printWhat on earth is a representative of the British National Party (BNP) doing in what he says is Wembley (an area of north-west London), but looks like Calcutta, warbling in Welsh? Be gone with you, you rambling racial supremacist. Give it up. As the Virginia Postrel thesis goes, change is always good. Embrace it. Count your blessings: there is still one pukka British symbol on the streets of Wembley: the double-decker bus.
Update I: Surprisingly, most comments hereunder ignore the larger reality, preferring to concentrate on minutia: are the streets clean and orderly (how the fuck do they know?). Western liberals are like that.
By contrast, confronted with a take-over of swathes of their towns, Chinese, Indian or Pakistani men would be furious. This is to their credit.
Yet an out-migration of the indigenous English population from a section of the city they no longer recognize or feel comfortable in is dismissed by your average, non-nonchalant, liberal-minded westerner. How sophisticated! This is why I, with few exceptions, have little respect for western men and, like Tom Fleming, hold white liberal-minded men responsible for everything from affirmative action to racial set-asides to speech codes—and, in general, for most forms of cultural and legal foot-and-mouth. As Dr. Fleming put it:
“[W]e should not make the mistake of blaming black people for the suicide we continue to inflict on ourselves. We white males are the problem, not blacks, women, homosexuals, or Mexicans. We–at least the liberal part of “we”– turned away from our religion and our civilization; we made war on property and marriage; we rejected Haydn and Sophocles in favor of John Cage and Kate Chopin. We have emasculated ourselves, pithed our brains, destroyed our vision and hearing …”
I believe this is the very impulse evinced in the blog posts that dismiss the Wembley footage. It’s left-liberalism at its seeming suavest.
Update II (Nov. 5): DEMOGRAPHICS? DIDDLYSQUAT! It is a great shame that the Jacobinism of the Steyns of the world is mistaken for a coherent defense of the West, or for the good kind of nationhood, for that matter. A little reminder: When the barbarians of the banlieusard rioted through France in November of 2005, one neoconservative troika—Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Frederick Kempe—fingered French racism and snobbery in marginalizing its poor Maghrebis. France, in this unholy trinity’s assessment, fell short in offering its Third Worlders freebies and fraternité.
From “Get With The Global Program, Gaul”:
When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.
The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority [can you say Steyn?]. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity.
Taking the Frank out of the French hasn’t been as easy. As the famed (neoconservative) Francis Fukuyama has observed, in Europe “identity remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory.” How gauche.
Steyn, your “One-Man Global Content Provider,” is, predictably, wrong. Demographics are NOT destiny. Demographics are the excuse of statists (such as our neoconservative contingent) to persevere with immigration policies that destroy western civil society and shore up the western state. (I will incorporate these idea in a column.)
Did the now-waning West become great because it outbred the rest of the world? Ridiculous! The West was once great becasue of human capital—innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas, and the willingness to defend such a civilization.
Of course, if I spouted the silly Steyn line I’d be rich.
After evacuating all the attractive women to the US, I say it serves the English right for giving the world the Bank of England.
In fact, if you spoke to many of those folks they would speak much better English than the commentator.
Culture is the important thing. English culture has revealed it self to be sick in that it cannot keep its population up without immigration. America too.
Sorry but I fail to see the problem. Here you have busy, orderly, clean streets, with people peacefully moving about, going to apparently bustling businesses. So most of these people are born elsewhere and look ‘different’; is that wrong ? That guy is barking up the wrong tree, unless he has something else to say but is too shy to say it. I’m sure the city of Detroit with it’s homogeneous (black), American-born population would really like to have streets looking like that.
So because English culture is “sick” it therefore deserves to be demographically replaced by foreigners? I’m sorry I do not buy that.
How about allowing the English to improve themselves, instead of judging them unworthy of existence and therefore subject to displacement?
Mr. Cloutier,
‘Sorry but I fail to see the problem. Here you have busy, orderly, clean streets, with people peacefully moving about, going to apparently bustling businesses.’
This area of North West London is notorious for gun crime.
“In fact, if you spoke to many of those folks they would speak much better English than the commentator.”
The commentator spoke with a perfectly comprehensible English (Midlands?) accent
The idea that indigenous Brits can’t speak English is just another nasty Lefty notion that seeks to portray anyone even vaguely working-class as a stupid prole.
Griffin’s point about London being a foreign city to the English was confirmed by the brief clip of Wembley High Street. It really does not look like the capital of England anymore.
