paleoconservatism are surprisingly good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Buchanan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservative_-_Paleoconservative_Conflict

Posted by Rnl on September 04, 2007, 09:03 PM | #

Scimitar wrote:

That’s a novel definition of “white” that creates all sorts of ambiguity and endless debates about the subject.

In most cases it is the normal sense of the term, though you are no doubt correct that it can occasionally be ambiguous.

Black = person of African descent. White = person of European descent. Whether “white” is the best word to convey that idea is another matter. It probably isn’t. But since it is understood by almost everyone, I see no reason not to use it. If there is occasional fuzziness, that’s an asset. 

Earlier someone suggested half seriously that White can be defined as the demographic category that is supposed to feel white guilt, the group against which instruction in tolerance and anti-racism is regularly directed. That would match “person of European descent” exactly. Hence the (mis)eductional attacks against Columbus the European explorer, not Columbus the Italian.

Posted by desmond jones on September 04, 2007, 09:26 PM | #

No, it is not only my opinion. It is a fact that the white yeomanry was not on the same civic, political, or social level of the American negro. That you would even suggest that was the case - when negroes were chattel slaves - speaks volumes about your ignorance of the matter.

Life and Labor in the Old South

Book by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips; Little, Brown, 1929.

Infestations by this parasite might have been relieved quite readily by medicine or prevented by the mere wearing of shoes; but its existence unsuspected, no prevention or cure was applied. The victims, “ lank, lean, angular and bony, with . . . a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief “, 5 “the most degraded race of human beings claiming an AngloSaxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth”, 6 suffered the contumely of their contemporaries who might better have given sympathy if they could not afford relief.

These wretchedly genuine “po’ white trash”, scorned even by the slaves, could not embrace opportunities.

Phillips, ignorant, Yankee or foreigner?

Truman became president and repudiated one by one FDR’s policies.

And then of course there was Eisenhower and the Suez.

Nope. The French-speakers of Quebec had nothing to do with the founding of Canada. It just so happens that Quebec was given control of the American Midwest and Catholics were put on a level of equality with Protestants.

And the act was repealed by the British parliament almost ninety years prior to the founding of the Canadian polity, all separate British colonies coming together in common cause as a federal entity. The French/English founding peoples tome is a lie, fabricated by liberals to appease Quebec and ensure unity. The Quebec Act is significant to Americans, but it has nothing to do with the nation of Canada. In case you haven’t noticed we don’t have control of the American midwest.

Because, as you have said yourself, they are ethnically “Canadians” now, not “Anglos.” No, the point was that they don’t identify as English/Scot/Irish. They speak English with a funny accent, eh. The point being, how is a distinct group formed, if they have no distinctness. It does not change their ethnicity.

What is the Irish Lobby?

Did take the word of an ignorant foreigner. Google it and form your own opinion.

Okay, you have listed all sorts of obscure incidents that 99% of Americans have never heard of. None of these things are really markers in American history. Our sense of identity tends to be based on more significant incidents like the conquest of the American West or the Civil War.

Okay, however, your allegations of Canadian kneejerk anti-Americanism seem almost as baseless as Abe Foxman’s charges of anti-semitism.

Canada doesn’t have enemies because it sits comfortably under the American nuclear umbrella with a military Get Out of Jail Free card like all sorts of other parasites in NATO. It has always been sort of a hanger on, whether it was with Britain during the early twentieth century or with the United States today.

What threat exactly were you oh so benevolent Yanks actually protecting us po’ parasitical Canucks from? The only threat the people of the Ice ever faced was from its southern neighbour. Given’ us po’ folk those useless Bomarc missile to defend us against consumation by the Soviet Empire was mighty kind. We’d have been better off throwing rocks from the Peace tower. Canada had nuclear capability in the 1940s but the programme was frowned upon by our more powerful southern neighbour. 

Aside from Ireland, which eventually was ceded independence, Canada was the disrupting force with the Empire advocating more autonomy and decentralization.

