Independent thinking in duplicate

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 10 July 2008 22:58.

Kevin Myers, probably the most outspoken journalist writing in the British press, evidently indulges in even more page-scorching realism when he goes home to Ireland. Certainly, he treated the readers of the Irish Independent to a refreshing view of the very dark continent.

Africa is giving nothing to anyone—apart from AIDS

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia’s (and Bob Geldof’s) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia’s population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn’t count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of ...

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.

It will win no friends, and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous, letter-writing wrathful, a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority.

... But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of our own Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There is no comparison. Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30pc. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia’s has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.

... Meanwhile, Africa’s peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million: The equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.

... For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates’ programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.

If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what?I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that’s an idea.

Meanwhile, the UK version of Independent journalism featured a rarity today. Here’s Deborah Orr, a writer whose frankness has got her into trouble before.

Poverty has a cause we’re not confronting

Proper Conservatives are at last warming to David Cameron, after he tipped up in Glasgow East and informed some of the fattest and laziest and poorest people in Britain that it was time they recognised that it was their own fault that they were fat and lazy and poor. Supporters see these views as a reassertion, at last, of classic Conservative political values, emphasising the primacy of the individual, and the primacy of bad individual choices as the creator of society’s ills.

... Actually, bold as Cameron’s challenge to political correctness might seem, I fear I am disappointed. He has not gone far enough to impress me. If he really wants to illustrate his desire to call a spade a spade, Cameron ought to name another individual characteristic that leads free people into making poor choices.

Neither left nor right any longer feels it is polite to suggest that sometimes people find themselves at a disadvantage because their intellectual capacity is comparatively limited. In fact, such is the taboo on this subject that I amaze myself by bringing it up. Yet it is something that needs to be discussed.

One can see why the right are unwilling to broach the subject. It might sound tough and uncompromising to make a speech suggesting that fat people or lazy people or poor people bring their misfortunes on themselves. But asserting that it is your own fault if you are, to use plain-speaking Cameroonian parlance, “stupid” is, let’s face it, not nice, or true or helpful.

... I think that you would be churlish indeed to assert that whoever set the ball rolling, and whoever dribbled it to the here and now, the 30 years we have just spent “managing the transition to a skills-based economy” have not resulted in happy and universal inclusivity.

The bare fact is that not everybody is intellectually equipped to make for themselves a place in such an economy. You may express this secret knowledge in a lefty way, by asserting that those factories should have remained open just to keep those now-drifting people gainfully occupied. Or you may express them in a righty way, by saying that the less fulsomely endowed should simply and meekly accept their limitations and work hard for a minimum wage that they cannot live on.

But you cannot express those thoughts in an explicit way, or all hell will break loose. The liberal left is as hung up on individual choice as the conservative right. The right is furious about what they see as the havoc wreaked by allowing people to have social choices, just as furious as it is about the economic “choices” it sees the welfare state as having promoted. Yet on both sides of the divide there is a blind assertion that everybody is as well equipped to think, weigh up, research and choose as everybody else, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

... Our refusal to look sympathetically on lack of intelligence as a real encumbrance in the modern world – or sometimes even to admit that it exists – is unfair on those who labour under that disadvantage.

... it is considered a dreadful thing to allow people to know that they are not so mentally adept. It’s a pity society cannot find a way of assuring people that there is no shame in being average, or even below average, and that this need be no bar to a useful and productive life. Sadly, however, our refusal even to talk about the phenomenon is proof in itself that we cannot bring ourselves to be that accepting or that accommodating.

So there we are. Ground-breaking honesty on Africa and IQ in two mainstream papers with the name “Independent”, and on the same day. I’m still pinching myself to make sure it was real.

Tags: Journalism

Comments:

Posted by DavidL on Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:23 | #

Two great articles !

If there is a God, please bless these writers with much ink and loooong healthy lives.

The Irish seem to have clearer perception of the world around them ( EU, race etc. ) and make it known.

Thanks again !

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:11 | #

please bless these writers

And don’t forget the editors who decided to run them, DavidL. The real control is at the level of the behind-the-scenes editor and owner.

Posted by Matra on Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:31 | #

Myers is the only columnist in the entire MSM whose articles I make a point of reading. Needless to say he’s hated by the purveyors of respectable opinion in Ireland. That he’s managed to retain his column is surprising but also a sign of hope that things are changing in Ireland.

They may also be changing in England. Below is another article one wouldn’t expect to read in the MSM. In fact it was published by the politically correct London Review of Books and written by an ex-anti-apartheid activist!

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/disk01_.html

Posted by .357 (Dave Johns) on Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:42 | #

“Ground-breaking honesty on Africa and IQ in two mainstream papers with the name “Independent”, and on the same day.”

Don’t get too excited! You can bet there’ll be dozens of articles forthcoming designed to discrediting those two.

It’s called “Fair and Balanced” - PC style.

Posted by Bill on Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:28 | #

“Victims could be allowed a say in the way criminals are punished in court – but only if they call for leniency rather than harsh sentencing.”

Posted by Robert Reis on Friday, July 11, 2008 at 04:29 AM

Aggression (vengeance) is to be engineered out of man’s soul - effeminate man. This is just another tool (among others) to beat us down the path to race suicide.

Posted by Hibernia Girl on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:28 | #

The Immigrant Council of Ireland (uber-PC folks, needless to say) have lodged a complaint with the Irish police against Myers saying that his piece was racially offensive and that he ought to be charged with “hate speech.” (How original!)

