|Vol. 14, No. 7||July 2003|
23 Years of Black Rule
The view from neighboring South Africa.
Thabo Mbeki (left) and Robert Mugabe —
bad news for the whites of Southern Africa.
Zimbabwe — when it was ruled by whites and known as Rhodesia — was the most prosperous nation in southern Africa. When black rule began in 1980, the country had excellent railroads, good highways, and clean, well run towns. It was rich in gold, chromium, platinum, and coal, and Rhodesia was such an agricultural success it exported food. It has now been reduced to a shattered ruin, facing famine, with whites and black dissenters murdered and tortured.
t is fashionable to blame the country’s failures on the man who has been president since 1980, Robert Mugabe. Even the famous white South African liberal Dorris Lessing writes of his “arbitrary cruelties,” and tells us “crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness.” Mr. Mugabe is undoubtedly a bad character, but so are most of the people who rule African countries. It is possible he hastened Zimbabwe’s decline but decline was inevitable once blacks took over institutions built by whites.
In the eyes of the world, black rule is so fine a thing it must never be spoiled by describing it accurately. The press therefore ignored the thievery and anti-white hatred of Zimbabwe’s new government. It looked the other way when Mr. Mugabe’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade killed thousands of Ndebele tribesmen for failing to support their new president from the Shona tribe. When, as early as the mid-1980s, the United Nations reported that the Mugabe government was as greedy and corrupt as any in Africa, there was silence in the West. Mr. Mugabe’s latest antics — driving white farmers off the land, and killing and muzzling political opponents — have finally forced a reluctant world to recognize him for the brute that he is.
There seem to be two additional motives beyond his usual avarice and cruelty behind Mr. Mugabe’s current campaigns. Since his government had pillaged every other source of wealth, including the mining sector, the 4,000 or so white farmers who continued to be the backbone of the economy were the only source of prosperity still available for “redistribution,” that is to say, appropriation by Mr. Mugabe’s friends. At the same time, Mr. Mugabe appears to have been deeply envious of the world’s adulation of Nelson Mandela next door in South Africa. By making one final and dramatic “anti-colonial” gesture, and by consolidating power beyond the slightest threat, he seemed to think his fame would reduce Mr. Mandela to insignificance.
Whatever the motives, in early 2000, Zimbabwe launched a program of violence and ethnic cleansing against whites, and began systematic terror against black Zimbabweans who dared to oppose the government.
The campaign against whites has been simple but effective. Truckloads of self-styled “war veterans” — the vast majority of whom are far too young to have fought the white regime in the bush war that ended 22 years ago — show up at white farms, where they camp out, get drunk, threaten the farmer and his family, and beat up black workers. The official fiction is that this is a spontaneous movement of Zimbabwean peasants who have lost patience with the refusal of whites to give up land they “stole” from blacks, but the invading convoys are clearly supported and supplied by the government. The police refuse to evict the “war veterans,” and the government has ratified the occupations by issuing decrees to revoke white ownership.
Most farmers have managed to get out alive, but 11 have not. The first two to die were David Stevens and Martin Olds. Their murders, which took place in 2000, set the tone for the ethnic cleansing that has followed.
David Stevens, who shared profits with his workers, was a member of the opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). On April 15, 2000, Mugabe-supporters attacked him on his farm in the Macheke area, about 60 miles east of Harare. He managed to escape to police protection, but the mob of “veterans” stormed the police station and abducted him in view of the several officers who did nothing. The blacks dragged him into the bush, where they tortured him and shot him at point-blank range with a shotgun. They then mixed his blood with alcohol and drank it. Mr. Mugabe himself approved the murder, saying Stevens “had it coming to him” because of his work with the opposition.
Martin Olds, the second farmer to die, was alone on his farm 400 miles southwest of Harare. He had sent his wife and two children to relative safety with friends because of death threats. He told the local police about the threats but they did nothing. At dawn on April 18, 2000, hundreds of armed men arrived at his farm in a convoy of 14 cars and a tractor trailer. They attacked the farm house but the 42-year-old former soldier held them off with a rifle and a shotgun. He telephoned his mother, who called the police four times but they refused to intervene. At one point a rifle bullet shattered his leg. He radioed to friends: “I’ve been shot and I need an ambulance.”