During the early twentieth century, the British had many of the same problems with Canadians that Americans now have:

Yeah those 60,000 deaths (more battlefied deaths than the Yanks in WWI) were a figment of our imagination. If memory serves, no Yanks were in the frontlines when the Canucks and Aussies faced the best of Germany at Amiens, in August, 1918.

As his final step in asserting Canada’s autonomy, King ensured that the Canadian Parliament made its own declaration of war one week after Britain.

One week! Wow, King really showed Westminster didn’t he? Westminster was a notoriously fickle lot. They left the colonials near destitute by repealing the Corn Laws for their beloved free trade, then when they got in trouble, Gordon in Khartoum or WWI or whatever, they send the King and Queen to do a tour, to re-enforce the old bonds.

Posted by ff on September 04, 2007, 09:36 PM | #

He is predicting Euro-American unity. I favor it now.

MacDonald says nothing specifically about southern Euros. Besides, if he’s right, you have nothing to worry about. In the meantime, I suspect you will “favor” in vain.

The White Ethnic Revival

History News Network
April 17, 2006

The leader of an anti-racism workshop in the 1990s once noted a disquieting inclination on the part white participants to dissociate themselves from the advantages of whiteness by emphasizing some purportedly not-quite-white ethnic background. “I’m not white; I’m Italian,” one would say. Another, “I’m Jewish.” After this ripple had made its way across the group, the seminar leader was left wondering, “What happened to all the white people who were here just a minute ago?”

The sense of a sentence like “I’m not white, I’m Italian” rests upon several historical preconditions, now loosely relayed in the term “ethnic revival”: the Civil Rights Movement heightened whites’ consciousness of their skin privilege, rendering it both visible and newly uncomfortable. The example of Black Nationalism and later multiculturalism provided a new language for—and perceived cache in—the specificities of an identity that was not simply “American.” After decades of striving to conform to the Anglo-Saxon standard, descendants of earlier European immigrants quit the melting pot. Italianness, Jewishness, or Greekness were now badges of pride, not shame.

“Identity” cannot accommodate the full circuitry of the new ethnicity or its social and political significance. Psychological yearning plays some part in the recovery of lost heritage, but so do wider cultural and institutional forces. After the 1960s the publishing industry, Hollywood, and television all lavished a new attention on ethnic particularity, at some times actually generating ethnic interests (Holocaust) and at others merely reflecting them (Moonstruck, Mystic Pizza). Sociologists and other academics forged a new consensus that America was less a “melting pot” than a “mosaic.” Teachers and students across the country agitated for Italo-American, Irish, and Judaic Studies. Immigration history flourished as a subfield, revising the national narrative and proliferating distinct “ethnic” histories. Ethnic merchandise and marketing practices appeared, from the kitsch shamrock key chain to the tourism industry’s “discover your homeland” packages in Ireland, Italy, or Lithuania. And the government itself became engaged in the construction and celebration of “immigrant heritage” in the Bicentennial, the Statue of Liberty Centennial Gala, and the Ellis Island restoration. Today Ellis Island greets more visitors as tourists than it processed as immigrants, even during its peak years.

Pinning dates on such currents is tricky, but one might begin with the summer of 1963 when, amid much fanfare, John F. Kennedy “returned” to Ireland after his clan’s century-long absence from the green fields of County Wexford. Kennedy had earlier called the United States “a nation of immigrants,” the title of his 1958 volume on the ethnic contributions to American life, and his Ireland visit lent this conceit a new stateliness, pomp, and circumstance. In a speech before the Dublin Parliament, Kennedy waxed eloquent on the special place America held in Irish history, and the special role of the Irish in America. Only a few years earlier one prominent sociologist had asserted with astonishing confidence that the ethnic group “had no future” in American life, that ethnic pluralists were “out of touch with the unfolding American reality.” But Kennedy’s Irish sentiments confounded such facile formulations. By the time Ronald Reagan “returned” to Tipperary and Michael Dukakis ran as “Everyethnic” two decades later, roots talk was everywhere.

