Category Archives: History

UPDATE II (9/6/017): The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865

History, Republicans, States' Rights, The State, War

THE NEW COLUMN IS “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865.” It’s currently on WND.com. An excerpt:

“Anybody who would trash Lee and laud Lincoln is either stupid as a post or just plain evil,” said a sage reader. This applies in spades to anyone who would laud the Radical Republicans of 1865, as one TV GOP blonde has recently, and asininely, done.

The Radical Republicans, if you can believe it, considered Abraham Lincoln a moderate (a bad thing, in their book). Lincoln successor Andrew Johnson these fanatics branded a reactionary (punishable by obstruction and impeachment).

Praised these days by the blonde-ambition faction of the Republican Party, the Radicals were stars of America’s own Reign of Terror over the South, at the end of the War Between the States.

If the French Reign of Terror was led by the terrifying Robespierre and his Jacobins; its American equivalent was infused with the spirit of lunatics like John Brown. (His abolitionist activists snatched five pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, in 1856, and split the captives’ skulls with broadswords, in an act of biblical retribution gone mad.)

Thaddeus Stevens was another of their “inspirational” madmen, lauded in the annals of the Party of Reconstruction. In his biography of Stevens, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian, historian Hans Trefousse even makes a brief reference to the Jacobin Club, a term reserved for the most extreme Republicans in Congress (p. 168). Other club members: Henry Winter Davis, Benjamin Butler, Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Zachariah Chandler.

Although Republicans shared “the drive toward revolution and national unification” (the words of historian Clyde Wilson, in The Yankee Problem, 2016), the Radicals distinguished themselves in their support for sadistic military occupation of the vanquished Rebel States, following the War Between the States.

While assorted GOP teletarts may find the rhetoric of Radical Republicans sexy; overall, these characters are villains of history, for helping to sunder the federal scheme bequeathed by the Founding Fathers. In their fanatical fealty to an almighty central government, Radical Republicans were as alien to the Jeffersonian tradition of self-government as it gets.

Today’s Republicans should know that the Radical Republicans were hardly heartbroken about the assassination of Lincoln, on April 14, 1865.

A mere month earlier (March 4, 1865)—and much to the chagrin of the Radicals—Lincoln had noodled, in his billowing prose, about the need to “bind up the nation’s wounds and proceed with “malice toward none … and charity for all.”

Radical Republicans were having none of that charity stuff. They promptly placed their evil aspirations in Andrew Johnson. A President Johnson, they had hoped, would be a suitable sockpuppet in socking it to the South some more.

Alas, Johnson, a poor, white tailor from North Carolina, turned out, in today’s political nomenclature, to be something of a populist. In going against the Radical Republicans, the 17th president of the United States was the Trump of his time, up against the Rubio-McCain-Graham Radical Republicans. (Marco Rubio, incidentally, has gone as far as to rationalize the Antifa ruffians’ violence, tweeting: “When [an] entire movement [is] built on anger and hatred towards people different than [sic] you, it justifies and ultimately leads to violence against them.”)

When Johnson failed to deliver the radical changes Radical Republicans demanded, our 1865 Antifans accused him of being “tainted by Lincolnism.”

Let’s unpack this …

… READ THE REST. The complete column, “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865,” is currently on WND.com.

FACEBOOK THREAD:

Me: Dig deep into what the Union League (the KKK of the Republicans) did to innocents … Violence, coercion, discrimination, intimidation; disfranchisement; Antifa has done nothing compared to the RR. The metaphor is more than apt, except the RR WERE THE GOVERNMENT. Antifa are still extra-governmental.

UPDATE I (9/6/017):

Readers write:
AvatarAmerican_cavalier • a day ago:

Brilliant and utterly unsurprising that Ilana has been the only author of note to write on this subject. The Radicals were not only tyrants, they were criminals. We owe almost the entire organized crime of America to these individuals. With their graft, greed, formation of identity politics, corporate chicanery, and corruption, they made national the Tammany Hall style of politics. It was from the road paved with this corruption that the mafia, Irish mob and others rode their way to global power.

KonfederateKonservationKorps • a day ago:

Thank you for this thoughtful and well-researched article. God save the South.