Amazing. I was in the Netherlands a few years ago just in time for some mini-riots from Dutch “youths” that set some police cars on fire. As you can guess, they weren’t that young and they weren’t that Dutch. It was so culturally enriching to have it happening there. It saved me from having to buy a plane ticket to see it first hand in some third-world “country.”
Agreeing with Michael, I saw (don’t have the link now) a 10 minute Youtube of the Detroit of abandoned buildings, ruined cars rusting, and no people block after block. Compared to that, Wembley looks in very good shape. the Detroit video looked like some Sci-Fi future after the radiation weapon or bio plague had wiped out all the people…..
It’s fun and cute to be open-minded and multi-cultural, but I buy the thesis of Mark Steyn (and others) that the demographic is destiny. If you’re not willing to fight for Western values, then you will lose to those who will. It’s not skin color or ethnicity we’re talking about, it’s the core beliefs and world view. Maybe you want to live under sharia law, but I don’t.
The problem with this picture – this video of part of what used to be London – is that there is no assimilation. No one, certainly not I, objects to legal immigration, but of people who choose to adopt the host country’s ethos.
Those of us who remember Social Studies classes in seventh grade remember the list of components to a successful society:
1. common language
2. common culture and belief system
3. shared view on governance.
What we see in many Western societies is the dissolution of the glue that bonds the people. In the US, the left has successfully converted one society into many “disadvantaged” and “underrepresented” groups, all demanding some payback for real and imagined grievances. And the rest “of us” have let it happen.
We too are falling apart, and it can be traced back to those who demonize Western intellectual history and accomplishment. And I would say that it was mostly old and not-so-old white men that have laid this foundation for equality, justice, and the rights of the individual.
All cultures are not equal. Some have created the framework of our liberties. Others seek to destroy these liberties. And if one cannot tell which is which, then I pity you.
Diana West has two very good articles today in line with this post. [Please get into the habit of providing links for the benefit of fellow posters—and mine.] “Some Great Sense from Great Britain” and “Taxicab Sharia” She reports that one of England’s MPs who has extensive experience in the Afghanistan pacification, reports that it is time for the British troops to come home and protect the British from terrorism. My guess is that neighborhood in the video is where the terrorists would blend into until they were ready to strike. The other article discussed how a Muslim cab driver threw two, alternate lifestyle individuals out of his cab for hugging in his cab. Both the terrorism and the enforcement of religious taboos are possible future problems in our future. One of the reasons for “White flight” is that non-Muslim women are not free to walk down the streets in western dress in a community like the one shown above. A clean, peaceful community comes at a price in liberty.
English culture has revealed it self to be sick in that it cannot keep its population up without immigration. America too.
A country does not need to keep up its population – especially overcrowded England.
It is special interest groups – including businesses with short-term goals and socialists looking to the long-term – who have decided the UK needs these foreign colonists. The more colonists arrive the more natives leave and the fewer children they have due to the deterioration of living conditions.
Compared to that, Wembley looks in very good shape.
Detroit is a city governed by blacks. Wembley is just a neighbourhood within a borough of a city. The colonists don’t run that city (yet).
Word from Detroit —
It all depends on where you choose to film. We are home here to one of the largest Arab communities in the country, complete with ‘calls to prayer’ all over the place like what you saw in the video above.
The wasteland is caused by flight from the area by anyone who can get out. Properties seized by banks and by government can’t be sold at any price. The city owns a huge percentage of the property, most of it abandoned.
It’s the entirely predictable result of a society and its’ government that hates smokestacks, hates the rich, hates capitalism, hates property rights, hates Western values, and has implicit faith in the ability of the cash cow to keep on giving no matter how badly it is mistreated or how little cash it yields any more.
Go into the city limits, and the value of your life becomes equal to the potential spoils to be gotten from robbing you or shooting you to get your car.
The void gets filled by immigrants who are willing to live in these conditions (because it’s affordable), and are the only ones willing to risk their lives to open up stores in the area. By being alien and clannish, they gain some measure of safety by creating conditions that local residents find distasteful.
I live a few miles away from Detroit. I’m moving further away, as far as I can get, before the big riots start. I predict skirmishes between Middle Easterners, Blacks, and Mexicans, as city and state governments crumble of their own weight. When they burn their own neighborhoods, we call it Urban Renewal.