The “new ethnicity” flowed from many tributaries. Its most politically potent source was the Civil Rights movement, which introduced a contagious idiom of group identity and group rights on the American scene. Its effect was electrifying not only for people of color, but also for white ethnics, whose inchoate sense of second-class status as non-WASPs required only the right vocabulary to come alive. The group-based mobilization of the movement, the group-based terms of its victories in 1964 and ‘65, and the group-based logic of rising black separatism all suggested a model for action. By 1970 the Ukrainian Weekly could call the notion of Ukrainian Power “a workable and quite feasible concept.” As black grievance achieved a new centrality in national discussion, the popular rediscovery of immigrant forebears also became a way of stressing, “We’re merely newcomers; this nation’s crimes are not our own.” On her heartfelt symbolic attachment to scenes such as the Triangle Factory Fire, writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz remarked, “we are so hungry for innocence that images of oppression come almost as a relief.”

Another impetus to ethnic revival was a powerful current of antimodernism, a common notion that ethnicity represented a haven of “authenticity,” removed from the bloodless, homogenizing forces of mass production and consumption, mass media, commodification, bureaucracy, and suburbanization. New pluralists looked to versions of ethnic “authenticity” as a salve to those post-industrial discontents spelled out in books like The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man . Markers of this tacit connection between ethnicity, “authenticity,” and antimodernism include the explicit appeals to mighty, blood-coursing tradition in popular mainstream productions like Zorba the Greek and Fiddler on the Roof.

A stream of popular literary and cinematic texts charted the rise of this new sensibility. After languishing in neglect for some decades, Abraham Cahan’s novels of the immigrant ghetto, The Rise of David Levinsky and Yekl, found their way back into print in popular paperback editions, followed soon after by Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Pietro DiDonato’s Christ in Concrete, Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, and many others. Fresh literary renditions of the ethnic saga like Mario Puzo’s Fortunate Pilgrim and The Godfather also found an eager readership. Audiences flocked to films like Funny Girl, Ragtime, and Crossing Delancey; and television programming turned away from the whitebread world of Ozzie and Harriet in favor of Bridget Loves Bernie, Welcome Back Kotter, Rhoda, Kojak, and Columbo—ethnic ancestors to Dharma Finkelstein, Ray Romano, and The Sopranos. As reflected in the media mirror, the image of white America looked more and more like a big fat Greek wedding.

These developments denote a change in personal feeling for some, perhaps, but a shift in public language for all. It was not the interiority, but the collectivity and the institutional basis of the ethnic revival whose reach in American political culture is most important. A new national myth of origins arose whose touchstone was Ellis Island, whose heroic central figure was the downtrodden but determined greenhorn, whose preferred modes of narration were the epic and the ode, and whose most far-reaching political conceit was the “nation of immigrants.”

The ethnic reverie conflates two distinct themes: immigration as geography vs. immigration as civic incorporation. It is only in the first sense that this is really anything like “a nation of immigrants”--everybody came from somewhere, whether from JFK’s New Ross, Alex Haley’s Kinte-Kundah, or across the land bridge from Asia. But this meaning has eclipsed the second, more profound meaning when it comes to comprehending the body politic. To construct “ America” solely through the eyes of the incoming European steerage passenger is not only to redraw a line around the exclusive white “we” of “we the people,” but to bowdlerize the pageant of the peopling of North America. Steerage, chains, whatever.

The ethnic revival’s political portent is immense. The iconic European immigrant has done double- or triple-duty in American racial politics. Despite recent fixations on Asian American success, for instance, European immigrants remain the nation’s real “model minority”: their saga supplies the “standard” template of incorporation and advancement against which all other groups are judged. It supplied the post-slavery, fresh-off-the-boat innocents who have become the most potent symbol in protests against affirmative action, busing, or reparations. In conservative populism white ethnics represent precisely those little people so in need of protection from the excesses of liberal social policy; and their exemplary mobility--from steerage to ghetto to suburb--is deployed in damning critique of both the contemporary welfare state and contemporary ghetto-dwellers themselves. Consequently, both the immigrant myth and immigration’s living descendants contributed to the swing vote which rendered the Republicans the majority party in the electoral realignment beginning in 1968. Indeed, had he lived into the 1970s and ‘80s, Malcolm X might well have relocated his famous quip about Plymouth Rock a few hundred miles southward down the seaboard: “We didn’t land on Ellis Island, my brothers and sisters—Ellis Island landed on us.”