Farmers rushed to his assistance, but were fired on when they approached his compound. They reported that many of the blacks were drunk. Police, who had set up a road block outside the farm, would not let an ambulance through. Mr. Olds splinted his own leg and went on fighting, wounding several attackers. The two-hour gun battle ended only when the blacks set his house on fire and forced him out. They beat him to mush and then shot him twice in the face at close range. The “war veterans” then got into their vehicles and drove away.
His widow, Kathy Olds, fled to England with their two children, a suitcase, and £60 in cash. His mother should have done the same. Nearly a year later, 68-year-old Gloria Olds died in a hail of bullets early one morning as she opened the gates to her house. Her attackers also shot her three dogs.
On December 12, 2000, a gang of “war veterans” gunned down another farmer, Henry Elsworth. He was a 70-year-old cripple, hobbling on his crutches when he was killed in Kwekwe, 125 miles southwest of Harare. His son Ian, who took five bullets in the leg and groin during the attack, said his father had received many death threats in the months before the murder, and had even left the country briefly in the hope tensions would subside.
Terry Ford, the tenth white farmer killed, had given up resistance and was actually leaving his property after an attack by 20 “war veterans.” Other “veterans” stopped his car, forced him out, stood him up against a tree, and executed him. Many other whites — men and women — have been beaten, threatened, and intimidated.
The self-styled leader of the farm invaders, the late Chenjerai Hunzvi, was a prominent Mugabe supporter, who personally lead militants onto more than 1,700 farms. He actually did fight against the white regime, and liked to go by the name of “Hitler.” He was a member of the Zimbabwe parliament, and at one time was probably the second most powerful man in the country. No one worked harder to drive whites off the land. In May 2000, Hunzvi publicly urged his countrymen to seek out “British passport holders” — whom he called “ruthless, cunning people” — and force them out of the country.
Chenjerai ‘Hitler’ Hunzvi.
“Hitler” was only following government policy. In April 2000, Mr. Mugabe told a television audience that white farmers were “enemies of the state.” In October, he elaborated on whites: “These crooks, really, we inherited as part of our population … We cannot expect them to have straightened up, to be honest people, and an honest community, all told… Yes, some of them are good people, but they remain cheats. They remain dishonest.” On August 18, 2001, Zimbabwe’s Vice President Joseph Msika explained that “whites are not human beings.”
Anyone who tormented whites or helped drive them out was therefore a great leader. In June 2001, shortly after Hunzvi died of AIDS, the ruling party politburo, headed by Mr. Mugabe, declared Hunzvi an official national hero. He is buried in Zimbabwe’s Hero’s Acre. In his funeral tribute, Mr. Mugabe said the dead man’s “leadership was particularly inspiring in that it came at an historic time.”
No doubt because he can hardly believe the British would abandon their co-racialists to death and dispossession, Mr. Mugabe is convinced Anthony Blair’s government is constantly plotting against him and is responsible for many problems. Mr. Blair has, in fact, said a few mild things against Mr. Mugabe, but has not lifted a finger to prevent outrages against whites, almost all of whom are of British stock, and many of whom also hold British citizenship.
There is no doubt Mr. Mugabe wants to expel whites, but the vast majority of his victims have been black. The non-partisan Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum has drawn up a list of 142 Zimbabweans killed in political violence since 2000. Only 11 were white, and almost all of the remaining 131 were supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Mugabe thugs have also killed another 115 black farm workers. Their crime is to have opposed the campaign against whites.
Many blacks who worked for white farmers were happy with their jobs, and knew ruin would follow the land grabs. Very few blacks can operate a modern, commercial farm, and when whites are run off production grinds to a halt. Any black worker who shows the slightest hint of support for whites or for the opposition MDC becomes an “enemy of the people.” The “war veterans” have operated like Maoist Red Guards, forcing farm workers to attend political rallies where they were made to identify MDC supporters. The Mugabe thugs then beat the opposition supporters or make other workers beat them. The farm invaders also love to make people sing songs in praise of Mr. Mugabe and his party for hours at a time. They have burned some farm workers out of their homes and looted many others.
