Mark Steyn shines on the topic of Arizona, and ventures comments on mass immigration. Perhaps we can expect a more courageous stand on the matter in the future?
“….Almost every claim made for the benefits of mass immigration is false. Europeans were told that they needed immigrants to help prop up their otherwise unaffordable social entitlements: In reality, Turks in Germany have three times the rate of welfare dependency as ethnic Germans, and their average retirement age is 50. Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole.”
Here’s more fromSTEYN’s “Bigotry label for thee, not me: Liberals bash Arizonans from the back seat of their limos”:
But wait: What about the broader economic benefits? The World Bank calculated that if rich countries increased their work forces by a mere 3 percent by admitting an extra 14 million people from developing countries, it would benefit the populations of those rich countries by $139 billion. Wow.
In his book ‘Reflections on the Revolution In Europe,’ Christopher Caldwell points out, ‘The aggregate gross domestic product of the advanced economies for the year 2008 is estimated by the International Monetary Fund at close to $40 trillion.’ So an extra $139 billion works out to a spectacular 0.0035 percent. Mr. Caldwell compares the World Bank argument to Austin Powers’ nemesis, Dr. Evil, holding the world hostage for 1 million dollars. ‘Sacrificing 0.0035 of your economy would be a pittance to pay for starting to get your country back.’ A dependence on mass immigration is not a gold mine nor an opportunity to flaunt your multicultural bona fides, but a structural weakness, and it should be addressed as such.”
“The ‘One-Man Global Content Provider’ [Mark Steyn] is wrong. Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital – people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.
Declining birth rates – and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative – are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy Western civil society and shore up the State.
If, as Geert Wilders and Mark Steyn contend, “Islam is a problematic religion; every school of Islam is basically at its core jihadist; and the religion is much closer to a conventional imperial project than to a faith” – its religionists must be kept away. State-engineered mass immigration must be halted.
Yes, postmodernism, PC and relativism hobble the West. Post-colonialism, however, affords it the opportunity to redraw the frontiers at the borders. This is the Wilders project. It has yet to be embraced fully by his American boosters. As Steyn has openly confessed, ‘For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on.'” …
The Second Edition features bonus material. Getyour copy(or copies) now!
Update: Declining birth rates – and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative – are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy Western civil society and shore up the State.
To add to “Anon’s” dazzling examples of small (First World) populations that produced genius second to none, another erudite gentleman spoke of “quality, not quantity,” and offered the examples of the Scottish Enlightenment and modern Jews.
I caught the late-night iteration of the Glenn Beck Show, in which he insinuated that Geert Wilders was of the “far right,” and that the European far right was fascist. See for yourself.
Defunct link:
Functioning one:
Glenn here is aping the thinking of the likes of Mark Steyn, Daniel Hannan, and other neoconservatives: all disavow any reclamation of national identity when done by Europeans. Neoconservatives are multiculturalists by default, by which is meant that, while fussing ceaselessly against official multiculturalism, neoconservatives motivate for that hollow concept of a propositional nation. Accordingly, and to quote from my upcoming book, a nation is nothing but a notion (the last is Buchanan’s turn of phrase), “a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.” There is nothing new about that.
Update I (March 9): Note please that the allusion above was to the neoconservative’s deracinated “thinking” Glenn has assimilated vis-a-vis nationhood and national identity. I do not know who said a good word about Wilders and how it was grounded philosophically, since the reader hereunder does not substantiate his assertion. However, it is one thing to defend Wilders’ right to free speech. That’s dead easy and doesn’t demand much mental effort. It is quite another to tackle Wilders’ refusal, in the name of Western tolerance, to prostrate his patriotism and his very survival—and the steps he wishes to take to that end.
Neoconservatives generally disavow, even mock, European reclamation of identity, with hackneyed, shallow assertions of American superiority: “Americans are so much better than they, as we ‘assimilate’ everyone into our [already dissolved] culture.” That would be a vintage neocon argument.
Update II: The multiculturalims aspect: It exemplifies a seductively shallow aspect readers find appealing in the neoconservative’s argumentation arsenal.