Paradoxically, in recent decades the “good” immigrant of yore has also been pressed into service in denunciations of the “bad” immigrant of today. Apocalyptic anti-immigrant books like Lawrence Auster’s Path to National Suicide consecrate earlier waves of immigration even while deploring the present one by emphasizing the affinities between Europe and America: that “they were of European descent and came from related cultures within Western civilization made it relatively easy for them to assimilate into the common sphere of civic habits and cultural identity.” But this European tradition is an uncertain fabrication, and such assessments of Italian or Irish immigrants’ “related cultures” have less to do with their actual relationship at the time than with a perceived kinship only after a century’s hindsight. A hundred years ago American commentators sounded remarkably like Auster in their assessments of these incoming Europeans. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge found in the European immigrants “races most alien to the body of the American people”; they “do not promise well for the standard of civilization of the United States.” The Superintendent of the Census thought they possessed “none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men [for] self-government.” Even the New York Times characterized these newcomers as “unwashed, ignorant, unkempt, childish semi-savages.”

If the first maneuver in recent nativism has been to forget the contemporary reception of European immigrants and the crisis their presence posed, the next has been to canonize their traits and their virtues. In memory, these “alien races” have become clean and moral and hugely striving; they have become joint-stock holders in a unified “European tradition”--they have become, in a word, “ America.” Nothing hinders white Americans’ even-handed acceptance of Third World immigration quite as stubbornly as the mythic, lavishly celebrated, and thoroughly naturalized icon of the European steerage passenger.

The roots obsession, then, has been no simple identity quest, nor can its impact be measured by the attendance at St. Patrick’s Day parades, by box office receipts for Jewtopia, or by the astronomical number of daily hits on genealogical websites. Rather, the ethnic revival recast American nationality, and it continues to color our judgment about who “we” are. Martin Luther King, Jr. decried the notion that this was a “nation of immigrants,” and he cautioned against the damning exclusions inherent in that conception. Citing the line inscribed on the Statue of Liberty which identifies her as the “mother of exiles,” King exclaimed that it is no wonder “the Negro in America cries, ‘Oh Lord, sometimes I feel like a motherless child.’” And yet as late as 2004, Republicans kicked off their national convention on the hallowed ground of Ellis Island. Amid pious talk of diversity, speakers appealed to Americans’ populist conceptions of “the people” by enumerating the many immigrant Bushes, Cheneys, Patakis, and Giulianis whose names grace Ellis Island’s “wall of honor.”

It was fitting, then, that during the Concert for New York in the wake of 9/11, among the most straightforward and applauded expressions of outraged Americanism was firefighter Michael Moran’s exhortation, “Osama bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish ass!” Like JFK’s “return” to Ireland in 1963, Moran’s proud Irishness expressed the conviction that to celebrate the hyphen is not to diminish anyone’s “Americanism.” But as our differential greeting of “illegal” Irish and Mexican immigrants affirms, not just any old hyphen will do. Such patterns of presumption and exclusion in our collective sense of naturalized Americanness should command the strictest attention, as should the mythology of the “nation of immigrants” that binds them. These more than anything else constitute the historical weave of that hypnotic political ideal, America.

Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies at Yale and author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America.

http://hnn.us/articles/23824.html

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 04, 2007, 09:54 PM | #

“That’s the sort of comment we don’t need.” (—Rnl a couple above)

Right, I wish I didn’t have to make it.  The other one that needed making was Ann’s, “If only there were a ‘No Irish Need Apply’ sign hanging in the U.S. Senate.” God, just imagine what a paradise that would be!  Oops!  I didn’t say anything I wasn’t supposed to, did I?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 04, 2007, 10:12 PM | #

I didn’t actually read Jacobson’s drivel (posted by ff).  Skimming it, the fourth paragraph from last where he talks about Lawrence Auster’s pamphlet caught my eye as showing why one has to talk about race in this game, not culture.  Unless one talks about race there’ll be endless claims by Jewish academics —ones hoping race-replacement will go to completion, which means, essentially, all of them —there’ll be endless claims to the effect there’s no reason to exclude this or that non-Euro immigration — Chinese, say — as long as they can acculturate.  But even if they can acculturate I don’t want my race changed into theirs.  Got it, Professor Jacobson?  If Prof. Jacobson is sooooooooo anxious to see one race changed into another, I move he start by advocating the Jews change into Nigerians.  How’s that?  Would that be OK with the professor? ...

Would it? ...

Professor? ...

Hello? ...

Professor Jacobson? ...

Where’d he go? ...

Hellooooooooo? ...

Professor? ...

Is anybody there? ...

Nobody? ...

Guess not ...

Boy, it’s suddenly so quiet around here you can hear a pin drop ...

Posted by Scimitar on September 05, 2007, 04:31 AM | #

GW,

My surname happens to be “Griffin.” I understand that it is rather common around Southwest England, Wales. Looking at “Nick Griffin” of the BNP, I can obviously see we are related.

Posted by Scimitar on September 05, 2007, 05:33 AM | #

Phillips, ignorant, Yankee or foreigner?

No, I am not sure exactly how the existence of hookworms though proves that working class whites were on the same level as negroes. Southern children of both races liked to run around and play without shoes. The environment it temperate year round here; mild winters, steamy summers.

I did that as a child. Does it mean that I was a chattel slave - the property of another man, universally regarded as socially inferior, and without civic equality or political voting rights? No, it does not. Are you arguing that Phillips is an authority on the Jim Crow South now? Would you be willing to accept his verdict on whether or not Southern whites were the social, civic, and political equal of the negro?

Did take the word of an ignorant foreigner. Google it and form your own opinion.

Why would have I have to do that, Desmond? I work in Washington. Now, what is the Irish Lobby?

And then of course there was Eisenhower and the Suez.

What about Suez?

1.) Egypt was an independent country long before Suez.
2.) Nasser and the Egyptian generals overthrew the monarchy. The British were fine with that until he went after the Suez Canal Zone which was not synonymous with Egypt.

Tell us. How are Americans to blame for the independence of Egypt which was granted to that country by the British themselves?

And the act was repealed by the British parliament almost ninety years prior to the founding of the Canadian polity, all separate British colonies coming together in common cause as a federal entity.

Desmond here ignores the fact that it was the Quebec Act, along with several other provocations, that lost the British most of the American colonies. That, of course, was an epochal event that would shape the entire future of North America, including Canada, which became a favorite destination of American loyalists.

The French/English founding peoples tome is a lie, fabricated by liberals to appease Quebec and ensure unity. The Quebec Act is significant to Americans, but it has nothing to do with the nation of Canada. In case you haven’t noticed we don’t have control of the American midwest.

That seems rather counterintuitive. The American Midwest was once under the administration of Quebec. It was lost, but that has nothing to do with the nation of Canada.

No, the point was that they don’t identify as English/Scot/Irish. They speak English with a funny accent, eh. The point being, how is a distinct group formed, if they have no distinctness. It does not change their ethnicity.

How is “Canadian” not a separate ethnicity from English? Canadians think of themselves as a people like Americans with distinct interests.

Okay, however, your allegations of Canadian kneejerk anti-Americanism seem almost as baseless as Abe Foxman’s charges of anti-semitism.

The above does qualify as kneejerk anti-Americanism. That some Canadians, not all, would dwell on something as ancient and insignificant as the godforsaken Fenian Raids is almost Jewish in malevolence. There were raids on the American North from Canada during the American Civil War. No one here remembers that or nurses such a trivial sleight.