“Fool me” writes a day ago:

Ten thumbs up for Ilana!

Petronius • a day ago:

Ms Mercer’s list of Jacobins is woefully incomplete without Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, who should probably rank as America’s greatest war criminal. ..

MORE.

UPDATE II:

Historian of the South Clyde N. Wilson writes with a correction to Clement Wood, whom I quote in “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865“:

Dear Ilana—great historical work you are doing!! One mild correction. The Southern states in the first elections after the war did not elect “secessionists” to office. In fact, they carefully elected and Johnson appointed, men who had not been active secessionists but had gone along loyally with their people—Perry in SC., Sharkey in MS, Worth in NC, etc.

 

The Universality Of The Confederate Cause

Boyd Cathey, Christianity, Democracy, Europe, Federalism, Founding Fathers, History, Political Philosophy, States' Rights

Dr. Boyd D. Cathey’s
SPEECH for CONFEDERATE FLAG DAY, LOUISBURG, March 19, 2017

Thank you. I appreciate that kind introduction. I always like being over in Franklin County. You see, my mother’s was a “Perry,” and although my branch remained up in Perquimans County for about eighty years after the first Perrys came to this part of North Carolina, I have been assured by family genealogists and by  my own research that I’m kin to most of the folks with that last name in this area. So, in a way, I’m a Franklin County boy, and I also count many good folks out this way as dear friends.

Today is a special day, and it is special not just for the citizens of Franklin County. It is special because here—right here in Louisburg—156 years ago, the first Confederate flag was designed and flown. Here, on this spot, began the epic of Americans attempting not only to keep and preserve the republic handed down to them as a legacy by their grandfathers, but also the effort by force of arms to repel the broader attempt by what Europeans have called “the Revolution,” or, what I call global progressivism, to overcome and defeat one of the last remnants of true Western Christian tradition. That remnant was the Confederate South.

Let me explain with some historical context.

I begin with the French Revolution. The intellectual currents that produced that upheaval were already percolating during the early 18th century. In its eventual aims that revolution was not just a violent effort to destroy the French monarchy. No, its intellectual leadership and its practical executors were intent on dethroning the power of religious tradition and, in effect, rejecting the belief in a God Who was Lord of all Creation. In His place they would enthrone what they called “the goddess of Reason” in the heart of Paris, in Notre Dame Cathedral.

Of course, these were the extremists; not all the revolutionaries would go quite so far or advocate such radical measures.  But all of those who soon denominated themselves as “liberals” would accept the primacy of reason and place man at the center of the universe, in effect, displacing God. I think we should keep that fundamental point in mind as we look at subsequent history on into the 19th century.

It is true the Founders of our American republic were familiar with the French radicals, and, although a few read them and expressed a mild enthusiasm for a few of their ideas, most of the Founders of our old republic rejected the radical democracy and the extremely destructive ideas of that revolution.  In a real sense, the formerly loyal colonists left Great Britain and declared their independence to vindicate their traditional rights and duties as patriotic Englishmen. That is, to use the words of the great historian, Bernard Bailyn, ours was a “revolution averted, not made.”

Our Constitution was configured as a very conservative document.  The paramount rights of the various states were fully recognized. And what we might call “liberal democracy” and across-the-board equality were avoided.

What do I mean by that?

First, the Founders set up a system that was balanced, based deeply in English law. Three branches of government were established as check-and-balance safeguards against tyranny. Only those citizens who really had an interest in the new commonwealth would have a real voice in its governance.  It was up to each state to decide the qualifications for voting and for holding public office. And most states had a religious qualification for elected office holders.  For instance, in North Carolina up until 1868 you had to be a Christian to hold elective office.  As for voting, most states required voters to hold some kind of property—that is, they had to have some actual and real interest in the country. Our forefathers figured that only if you had an interest—an involvement—could you be truly trusted to cast a vote.

Let me point out, parenthetically, that the Supreme Court never declared such conditions and qualifications illegal or unconstitutional in the 19th century. Only in our benighted modern era have such decisions been made. But it is equally evident and clear that the Founders had no intention whatsoever to in any way impede religion or the states’ establishing Christianity in their respective territories. To make that assertion is to reveal an abysmal ignorance of history.