Re: Update – I knew a Chinese Englishman who was more Thatcher than Thatcher – NEVER mention the IRA near him! – and an Indian conservative country-club Republican snob who was upset when his dark-skinned daughter dated a half-black student (where did SHE get HER dark complexion?). Some immigrants adopt the ways of their new country, speak English and become culturally Western. Others – Moslems and underclass blacks come to mind – are hostile to the Western values and probably will never adapt.
But keep in mind that the good old Yankee Protestants were the guiding force behind Abe Lincoln’s Crusade and Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive “reformers”. And that primordial idiot Dubya is WASP to the Nth generation.
But times change – an America of ubiquitous car ownership and phone texting will not return to the small-town days of “Its A Wonderful Life” whether we look like the Mayflower or Starshhip Enterprise. And, frankly, how many people really prefer some rural spot in Kentucky to Silicon Valley – at least the real-estate market votes for the latter.
But the concern is not external complexion as cultural degeneration like honor killings:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1109/saunders110509.php3
Remember – “NATIVE” Americans destroyed Detroit – not recent immigrants.
Related to the subject of this post is this story http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=115011 in which the director of the upcoming sci-fi flick “2012” admits that he did not include footage of Mecca’s Kaaba being blown to bits for fear of fatwa. Footage showing destruction of the Vatican and Christ of the Andes was included. In other words, total capitulation to _their_ values while dumping on ours. Given the real physical risks, I understand it, though.
I also remember about 30 years ago, there was a controversy about a film, “Death of a Princess,” which depicted the execution of a Saudi princess for adultery. At that time, “culturally sensitive” Americans were begging and pleading that it not be shown, but it was anyway. The death penalty for free speech wasn’t in vogue then, however.
“But keep in mind that the good old Yankee Protestants were the guiding force behind Abe Lincoln’s Crusade and Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive “reformers”. And that primordial idiot Dubya is WASP to the Nth generation.” Myron Pauli
Bingo! Look what you have wrought “Progressives”, because you thought pragmatism was far more important than time honored principles such as liberty and basic honesty.
Sorry: I thought that since Ms. West is listed on the left side of the page, readers should be familiar with her; http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx; [Once no longer new; a URL is hard to find from a front page of a website. That’s why we use hyperlinks!]
I agree that immigration is not necessary and would add, not necessary in any country today.
I, too, was troubled by a couple of the initial comments here — but the VDARE article linked by Ilana left an equally bad taste. The author says that he does not support the BNP because he is “not a white nationalist,” and then picks apart Nick Griffin’s BBC performance with an unduly hostile tone, affording him only slightly more credit than did the liberal British press.
I watched the entire Question Time episode on Youtube, and never have I seen the deck so blatantly stacked against someone on a TV show. The obviousness of the BBC’s hatchet job was more offensive than anything Griffin had to say.
Of course, Griffin is far from ideal as the face of the BNP. He has too many skeletons in his closet, too many unfortunate statements on the record. But he must do until someone else comes along.
The libertarian author’s support for the UK Independence Party is understandable, but also a little ironic. Even a shared understanding of the threats posed by mass immigration and the savagery of Islam is not enough to stop native Britons from turning against one another, dividing their allegiances even as the walls close in around them.
Confession: I used to be a “Progressive” in High School. Who can be against progress? But what is progress? Liberty is the only way to prove what true progress is. Otherwise it is just theoretical.
I’d be curious as to whether Muslim immigration into the U. S. and U. K. (with the accompanying lack of assimilation and inevitable clash of values) might be linked to our countries’ groveling before the government of Saudi Arabia, that began (for the U. S.) on May 29, 1933, when Ibn Saud granted Standard Oil of California “exclusive rights for six decades to extract oil from eastern Saudi Arabia,” (K. E. Meyer and S. B. Brysac, “Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East,” p. 227.) I ask because, on reviewing info. about the film, “Death of a Princess,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Princess it’s pretty clear that opposition to the 1980 drama came not from the usual liberal suspects, as I’d erroneously implied, but rather, from business and government leaders in the First World who feared painting the Saudis in a negative light. Loss of commerce, rather than an affront to multiculturalists or a fatwa, was the primary concern back then.
America’s “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia resulted in “fast track visas” for pilot trainees who flew planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11; and I wonder whether it’s also possible that deference to the source of our oil results in increased Muslim immigration from throughout the Ummah, as well.
Myron Pauli: I knew a Chinese Englishman who was more Thatcher than Thatcher – NEVER mention the IRA near him!