The U.S.-Canadian border is one of the longest, peaceful, demilitarized zones of its kind (it might hold the record here, I haven’t checked). Canadians can criticize, poke fun at Americans all the want in full knowledge that the U.S. military isn’t going to come roaring up towards the North Pole. With friends like the Yanks who needs enemies!

Would you prefer to be Poland alongside Germany, Desmond? How about an Ireland or a Serbia alongside Turkey?

What threat exactly were you oh so benevolent Yanks actually protecting us po’ parasitical Canucks from?

Canada is very nice piece of real estate, especially with global warming going on and all. Canada doesn’t have to maintain a decent military because of its special relationship with the United States and Britain. The U.S.  and Britain will not tolerate a military attack on Canada. As it happens, it was the possibility that the Second World War might spread to North America in the event of a British military collapse that prompted much of FDR’s support for the Allies.

FDR wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of British imperialism, but he preferred British imperialism to German U-Boats in the Western Atlantic and the S.S. washing up on the shore of Newfoundland. That was Churchill’s most compelling argument. Less appealling was his offer of British islands in the Caribbean and their worthless negro populations in exchange for Lend-Lease.

The only threat the people of the Ice ever faced was from its southern neighbour. Given’ us po’ folk those useless Bomarc missile to defend us against consumation by the Soviet Empire was mighty kind. We’d have been better off throwing rocks from the Peace tower. Canada had nuclear capability in the 1940s but the programme was frowned upon by our more powerful southern neighbour. 

Do you honestly live in fear of Irish-American micks marauding across your border to attack the Anglos of Canada? The U.S. has no reason to invade Canada. We can get everything we want from Canada through trade.

Yeah those 60,000 deaths (more battlefied deaths than the Yanks in WWI) were a figment of our imagination. If memory serves, no Yanks were in the frontlines when the Canucks and Aussies faced the best of Germany at Amiens, in August, 1918.

Because that wasn’t our fight. We’re not British. Personally, I wish the U.S. would have stayed out of that war. It was a gross waste of our resources and lives. It earned us nothing but the scorn of Europeans. That was the prevailing view in America for about 20 years after WW1.

In any case, your point is non-responsive. Please recount for us the story of how Canada ceased to be a colony, how Canadians acquired Canadian citizenship, and how by the time of WW2 all dominions were on a level of equality with Britain. You are trying to pass yourselves off here as loyal sons of the Empire.

It must be a bitter source of resentment that you were the ones who demanded your own independence and were amongst the loudest voices for pulling down the British Empire into a decentralized Commonwealth of independent nations.

One week! Wow, King really showed Westminster didn’t he? Westminster was a notoriously fickle lot. They left the colonials near destitute by repealing the Corn Laws for their beloved free trade, then when they got in trouble, Gordon in Khartoum or WWI or whatever, they send the King and Queen to do a tour, to re-enforce the old bonds.

Desmond,

Is it not true that Canadian nationalists, as opposed to the Australians, wanted a looser relationship with Britain prior to the Second World War? Is it not true that Canadians agitated for decades - indeed, harped away for years - about how Canada should do what is in the interests of Canada? Wasn’t it Canada that was the most outspoken of the dominions about equality of status?

I might be an ignorant foreigner, but what is this I read about the Chanak Crisis, about the Imperial Conference of 1926 at which King argued for “greater autonomy of the Dominions,” the Balfour Declaration of 1926 which ceded the equal status, and the Canadian Citizenship Act of 1946? It seems to me that Canada was a constant headache, a thorny issue for the British to deal with for many years.

Listen to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyon_Mackenzie_King

King’s promise not to impose conscription contributed to the defeat of Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale Quebec provincial government in 1939 and Liberals’ re-election in the 1940 election. But after the fall of France in 1940, Canada introduced conscription for home service. Still, only volunteers were to be sent overseas. King wanted to avoid a repeat of the Conscription Crisis of 1917. By 1942, the military was pressing King hard to send conscripts to Europe. In 1942, King held a national plebiscite on the issue asking the nation to relieve him of the commitment he had made during the election campaign. He said that his policy was “conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.”