In the Karoi district, black workers reported more than 1,000 cases of assault by Mugabe gangs in the two-month period of June and July 2000 alone. The police did nothing. After farmers and black workers complained, the local police chief, Superintendent Mabunda, responded with threats: “Do you want war? If you want war, I will bring troops and we can have war. I think we will have war today.”
A huge number of blacks lost homes, jobs, and access to schools and medicine, as the “war veterans” rampaged through the country, shutting down farms. Many once-prosperous farms are now looted, overgrown wrecks, and food production has plummeted. Many of the high-ranking blacks who have officially taken possession do not even pretend to farm. They live in the cities and come out for picnics.
According to the Zimbabwe Agricultural Welfare Trust (ZAWT), an organization that helps blacks suffering from the chaos of Mr. Mugabe’s polices, between February 2000 and the end of 2002, about 1,300 commercial farmers were forced to stop farming. An estimated 200,000 farm workers have lost either their homes or their jobs since the farm invasions began, and this figure does not include wives and children. The majority of displaced workers have nowhere to go. Countless thousands are now scattered around the farming areas, sometimes simply camping along roadsides with no possessions. They join the estimated 600,000 “internally displaced” people in Zimbabwe. It is not well known that a few prosperous blacks have lost farms. Anyone identified with the opposition can be treated just like a white.
The brown areas in the eastern part
of the country were a lush green
before whites were driven off.
Now Zimbabwe faces famine.
The economic consequences of raping the countryside have been immense. While it is true that southern Africa is suffering from drought, there is no doubt that the food crisis now facing Zimbabwe is the result of Mr. Mugabe’s land policy. When whites could still farm freely, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of southern Africa, and exported a range of food products. Now there are only an estimated 350 commercial farmers left, many operating under impossible conditions.
The catastrophic drop in food production means that an estimated eight million of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people face starvation, according to the UN and other international bodies. Corn meal — the staple food — bread, milk, sugar and other commodities are scarce, and long lines are common. In the Masvingo district, a BBC reporter was shocked to find Zimbabweans scratching in the dirt looking for roots to eat. Other journalists have found Zimbabweans eating rats, river silt and poisonous plants in order to fill their stomachs.
The entire economy is starving. Tobacco, once the leading export product, was largely grown by white farmers. Now, hard currency shortages mean gas stations run dry. Finance Minister Simba Makoni admits the country is bankrupt. “No one is investing in the country, nor is there any likelihood anyone will, and there is no foreign currency available to import food,” he says, in a rare display of government honesty. Food relief — the United States is a major donor — is distributed along political lines, further consolidating Mr. Mugabe’s power.
When black rule began, Zimbabwe still had all the institutions of Western government whites had set up, and although Mr. Mugabe has essentially dictatorial powers, he has not yet completely destroyed these institutions. For example, Zimbabwe still has elections, in which political opponents run for office against the ruling Zanu-PF party. In the early years, Mr. Mugabe could afford to hold elections with relatively little vote-rigging because he and his movement were still popular. Now he rules through force and intimidation, and opposition politics is a dangerous career.
In connection with the June 2000 parliamentary elections alone, Mugabe supporters murdered more than 30 political opponents. Dozens of opposition politicians have been arrested, assaulted, or had their homes attacked. Human rights groups charge that during the elections there were more than 19,000 cases of politically-motivated violence and torture. Since the vote, Mugabe thugs have killed another estimated 60 to 80 opposition supporters. The elections themselves were spectacularly corrupt, but still left opposition parties with 48 percent of the 120 contested seats (30 parliamentarians are directly appointed by Mr. Mugabe, so the MDC has 57 of 150 seats).
Another gift of white Rhodesians to black Zimbabwe was a tradition of press freedom, a tradition Mr. Mugabe has gradually snuffed out. During 2002, the authorities threw two journalists in jail, detained 32, and assaulted five. The offices of the Daily News, the one remaining independent paper, have been firebombed three times in the last two years. In May, police forced the last foreign correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, onto a plane and expelled him for publishing “false news.”