Let us jump forward to 1860. Up until that time the general consensus had been that the old republican system established by the Constitution of 1787 was and should be the basis for American life. But beginning early in the life of our republic there were a few voices—not many, but a few—that advocated greater centralization and more radical changes. Even in the Northern states, those voices were a minority for most of our ante-bellum period. Yet, those voices who thought that way were loud and boisterous.

Certainly, the issue of slavery entered this discussion, beginning in 1820 with the debates over the Missouri Compromise. But even then, the issue for most members of Congress was not slavery itself, but the power, both economic and political, of the states. It was the great Nathaniel Macon, North Carolina’s only Speaker of the House of Representatives, who saw clearly what was brewing.  For him the issue boiled down to the power of the Federal government to dictate to the states the disposition of their property.  If the Federal government could do that, he said, then a war between the states—that is, between those who believed in states’ rights and those who did not—would be the eventual result.

In 1861 North Carolina very reluctantly left the Federal union, but only after the Lincoln administration had demanded troops to invade South Carolina.  As members of the North Carolina Secession Convention declared, if a free state, a former colony, had freely entered the Federal union, then it could, with justice, freely leave that union if there were serious and grave reasons.  Indeed, many of the original thirteen colonies actually said so in the acts of joining the union.

When North Carolina seceded on May 20, 1861, it did so on the anniversary date of its 1775 Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Our state declared that the bond of union was dissolved and that as a free people we were re-vindicating our rights as citizens under the original American Constitution and not the one abused and scorned by the Lincoln administration.

Now let us return to my earlier discussion of what I termed “the Revolution.” And let’s examine how the actions taken in 1861 and our Southern crusade were viewed worldwide. The efforts of the Southern Confederacy on the battlefield, 1861-1865, were seen by many traditionalists in Europe as part of a global counter-revolution—the resistance—against the revolutionary poison unleashed by the French Revolution.

When I studied in Spain for my doctorate and later in Switzerland, I began to read and examine documents in various archives detailing the enthusiastic support that many persons, writers, even sovereigns, in Europe gave to the Confederacy. Thousands—yes, thousands—of volunteers came to the South to fight for the Confederacy.

Let me give some fascinating and incredible examples.

First, probably very few Americans know anything about the old Kingdom of Naples.  It ceased to exist in early 1861, after the forces of the liberal Kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy defeated it, thereby establishing the modern Kingdom of Italy. The Kingdom of Naples was hated with a passion by European liberals. For them it was backward, too bound to tradition and custom, too undemocratic, too hierarchical.  After an heroic fight the last Neapolitan army was defeated in February of 1861.

And then, guess what happened?  As many as perhaps 2,000 of those soldiers of the old, traditionalist Kingdom of Naples got on boats and sailed for New Orleans to volunteer to fight for the new Confederacy. Many of them formed the Italian Brigade that fought valiantly in Louisiana, along the Mississippi, and most notably at the Battle of Mansfield. Many lie buried in Southern soil, honored by our SCV compatriots down in Louisiana and Mississippi. Some returned to Italy.

Back in 1977 I visited a museum and revered historic site outside the city of Naples. There, over the hallowed memorial to Neapolitan Confederates, flew side by side a Third National Confederate Flag and the Royal Standard of the old Kingdom of Naples—gone maybe, but not forgotten.

That story is not well known, but it is not unique. In Spain I discovered that as many as 1,000 Spanish Traditionalists, or Carlists, who rose up against Liberalism in their own country under the motto, “God, Country, our Regional Rights, and our King,” came to Texas to volunteer for the Confederacy. They came by way of Mexico and fought in Confederate ranks at Sabine Pass and at other battles. According to Spanish military historian, David Odalric de Caixal, some enlisted in the Louisiana Tigers. Others found their way as far afield as the 34th and 41st Tennessee regiments. A few even ended up in the Army of Northern Virginia, where General A. P. Hill called them “his rough, tattered lions sent by Providence.”

In Spain one of my dearest friends, the Baron of Montevilla, had an ancestor who traveled to Texas to fight for the Confederacy. When his ancestor returned to Spain, an acquaintance asked him: “How can you justify fighting for two lost causes?” To which my friend’s ancestor replied: “A lost cause is never really lost if the fight is for what is true and what is right.”