French Canadians voted overwhelmingly against conscription, but a majority of English Canadians supported it. French and English conscripts were sent to fight in the Aleutian Islands in 1943 - technically North American soil and therefore not “overseas” - but the mix of Canadian volunteers and draftees found the Japanese had fled before their arrival. Otherwise, King continued with a campaign to recruit volunteers, hoping to address the problem with the shortage of troops caused by heavy losses in the Dieppe Raid in 1942, in Italy in 1943, and after the Battle of Normandy in 1944. In November 1944, the Government decided it was necessary to send conscripts to Europe. This led to a brief political crisis (see Conscription Crisis of 1944) and a mutiny by conscripts posted in British Columbia, but the war ended a few months later. Over 15,000 conscripts went to Europe, though only a few hundred saw combat.

King was extremely unpopular among Canadian servicemen and women during the war, who were pro conscription. His appearances at Canadian Army installations in Britain (and, after 6 June 1944, in continental Europe) were invariably greeted with boos and catcalls. When he was defeated after the war in his Prince Albert riding, the servicemen’s vote was considered instrumental, and a sign was placed outside the town, similar to those that had been erected in The Netherlands, reading, “This Town Liberated by the Canadian Army.”

You will recall that we unwashed, uncouth Americans instituted the draft even before our entry into the Second World War. How was it that the Canadian government - we’re operating under the theory that Canadians are British here - was only sending conscripts to Europe in November 1944?

In light of these revelations, would you like to re-examine your theory about the United States being responsible for the downfall of the British Empire? Perhaps you can come up with a better explanation next time of how the Americans made you do it.

Posted by desmond jones on September 05, 2007, 08:55 AM | #

No, I am not sure exactly how the existence of hookworms though proves that working class whites were on the same level as negroes.

Refute his position with historical sources rather than posting some tangential nonsense about hookworms. The Southern planter population, and their Negro slaves, viewed po’ white trash as “the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth”. Phillips is still Southerner’s go to guy for all things racialist and you blow off his assertion with some anecdotal reference to you childhood. Too funny.

If you work in Washington then unearthing the views of the Irish Lobby will be a breeze.

What about Suez?

Your point was the robust support the US provided for French/British Imperialism post FDR. Yet here we have an example yet again of an American foreign policy bent on undermining European interests in the Middle East, by siding with a despotic wog like Nasser. Upon which the petty Egyptian dictator shows his appreciation to his new found American ally by flipping them the bird and moving into the Soviet sphere. The new Arab Stalinist encourages other Arab demagogues, like Saddam Hussein, to set up shop and butta boom butta bing, American boys are dying in Iraq to protect US interests in the region.

Desmond here ignores the fact that it was the Quebec Act, along with several other provocations, that lost the British most of the American colonies. That, of course, was an epochal event that would shape the entire future of North America, including Canada, which became a favorite destination of American loyalists.

You ignore the fact that the British colony of Quebec would have existed with or without United Empire Loyalists. It’s an entirely separate issue to Canada.

The above does qualify as kneejerk anti-Americanism. That some Canadians, not all, would dwell on something as ancient and insignificant as the godforsaken Fenian Raids is almost Jewish in malevolence. There were raids on the American North from Canada during the American Civil War. No one here remembers that or nurses such a trivial sleight.

You were the one who raised the issue, or at least the CNN version, of Canada defining itself solely as ant-American. Now you whine about the fact that even if we concede your position, for arguments sake, there was a bounty of good reasons for that sentiment. Oi vey. A substantial number of Canadians did serve in the Civil, most on the Union side.

The U.S.-Canadian border is one of the longest, peaceful, demilitarized zones of its kind (it might hold the record here, I haven’t checked). Canadians can criticize, poke fun at Americans all the want in full knowledge that the U.S. military isn’t going to come roaring up towards the North Pole. With friends like the Yanks who needs enemies!