A once-independent police and judiciary are yet more casualties of black rule. According to the Amani Trust in Harare, which monitors human rights abuses, the police have been purged of anyone suspected of disloyalty to the regime, so that the force is now effectively another Zanu-PF militia. This is why appeals for help from whites or political opponents are fruitless, and why attackers are not prosecuted. The army and the Central Intelligence Organization — the Zimbabwe secret police, which is accountable only to Mr. Mugabe — are just as partisan. At a political rally in 2000, then Zimbabwean defense minister Moven Mahachi explained how to handle the opposition: “We will move door to door, killing … I am the minister responsible for defense; therefore I am capable of killing.”
All public employees soon learn where their primary loyalty must lie. In June 2001, Mr. Mugabe’s foreign minister, Stan Mudenge, told trainee teachers: “As civil servants, you have to be loyal to the government of the day. You can even be killed for supporting the opposition, and no one would guarantee your safety.”
| Ursula Frost with her boyfriend,
farm manager Duncan Cooke. In
December 2001, six government
officials were inspecting farm land
for expropriation. When Mr. Cooke
asked them to move their car so he
could drive a tractor past it, one of
the men slashed him with a machete.
Judges, respected and independent when they were Rhodesian, are now tools of the regime. Many magistrates are Zanu-PF-appointees or are too intimidated to act against the government. In March 2001, the government forced the country’s chief justice, Anthony Gubbay, into early retirement after he ruled against the seizure of white-owned farms. Other judges who tried to take a stand have resigned after threats to their lives and families. Courts have issued at least two orders to the authorities to clear farm invaders off private land, but the government paid no attention.
A Zimbabwean High Court judge, Ben Hlatshwayo, ignored an order by his own court barring him from moving onto a farm confiscated from a white family. In December 2002, Mr. Hlatshwayo moved onto the 900-acre farm anyway, accompanied by a police escort.
While the government ignores the courts at will, it uses the law as a weapon against opponents. The MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, is on trial for allegedly plotting to assassinate Mr. Mugabe, and could be put to death if found guilty.
The causes of Zimbabwe’s misery are so clear that many people continue to risk death to oppose Mr. Mugabe. In early June, the government sent tanks into the street to put down what was to be a five-day general strike called in the hope of driving Mr. Mugabe from office.
Ben Hlatshwayo had conveniently issued an injunction against the strike, and police arrested Mr. Tsvangirai for the capital crime of treason. Police disperesed demonstrators with live fire, tear gas, and water cannon. There were hundreds of injuries, but miraculously, no one was killed.
Interest and Admiration
Although Zimbabwe’s measures against white farmers are destroying the country, and have been met with universal condemnation in the West, Africans look on with interest and admiration. Most ominous is the reaction in South Africa, which has had a less well-publicized campaign of murdering white farmers. In August 2001, South Africa sent its agriculture minister to Zimbabwe to discuss “helping understand farmer settlement,” and in October 2001, South Africa’s Deputy President, Jacob Zuma, said Mr. Mugabe had “convincingly explained his land policies.” South African Labor Minister, Membathisi Mdladlana said in Zimbabwe on January 11, 2003, that his country “had a lot to learn from President Robert Mugabe’s program of land reform.”
When Mr. Mugabe’s government expelled outspoken journalist Mercedes Sayagues, the foreign affairs spokesman for the ruling African National Congress (ANC), Ronnie Mamoepa, said he had no reason to doubt Zimbabwe’s explanation that the expulsion was not a threat to press freedom. Likewise, South African Justice Minister Penuell Maduna argues that measures taken against judges do not undermine judicial independence or the rule of law. In March 2001, Frank Chikane, Director-General of the South African presidency, announced that his government believes there are no human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. Other African countries are just as supportive. A meeting in Angola in December 2001 of African heads of state from the 14-nation Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) unequivocally backed Mr. Mugabe’s leadership, and refused to impose sanctions of any kind.
Particularly worrisome for white South Africans is the “Amendment to the Land Restitution Act” promulgated by the government on May 9, 2003, and likely to pass easily in the ANC-dominated parliament. It is an almost perfect copy of the Zimbabwean farm seizure legislation, and will give the South African Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs the power to take urban or rural land without any judicial process if it is “in the interests of land reform.” At present, land can be “redistributed” only by court order and if there is an agreement between the current owner and the claimant of the land. The ANC clearly intends to follow the Mugabe path.