Additional volunteers for the Confederate cause came from France and other European countries. We all should remember the great Prussian officer, Johann Heros von Borcke, who rode gallantly with General Jeb Stuart and distinguished himself throughout the war. Returning to Prussia after the war, he continued to fly our flag at his estate until his death. And who can forget Major General the Prince Camille de Polignac, from an old and noble traditionalist French family, who came and on the death of General Alfred Mouton, assumed command of Mouton’s division at the Battle of Mansfield? Among his troops were Texas frontiersmen, and apparently many of them could not pronounce his last name. So they called him “Gen’ral Polecat.”  But they loved him just the same, and would have followed him to the gates of Hell. Interestingly, the Prince de Polignac was the last surviving Confederate Major General, passing away in 1913.

In recent years it has been our Battle Flag that has flown as the people of East Germany tore down the Berlin Wall.  And today in the centuries-old Russian-speaking area of Ukraine—the Donbas—as those valiant people attempt to secede from an oppressive, centralized and imposed Ukrainian state, they fly a replica of our Battle Flag as a sign of the defense of their liberties and their belief in their Christian and Russian heritage.

What I am saying, my friends, is that our cause, the cause of the Confederacy, the cause symbolized by that flag that flies here today, was and is a cause that has universal meaning.

In the eyes of European traditionalists the Southern Confederacy represented the finest of Western Christian heritage. They could identify with leaders like Lee, Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Stuart, and others. Of course, most of those European supporters were Catholic, not Protestant, but they shared a fundamental world view of an order under God, a belief in Divine and Natural Law, an understanding that society is composed of families in communities, and an allegiance to the idea of states’ rights, which they called subsidiarity.  That is, what can be done on a lower level of government, very simply should be done on that level closer to the people, and not on a higher level.

But those Europeans also saw the heroic virtue of the South, and it was an heroic virtue based in the chivalry and honor of Christian tradition.  It was opposed to the growing Liberalism in the North.  That Liberalism advanced a progressivist view that history was an unfolding evolution of human perfectibility, throwing off older beliefs and what they called the “myths” and chains of tradition. Whether those boys in butternut and gray who sank deep in the cold mud trenches at Petersburg completely realized it or not, they were defending Western Christian tradition against Liberal Modernism. And thus they stood with their traditionalist brothers in Europe and elsewhere who also rejected the progressivist vision of history.

My friends, for 152 years we have watched as the results of Southern military defeat have metastasized like a voracious cancer. Sixty years ago many Southerners felt that we had reached a real understanding with the Progressivists. We were mostly left alone; we had a thriving literature with America’s greatest writers in our midst. Hollywood made films that treated us at least with some sympathy. Our colleges taught real history. Although still suffering the deep economic consequences of military defeat, our people had made giant strides of recovery.

All that changed beginning in the 1960s. Since then, not only here in our beloved Southland, but in America generally, the Progressivist revolution has taken aim, and the targets are many: our politics—-our entertainment industry—-our educational system—-and our churches. It is as if a giant infection and subversion have taken place. Indeed, I would assert that they have taken place, and, sadly, most of our fellow citizens have been lulled by the false victories by politicians who promise us one thing, but once in office, go along to get along with a powerful progressivist establishment.  And that establishment will accept no dissent.

We are at ground zero in this cultural and political war.  And although our particular conflict concerns basically our Southern heritage, our legacy, and our symbols, it also involves, as I said earlier, a broader battle for Western Christian civilization, itself.

When I was in Spain pursuing graduate studies, my good friend called the Southern soldiers who gave their lives at Gettysburg, Bentonville, and other battle sites—he called them “Paladins of Christian Civilization.” I think that is very true.

Remember fifty years ago when Raleigh’s Channel 5, WRAL-TV, would sign off by playing “Dixie”? The times have changed radically.  The Revolution has made a lot of progress since then. Now our flags and precious relics are hidden away in dusty museums, our songs are banned, our symbols are labeled as “hateful.”