Article from the Irish Times:

ICI claims article was ‘racially offensive’

A post by me:

PC bullies from the Immigrant Council of Ireland swing into action

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:25 | #

Hibernia Girl, that was a good log entry you posted on the problems of Africa. However, with all due respect to Steve Sailer and the Pioneer Foundation, one wonders to what extent vitamin and mineral deficiencies among Africans can be the explanation when U.S. Negroes, certainly not malnourished, display the same or nearly the same cognitive/behavioral/civilizational limitations.

By the way, I notice at your site you list this blog, MajorityRights.com, under “USA / Canada.” It’s neither American nor Canadian but an English blog (the fellow who runs it, GW, is an Englishman).

Posted by Matra on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:35 | #

Helen Keogh of the “Christian charity” World Vision on Myers’ article:

What about African world leaders such as Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela and Archbisop Tutu—have these people contributed nothing to the world? What about Africans such as Haile Gabriel Selassie and Tirunesh and Ejegayehu Dibaba—world champions?

Should these people be wiped out because they are from Africa and we should therefore presume that they have nothing to give to the world but AIDS?

Kevin Myers is proposing a version of Nazi Germany’s The Final Solution.

Is he seriously suggesting that Ireland implement a version of this plan whereby we refuse all help to Africa, leave people to die from preventable diseases and thereby finally solve the ‘Africa question in Europe’?

You just knew the Nazis would come up in this controversy.

If the West interferes in Africa we are racist neocolonialist exploiters. If we leave Africa alone we are instituting “a version of Nazi Germany’s The Final Solution”.

Posted by Matra on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:38 | #

This should be more like it

Link

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:36 | #

The only way to answer Helen Keough is by sending her on a six-month all-expenses-paid vacation to Soweto, Durban, Port Moresby, Port-au-Prince, or Detroit, her choice. (For this job I’d frankly recommend Port Moresby.) Oh, and with one of those explosive collars that Arnold Schwarzenegger wore in the film, “Running Man,” the kind that blow up if you try to leave the place without permission.

That should do it.

Posted by weston on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:38 | #

That section of Keough’s article that Matra quoted reads like an unbelievable parody.

Surely Myers isn’t suggesting that the rest of the world can do without Africa’s distance runners.

Talk about a self-refuting argument.

Posted by Hibernia Girl on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:47 | #

Fred: By the way, I notice at your site you list this blog, MajorityRights.com, under “USA / Canada.” It’s neither American nor Canadian but an English blog (the fellow who runs it, GW, is an Englishman).

Oops! Thanks for letting me know, Fred. I dunno why I thought MR was an American blog—I think it was a combination of James Bowery’s presence as well as the level of free and open speech here—I guess I just assumed the owner(s) felt protected by the U.S. 1st Amendment. Apologies to GW!

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:08 | #

Hibernia Girl’s recent log entry, “Why does Ireland have to be transformed?” is excellent, by the way, as are most of the letters in the comments thread underneath. (One part of a letter I didn’t like was by “Choicez” in Southern California who implied race-replacment’s purpose is to assure the retirements of the baby boom generation [since women’s-lib-brainwashed young white women have more or less refused to have white babies for a generation and counting]. That canard was laid to rest a long time ago — not even race-replacement’s most rabid supporters dare to trot that one out any more. It’s crap: Choicez is ten years behind the times with that lie.)

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:34 | #

MR is a blog for the European people. Not English or American.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:03 | #

The only way to answer Helen Keough is by sending her on a six-month all-expenses-paid vacation to Soweto, Durban, Port Moresby, Port-au-Prince, or Detroit, her choice. (For this job I’d frankly recommend Port Moresby.) Oh, and with one of those explosive collars that Arnold Schwarzenegger wore in the film, “Running Man,” the kind that blow up if you try to leave the place without permission. That should do it. (—my comment above)

And Marcfrans will be the perfect choice as Helen’s ... traveling companion, shall we call it? (Oh yes, and don’t forget the exploding collars!)

Yes, Port Moresby ought to do the trick very nicely ... How soon can you two leave?

Posted by 123 on Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:45 | #

“I perused Mr. Myers other columns. He is a Zionist and promoter of the Holocaust religion.”

Yes, now things start to make sense.

How anyone not a member of the tribe would dare write such an article, get it published in a mainstream paper, and on top expect to get away with it, was beyond me.

Posted by Matra on Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:15 | #

Reis,

I perused Mr. Myers other columns. He is a Zionist and promoter of the Holocaust religion

A perfect example of the American WNist mindset. One’s view of the Second World War and Israel trumps everything else. Maybe in there somewhere we’ll discover why Reis prefers Ukrainian multiculturists in Canada over the Anglo-Saxon host population. (The Ukis were more pro-German?)

123,

Most of the the Irish media are pro-Palestinian. I can’t think of a single popular columnist or politician in Ireland who supports the Palestinian cause and immigration control. In Ireland, unlike the US, anti-Zionism and anti-white multiculturalism usually go hand in hand.

Posted by Hibernia Girl on Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:09 | #

Myers is back with a rejoinder:

Writing what I should have written so many years ago

Posted by snax on Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:22 | #

Myers may believe in the holocaust, almost everyone in Europe and America does, and he may say the Jews can have their state, likewise, - me too - but he’s a more open-minded writer than most in the MSM on these subjects.

the-problem-isnt-racism-its-the-tidal-wave-of-immigrants

wiesenthal-was-a-liar—but-that-doesnt-fit-the-fairytale

Posted by snax on Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:03 | #

Perhaps Kevin Myers should be interviewed for MR Radio, most journalists also love to talk and notorious journos usually get that way by design. Myers is becoming notorious:

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/risible-lies-about-immigrants

Small meat for MR stomachs, but as he points out, too much for most of the MSM.

Call him at his word. Fearless or no? Challenges ‘real’ racism or doesn’t he?