Although observers from Europe and the United States dismissed the March 2002 presidential election — won handily by Mr. Mugabe — as a fraud, the head of the South African observation team said the vote was legitimate, and that the ANC sent “warm congratulations.” Other African heads of state endorsed the elections. Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania even called Mr. Mugabe a “champion of democracy,” and a spokesman for Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said his government would urge Europe and the United States to accept the election results. President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya sent his congratulations. Namibia conveyed its “warmest congratulations to His Excellency, Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe,” and President Sam Nujoma announced plans for a farm seizure program of his own.
The Organization of African Unity (OAU) observer team in Zimbabwe reported that “in general the elections were transparent, credible, free and fair.” By African standards, of course, the election was entirely as it should be: it kept the incumbent in power.
A wide-spread view of Mr. Mugabe was expressed in New African magazine, which is read all over the continent. Its May 2000 cover story was unequivocal: “Mugabe is Right.”
Africans everywhere seem to love Mr. Mugabe. Last September 12, after addressing a session of the UN General Assembly in New York, he accepted an invitation to speak at New York’s City Council chambers, where he gave a long talk about his land policies to a dozen or so members of the City Council’s Black and Hispanic Caucus. Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, and the council member who had invited Mr. Mugabe to City Hall, hugged him and held his hand aloft like a victorious boxer. No council member protested the visit.
South Africa offers Zimbabwe material as well as moral support, providing seed, fertilizer, fuel and transportation aid under the terms of an aid package signed in October 2002. The state-owned South African electricity and oil companies, Eskom and Sasol, supply Zimbabwe on credit — something no one else will do — and have very little chance of collecting on tens of millions of dollars worth of debt. The cost is borne by South Africans, of whom the largest number of paying customers are white. The continuing cost of ANC support for Zimbabwe has been reflected in the currency markets; the South African rand lost 25 percent of its value in 2000 alone, and has declined steadily ever since. The country’s annual inflation rate is more than 250 percent.
Mr. Mugabe will probably succeed in driving whites out of the country. Some he will force out physically, and others will leave voluntarily as Zimbabwe sinks further into Third-World misery.
There was a time, not so long ago, when whites could not have been treated this way. In 1866, Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) imprisoned a number of British subjects, claiming Britain was not showing his regime enough respect. Diplomacy failed, and the emperor took his hostages 400 miles inland to the mountain fortress of Magdala. Under orders from the prime minister and Queen Victoria, Sir Robert Napier equipped an army of 13,000 British and Indians in Bombay, loaded the men and nearly 30,000 head of livestock (including 44 elephants) onto a great fleet, and sailed across the Indian Ocean to Massowah on the Red Sea coast. It took three months to march the men through the parched, mountainous wilderness to Magdala, where Napier reduced the fort and rescued the hostages. Emperor Theodore committed suicide.
That was a time when Britain — and the white man — were not to be trifled with. Other nations took note, just as Namibia and South Africa are now taking note of Britain’s spinelessness as Mr. Mugabe drives whites off the land. Action in defense of one’s people is strictly a question of will, which the British once had but now do not. They could arrange a “regime change” in Zimbabwe with one 20th of the men they sent to Iraq, but the British are now incapable of using force to defend race and heritage.
Zimbabwe teaches several lessons. Two are all too familiar: blacks make a mess of Western institutions, and some will brutalize whites if they get the chance. South Africa will meet the same fate; it is only a matter of time. But losing southern Africa to savagery is far less important than the fact that Britain, the United States, and all other European countries are letting it happen. If the British cannot bring themselves to save their Zimbabwean cousins from white-hating barbarians, they cannot be counted on to save themselves either. If immigration continues, and dispossession comes to the home islands, there will be no mother country to ignore their pleas for help.
Arthur Kemp is a Rhodesian-born journalist and author.
Another Institution Dies
The South African Defense Force, once by far the strongest army on the African continent, has dissolved into near-anarchy since the introduction of black rule in 1994. Fewer than half of its “soldiers” are medically fit, it has an AIDS infection rate estimated at 60 percent, and its equipment is deteriorating to the point that the country has only four working tanks and eight armored cars. The decline began after the handover of power to the ANC, when members of the armed wings of both the ANC, and a smaller more radical black movement, the Pan African Congress (PAC), were incorporated into what was renamed the South African National Defense Force (SANDF).