So it is for us, under that flag, to redouble our commitment to those principles that our ancestors held dear and for which they bled and died. That may mean that we lose friends or even lose positions. It may even mean that we must spend years, perhaps decades, in a kind of dark catacomb. But if we are faithful to those principles and to that memory—if we are faithful to the precious inheritance that we have received—-if we are faithful to that flag and what it stands for—-then we shall have done our duty.

For our principles are timeless and they only fall if we relinquish the field of battle. We cannot and must not.

As I grow older, the words of my Spanish friend’s ancestor resound constantly in my ears: “A lost cause is never truly lost if the fight is for what is true and what is right.”

That is our obligation before the long shadow of our ancestors and before the judgment of Almighty God. We can and should do no less.

Thank you, and God bless the South!

*****

References:

David Odalric de Caixal, in the Spanish journal, La Santa Causa. Accessed online at: http://www.geocities.ws/boinasrojas/impresa.html.

M. Estella, “Un historiador investiga la presencia de carlistas en la Guerra de Secession,” Diario de Navarra [Pamplona], December 9, 2011. Accessed online at: http://www.diariodenavarra.es/noticias/navarra/tierra_estella_valdizarbe/un_historiador

_investiga_presencia_carlistas_guerra_secesion_57393_1006.html

==========================================

~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.

George Orwell’s “1984” And The “Must Topple” List

America, Communism, Free Speech, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Literature, States' Rights

FROM George Orwell’s “1984”: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

“Must topple” is courtesy of the Observer-Reporter.

Douglas Murray Gets Rave Reviews Despite Ripped-Off Title & Unoriginal Theme

Britain, Colonialism, Europe, History, IMMIGRATION, Islam, The West

What kind of a “book review” passes no judgment on the author under review, in this case neoconservative Douglas Murray, while simultaneously, if surreptitiously, pointing out that the title and theme of his book, The Strange Death of Europe, are, well, unoriginal?

All Murray, an articulate Second Hander, has done is to elegantly restate the tragedy of inviting immigration and Islam into Europe while ignoring identity and civilization, themes our side (Old Rightists) has been pounding for decades. Our side doesn’t ponder wistfully, but attacks the culprits with verve and vim.

Yes, Murray is not happy. He’s gone all wistful about Europe’s demise through immigration. I remember writing, in 2005, about the response of American neoconservatives to Muslim riots in France. They (Frederick Kempe, Francis Fukuyama, Jonah Goldberg) gloated. Their Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American exceptionalism. Riots are not happening in the US because we’re superior, they crowed. Krauthammer, Mark Steyn: that was their position. Other than making babies at home and total war abroad, Steyn had refused at the time to propose an immigration ban. My point: Neocons are seldom on the vanguard of conservative thought. Yet, after marginalizing those who are, onto the scene they prance, managing to appear cleverer and more seductive than everyone. How do they get away with this?

As to colonialism: Murray, it appears, has been unable to come up with a better explanation for the “suicide of the West” than the hackneyed guilt over it!

In Into the Cannibal’s Pot, published in 2011, I presented a chapter on Africa BC (Before Colonialism) and After, citing the great Sir P. T. Bauer at length. The book, written 6 years ago, was unequivocal: Condemn or condone it, before colonialism there was nothing in Africa.

Here’s the wishy-washy Chronicles review:

George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England was published in 1935.  It is an exceptionally well-written book and became a cult classic, its haunting title suggesting a mysterious crime, as in a thriller.  Dangerfield’s theme was the decay of the civilization created by the British Liberal movement in the years that led up to 1914.  Douglas Murray’s book is consciously indebted to its antecedent, and makes a ferociously well-argued case that Europe is now engaged on a parallel course: “Europe is committing suicide.  Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide.  Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.”

That challenging exordium states the theme, which Murray pursues with unrelenting tenacity and wide grasp of fact.  The mass movement of peoples into Europe coincided with a loss of faith in Europe’s own beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy: “Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past.”  This is a fairly recent development.  Half a century ago, “colonial guilt” was not current; it is now widely accepted through sheer repetition as historical and psychological truth.  And yet most adults at that time had no idea of this supposed burden of guilt.  Most people reckoned that the British Empire, barring a few grubby episodes, was on the whole a good thing.  And it extended the civilization of Europe.  When in 1969 Kenneth Clark was commissioned by the BBC to write and present a TV series, he called it Civilization.  He meant European civilization, with a few nods toward oriental buildings.  There was some sniping from the left, but the TV series, with its accompanying book, was enormously successful.  There was a precedent in The Rise of Christian Europe (1964), a series of lectures delivered to the University of Sussex by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University.  Trevor-Roper did not believe in African history; “there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa.”  To turn in that direction

‘we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped.’