Formulaically, they will finger multiculturalism and the newcomer’s failure to assimilate in a gamut of problems—from what they dub anti-Americanism to terrorism. Neoconservatives, however, resolutely resist dealing with the Putman findings, according to which racial and ethnic diversity mess with people’s minds—especially the host population—and makes them miserable and dysfunctional.
Update III (Mar. 10): I have updated the original, defunct YouTube embed with the functioning one provided by Robert. As Ms. West alleges here, Fox News removed the unreasoned Beck rant. Surprising to me is the surprise evinced by European rightists, and trackers of all things USA, at the denunciation of their positions by Chuckie Krauthammer and Bill Kristol. The latter—together with Hannan, Steyn, etc.—are completely congruent and consistent.
For the European Right “identity remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory”—that’s neoconservative Francis Fukuyama’s derisive description.
My readers are also having a hard time with the distinctions I’ve tried to draw so far.
BECK VS. BURKE. With respect to the Enlightenment and Schmidt’s comments: In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke provides a “compelling presentation of historically-based conservatism.” Russell Kirk said about “Reflections” that it “burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes.” The Founders brought a lot of Burke to the republican table, but, for obvious reasons, our countrymen (Beck is representative) know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious French Revolution.
You can guess who it is that I prefer as a historical figure and social theorist. To quote my friend Paul Gottfried, it is not “the peripatetic troublemaker Paine.”
I caught the late-night iteration of the Glenn Beck Show, in which he insinuated that Geert Wilders was of the “far right,” and that the European far right was fascist. See for yourself.
Defunct link:
Functioning one:
Glenn here is aping the thinking of the likes of Mark Steyn, Daniel Hannan, and other neoconservatives: all disavow any reclamation of national identity when done by Europeans. Neoconservatives are multiculturalists by default, by which is meant that, while fussing ceaselessly against official multiculturalism, neoconservatives motivate for that hollow concept of a propositional nation. Accordingly, and to quote from my upcoming book, a nation is nothing but a notion (the last is Buchanan’s turn of phrase), “a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.” There is nothing new about that.
Update I (March 9): Note please that the allusion above was to the neoconservative’s deracinated “thinking” Glenn has assimilated vis-a-vis nationhood and national identity. I do not know who said a good word about Wilders and how it was grounded philosophically, since the reader hereunder does not substantiate his assertion. However, it is one thing to defend Wilders’ right to free speech. That’s dead easy and doesn’t demand much mental effort. It is quite another to tackle Wilders’ refusal, in the name of Western tolerance, to prostrate his patriotism and his very survival—and the steps he wishes to take to that end.
Neoconservatives generally disavow, even mock, European reclamation of identity, with hackneyed, shallow assertions of American superiority: “Americans are so much better than they, as we ‘assimilate’ everyone into our [already dissolved] culture.” That would be a vintage neocon argument.
Update II: The multiculturalims aspect: It exemplifies a seductively shallow aspect readers find appealing in the neoconservative’s argumentation arsenal.
Formulaically, they will finger multiculturalism and the newcomer’s failure to assimilate in a gamut of problems—from what they dub anti-Americanism to terrorism. Neoconservatives, however, resolutely resist dealing with the Putman findings, according to which racial and ethnic diversity mess with people’s minds—especially the host population—and makes them miserable and dysfunctional.
Update III (Mar. 10): I have updated the original, defunct YouTube embed with the functioning one provided by Robert. As Ms. West alleges here, Fox News removed the unreasoned Beck rant. Surprising to me is the surprise evinced by European rightists, and trackers of all things USA, at the denunciation of their positions by Chuckie Krauthammer and Bill Kristol. The latter—together with Hannan, Steyn, etc.—are completely congruent and consistent.
For the European Right “identity remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory”—that’s neoconservative Francis Fukuyama’s derisive description.
My readers are also having a hard time with the distinctions I’ve tried to draw so far.
BECK VS. BURKE. With respect to the Enlightenment and Schmidt’s comments: In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke provides a “compelling presentation of historically-based conservatism.” Russell Kirk said about “Reflections” that it “burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes.” The Founders brought a lot of Burke to the republican table, but, for obvious reasons, our countrymen (Beck is representative) know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious French Revolution.
You can guess who it is that I prefer as a historical figure and social theorist. To quote my friend Paul Gottfried, it is not “the peripatetic troublemaker Paine.”