Up until 1936, the US did have an invasion strategy to deal with Canada.

Would you prefer to be Poland alongside Germany, Desmond? How about an Ireland or a Serbia alongside Turkey?

Now that would take a tectonic shift; which only reconfirms the position that the only threat to Canada has been its southern neighbour.

Canada doesn’t have to maintain a decent military because of its special relationship with the United States and Britain.

A decent military? Your countrymen are not complaining about Canuck efforts in the Stan.

The U.S.  and Britain will not tolerate a military attack on Canada.

The point is moot because there is no threat to Canada.

As it happens, it was the possibility that the Second World War might spread to North America in the event of a British military collapse that prompted much of FDR’s support for the Allies.

Self interest then, nothing to do with neighborly good graces.

The only threat the people of the Ice ever faced was from its southern neighbour. Given’ us po’ folk those useless Bomarc missile to defend us against consumation by the Soviet Empire was mighty kind. We’d have been better off throwing rocks from the Peace tower. Canada had nuclear capability in the 1940s but the programme was frowned upon by our more powerful southern neighbour. 

Do you honestly live in fear of Irish-American micks marauding across your border to attack the Anglos of Canada? The U.S. has no reason to invade Canada. We can get everything we want from Canada through trade.

Interesting segue. How do you get from Soviet empire to Irish micks?

Because that wasn’t our fight. We’re not British. Personally, I wish the U.S. would have stayed out of that war. It was a gross waste of our resources and lives. It earned us nothing but the scorn of Europeans. That was the prevailing view in America for about 20 years after WW1.

It wasn’t our fight either, but ethnic kinship is funny that way. That wasn’t your original point though.

In any case, your point is non-responsive. Please recount for us the story of how Canada ceased to be a colony, how Canadians acquired Canadian citizenship, and how by the time of WW2 all dominions were on a level of equality with Britain. You are trying to pass yourselves off here as loyal sons of the Empire.

Over a hundred thousand dead; over a million and a half served, how exactly do you define loyalty?

Is it not true that Canadian nationalists, as opposed to the Australians, wanted a looser relationship with Britain prior to the Second World War? Is it not true that Canadians agitated for decades - indeed, harped away for years - about how Canada should do what is in the interests of Canada? Wasn’t it Canada that was the most outspoken of the dominions about equality of status?

I might be an ignorant foreigner, but what is this I read about the Chanak Crisis, about the Imperial Conference of 1926 at which King argued for “greater autonomy of the Dominions,” the Balfour Declaration of 1926 which ceded the equal status, and the Canadian Citizenship Act of 1946? It seems to me that Canada was a constant headache, a thorny issue for the British to deal with for many years.

And why do think that was? Clue, the answer is in your post.

French Canadians voted overwhelmingly against conscription, but a majority of English Canadians supported it. French and English conscripts were sent to fight in the Aleutian Islands in 1943 - technically North American soil and therefore not “overseas” - but the mix of Canadian volunteers and draftees found the Japanese had fled before their arrival. Otherwise, King continued with a campaign to recruit volunteers, hoping to address the problem with the shortage of troops caused by heavy losses in the Dieppe Raid in 1942, in Italy in 1943, and after the Battle of Normandy in 1944. In November 1944, the Government decided it was necessary to send conscripts to Europe. This led to a brief political crisis (see Conscription Crisis of 1944) and a mutiny by conscripts posted in British Columbia, but the war ended a few months later. Over 15,000 conscripts went to Europe, though only a few hundred saw combat.

Who do you think King, indeed Liberal PMs to this day, relied upon to keep them in power?

King was extremely unpopular among Canadian servicemen and women during the war, who were pro conscription. His appearances at Canadian Army installations in Britain (and, after 6 June 1944, in continental Europe) were invariably greeted with boos and catcalls. When he was defeated after the war in his Prince Albert riding, the servicemen’s vote was considered instrumental, and a sign was placed outside the town, similar to