They’d hang him for that today.

Such was the tottering establishment opinion of the era.  “While the likelihood of cultural erosion remains irresistible,” says Murray, “the options for cultural defence continue to be unacceptable.”  The rise of “colonial guilt” fed the idea of Europe as a unitary state, with its own structures of rights, laws, and institutions that superseded the nationalisms that divided Europe.  The European Union was conceived, born, and grew into sickly manhood.  Its hallmark was a borderless Europe, with no internal frontiers—and not much of an external one.

And to that Europe the migrants came—legally, to begin with, and then in vast numbers with no pretense of legality.  In Britain, Enoch Powell first raised the problem of absorbing the numbers.  He was at once reviled as a racist, and dismissed by Edward Heath from the Cabinet.  In fact Powell was never a racist.  (In India he learned Urdu to interpreter level, and was well regarded by his Indian constituents in Wolverhampton.)  He was a nationalist, for whom England was the supreme value.  His “Rivers of Blood” speech made discussion of immigration impossible for many years.  But he had understood the problems of integration; and the later spilling of blood in the capital went far toward his posthumous rehabilitation.  Not that there has been any sign of this in official pronouncements.

Murray’s central theme is the ever-widening chasm between government policy and the views of the population at large.  In the early postwar years European governments simply imported workers; they needed them, especially Germany.  Later on immigration took a sharply ideological turn.  When Tony Blair allowed free entry to the U.K. for the eight new accession countries in 2004, the government announced that it expected 13,000 people per year to take advantage of the scheme.  This was plainly ridiculous.  Britain was an extremely attractive haven to the Eastern European countries, all much poorer, and their numbers resident in Britain soared from 170,000 in 2004 to 1.24 million in 2013.  But this was a deliberate policy of societal transformation imposed on the nation, “a culture war being waged against the British people using immigrants as some kind of battering ram.”

There were excuses.  Governments believed, or affected to believe, that the Gastarbeiter would return to their home countries.  They did not.  They brought in their families, old and young, and put down roots.  So politicians began to talk of “controlling immigration,” with no feasible means of achieving this; such talk became merely “an electoral trick.”  The next recourse was that of the Conservative mayor of London (probably the last of that party), Boris Johnson.  In a column for the Daily Telegraph titled “Let’s not dwell on immigration but sow the seeds of integration,” Johnson wrote, “We need to stop moaning about the damburst.  It’s happened.  There is nothing we can do now except make the process of absorption as eupeptic as possible.”  After half a century of failed eupeptic endeavor, for which governments were solely responsible, it takes some chutzpah to chide the citizenry for not trying harder.  It is one thing to believe that some immigration is beneficial to the host country.  It does not follow that the more immigration, the better.  But this was the default position of the liberal media and those who appeared on TV.  Those holding different views did not appear on TV.

The cultural downside of mass immigration became evident in the new century, and following the 2011 census.  An Old Bailey trial found nine Muslim men—seven of Pakistani origin, two from North Africa—guilty of the sex trafficking of children between the ages of 11 and 13.  One girl of 11 was branded with the initial of her “owner,” M for Mohammed.  High-profile cases with the same import came out of Rotherham and other northern centers.  In Rochdale 1,400 cases of sexual abuse were traced; they were sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism.  The authorities took no serious action, and the media reported these events with studied euphemisms, such as “Asian men” instead of “Pakistani” or “Muslim.”  The official view promoted talk of a “melting pot” (a term that never applied to Britain) and hid the implications of population growth.  The number of migrants continues to soar well above the official figures.  Although net migration figures for recent years are far in excess of 300,000, “the number of new National Insurance numbers issued each year (because they are required for work) has been more than double that.”  Immigration and rising birthrates among immigrants account for almost all the population growth, which ensures that the demographic makeup of the U.K. will change significantly within the lifespan of most readers of this book.  Murray concludes this somber chapter: “the voices almost everybody wanted to demonise and dismiss were in the final analysis the voices whose predictions were nearest to being right.”