The Chinese population in England is small. If they were over 25% of England due to continuing immigration they would develop a strong collective ethnic identity within England that would be in constant political conflict with the English majority. An immigrant is far more likely to adapt the the outward expressions of his host population if there are few of his own kind to mix with.
Northern Ireland is an example of a place where the size of the minority matters. In most areas that are over 90% either Protestant or Catholic the minority population has no choice but to work, shop, go to clubs, and often intermarry with the majority. That majority feels secure enough to respect the rights of the minority.
Even in Northern Ireland the areas where the minority is less than 10% of the population usually have good inter-community relations. The minority accepts the majority’s right to dominate the public space with its ethnic symbols whilst the majority feels secure and in turn tries to show sensitivity to the harmless minority. Areas in N Ireland that have a significant minority are all characterised by a siege mentality, voluntary apartheid, and ethnic agitators.
Myron Pauli: Remember – “NATIVE” Americans destroyed Detroit – not recent immigrants.
Must have been those WASP Mayflower descendants who did that! Get real.
“A clean, peaceful community comes at a price in liberty.” Robert Glisson
It is precisely liberty that leads to clean and peaceful. If we are unclean and unpeaceful it is because the decent people have been muzzled, chained and forced via the power of law in regard to:
1. how their children are educated.
2. who they can hire and fire.
3. what they can say (“hate” speech laws).
4. how they spend their money in that much of it is taxed/looted away by inflation away for the benefit of the ninny, nanny, welfare/warfare state.
Question: Does liberty favor good or evil? Conversely, does tyranny favor good or evil?
Get a clue people.
“America’s “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia resulted in “fast track visas” for pilot trainees who flew planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11; and I wonder whether it’s also possible that deference to the source of our oil results in increased Muslim immigration from throughout the Ummah, as well.” Barbara Grant
Bingo!
“Follow the money trail.”
With the Federal Reserve counterfeiting, marginal tax rates above 50% (FICA, Fed, State), what professionals have the energy to have many children? Other than Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and uber-Catholics, most Western-oriented EDUCATED people frown on having large families.
The result is John Danforth’s Detroit (my sympathies) with 2Pack-Leroy, Pedro, and Abdul propagating dozens of kids, supported by the Welfare State, marginally employable, sucked into the criminal / underground economy, indulged by Demoplican Republicrats seeking votes, and alienated from the global market economy.
American demographic trends are far better than in Ghettoized Europistan – ask Ilana, Diana, or Geert. But don’t knock Bangalore or Guangzhou, I might need to emigrate there the way things are heading in Obamastan!
“The other article discussed how a Muslim cab driver threw two, alternate lifestyle individuals out of his cab for hugging in his cab.” Robert Glisson
If the cab was private property I see no problem except the cabby should probably have advertised his right to eject for behavior he found offensive.
Some folks need to get back into the closet. I try to keep my sins private, why can’t they?
No one, certainly not I, objects to legal immigration…
I do. Emphatically. And I’m not the only one.
Re: Update – I knew a Chinese Englishman who was more Thatcher than Thatcher – NEVER mention the IRA near him! – and an Indian conservative country-club Republican snob who was upset when his dark-skinned daughter dated a half-black student (where did SHE get HER dark complexion?).
Oh yeah? Well my neighbor Keeshawn is smart enough to be a brain surgeon. My minority anecdote beats yours paper-rock-scissors. Get over yourself.
Of course, the immigration problem doesn’t end with your seemingly conservative “Chinese Englishman” (had to laugh at that one). If he suffers an unfortunate ethnic insult from a random drunk, will he remain conservative? Will his children be as conservative as he? And their children? And their children? The British people shouldn’t be expected to roll the dice on such a matter.
Some immigrants adopt the ways of their new country, speak English and become culturally Western.
But most do not and never will, and that is grounds to exclude all of them if it is in the best interests of the nation’s people. Sorry, but this isn’t a parlor game. The number of people you describe in your anecdotal evidence are minute by any extrapolation, so implying that the immigration argument should hinge on them is wildly irresponsible. No nation is morally obligated to allow any immigration, and the fact that white liberals are the ultimate cause of this mess doesn’t make 3rd-world interlopers our allies.
But don’t knock Bangalore or Guangzhou, I might need to emigrate there the way things are heading in Obamastan!
Spoken like a true patriot. When things get too hot, flee!