Murray demolishes the economic case for high rates of immigration in a devastating chapter, “The Excuses We Told Ourselves.”  The basis of the welfare state is that people are able to take services out of the system because they have paid into it through their working lives.  But new migrants who have contributed nothing make immediate demands on healthcare, schools, and housing.  A study by University College London found that from 1995 to 2011 the potential cost of immigration to Britain was £159 billion.  “The reality is that whatever its other benefits, the economic benefits of immigration accrue almost solely to the migrant.”

Then there is the problem of aging.  In order to maintain a numerically stable population, a developed country needs a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman.  Across Europe in recent years that rate has fallen below replacement level, partly for economic reasons.  The costs of bringing up a child and providing for a decent education for him are well known, and frankly dismaying.  The aged, their numbers ever-growing, need care, which can come from migrant workers.  But those same migrants will themselves grow old.  The “diversity” argument holds that they bring new cultures and attitudes—“and of course the endlessly cited example of new and exciting cuisine.”  Their social and political views, however, may be startlingly different from those of the host country.

The travails of Continental Europe are extensively visited here.  They are not shared by the Visegrad group (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic), which, being Christian, refuses to have anything to do with Angela Merkel’s policy of a quota system for largely Muslim immigrants.  Their line is “You broke it, you own it.”  Murray has been to Lampedusa, an offshore island that serves as a gateway to the Continent: “Once onto Lampedusa you are into Italy, and once into Italy you are into Europe.”  The migrants are passed on, making their way to France, where virtually nobody is a first arrival—the Atlantic crossing to Bordeaux holds no charms for them—and congregate near a Channel port where the great prize is entry to El Dorado, Britain.  In several excruciating chapters, Murray details the hellish consequences of people-trafficking and the refusal of the authorities to face up to the problem.

Merkel continued to assert the moral aspect of multiculturalism: “it suddenly seemed as though some of the absolute bases of Western civilization were being offered up for negotiation.”  What is now happening is that entire national populations fear “Le grand remplacement” (Renaud Camus’s term), described by a brilliant novelist-philosopher, Michel Houellebecq, whose dark novel Submission imagines a future in which France votes for a moderate Muslim party as the only means of keeping the National Front out of power.

Population displacement hides behind that thoroughly bogus concept of “net migration,” the figure at the forefront of the British government’s policy of reassuring its citizens that immigration is under control.  If the numbers of leavers and newcomers are not far apart, then all seems to be in order.  But suppose that in a given year half a million left the U.K., and another half a million entered the country: Net migration is nil.  Would that be hailed as success?  In that case, the interesting question is not simply arrivals, but leavers.  For a pointer to the future, look at France.  In 2016 an estimated 12,000 millionaires left France; 60,000 total, since 2000.  Where did they go?  Top of the list came Australia, an outpost of Europe with a superb climate, generous social arrangements, and freedom from the migration problems of Europe.  Another thing: Australia and New Zealand have no inheritance tax.  Wealth protects itself, and wealth is part of the future.

For the Europe left behind, the prospects are less alluring, as the states have to pay for the demands of their own citizens and of immigrants, most of whom are simply gatecrashers who cannot be repatriated or repudiated.  Murray’s final two sentences read, “Prisoners of the past and of the present, for Europeans there seem finally to be no decent answers to the future.  Which is how the fatal blow will finally land.”  Dangerfield’s elegiac musings on The Strange Death of Liberal England come to mind as the author characterizes the aftermath of the Sarajevo killings.  It is his equivalent to Sir Edward Grey’s “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”  Dangerfield wrote,

‘Now the gracious, the terrible twilight absorbs, minute by minute, the low German coast, and seems, in the mind’s eye, to creep reluctantly westward . . . And now the half light fades away altogether, and on the splendour of Imperial England there falls, at last and forever, an inextinguishable dark.’

Change “England” to “Europe,” and Dangerfield’s conclusion is Murray’s.