Incorporation has not always been smooth. On September 16, 1999, a former PAC guerilla inducted into the SANDF went on a rampage, killing and wounding whites at the Tempe military base in Bloemfontein. The leader of a special police investigations team reported he was “reluctantly forced to admit” that Lieutenant Sibusiso Madubela, 28, brushed aside black colleagues in order to shoot only whites, killing six officers and a civilian woman, and wounding five soldiers. Another soldier later died of his wounds.
Since then, whites have slowly been squeezed out of the army, leaving an overwhelmingly black force — with predictable consequences. A South African parliamentary subcommittee briefing on defense, held in July 2002, found that:
- More than half of South Africa’s 76,000 soldiers were medically unfit for duty.
- The SANDF could deploy only one operational brigade of 3,000 men.
- Training had virtually come to a halt.
- Equipment was in a deplorable state, with only four out of 168 Olifant tanks and eight of 242 Rooikat armored cars still operational.
- There was not enough money to buy fuel. In the air force, funds were allocated for only 2,400 flying hours instead of the 7,200 requested, and pilots were resigning in droves. “The air force usually runs out of aviation fuel every September,” said a member of the committee that handles military matters.
- Reduction of the armed forces from 104,000 in 1994 to the present 76,000 involved massive cash payouts that, according to committee member Hendrik Schmidt, turned the defense force into “an armed welfare department.”
- The force was seriously top-heavy, with a ratio of one general for every 293 men, compared to one general for every 2,000 men in the United States Army.
- More than 52 percent of the defense budget was spent on personnel, and only 0.5 percent on new equipment.
- Seven out of every 10 deaths in the armed forces were AIDS-related. A medical specialist at a military hospital said six out of every 10 soldiers admitted to hospital tested HIV-positive, and that an AIDS infection rate of 60 percent was “feasible.”
|Rooikat: too hard to maintain.|
Some details of the decline of the SANDF seem almost comical. In August 2002, Colonel T.C. Mokhosi, who commands the 1st South African Infantry Battalion, told another parliamentary subcommittee that “dental reasons” explain why only 138 of his 612 men can be deployed internationally. Presumably 77.5 percent of his men have such bad teeth they are unfit for service, but the SANDF refuses to elaborate. Col. Mokhosi also told MPs that his battalion turns in 175 sick notices a week in the winter, which prevents it from participating in certain training programs. Many of the army’s other 38,000 unfit soldiers reportedly have dental problems, too.
Generals have faked their qualifications to land plum jobs. At least two, Ernest Zwane and Petronella Mari, both from the ANC’s armed wing, were arrested in November 2002 for forging university qualifications. The year before, police arrested two other former ANC fighters, a colonel and an ex-colonel, on charges of diverting about R20 million from the SANDF demobilization fund in 2001. Upon learning of the scandal, Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota replied, “I remain satisfied that there is nothing we cannot deal with.”
The Pioneer Fund: Science Under Fire
The foundation that kept racial science alive.
Richard Lynn, The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund, University Press of America, 2001, $54.50 (soft cover), 643 pp.
Although it is a small foundation that oversees a modest endowment and has no paid staff, the Pioneer Fund has, since its inception in 1937, changed the face of social science and the public understanding of race and human genetics. Without the Pioneer Fund, there would probably be very little scientific data on race differences in intelligence and behavior. Most of the major research in this area has been done by Pioneer grantees, such as Audrey Shuey, Frank C. J. McGurk, R. Travis Osborne, Arthur R. Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Linda S. Gottfredson, and Richard Lynn. Pioneer grantees such as Prof. Lynn, William B. Shockley, Seymour W. Itzkoff, and Daniel R. Vining have also done almost all the recent work on dysgenic fertility, and have been the most forceful advocates of eugenics in our times.
Pioneer also made possible Thomas J. Bouchard’s landmark Minnesota Twin Project, which showed that identical twins reared apart are vastly more similar than fraternal twins reared together. Although Pioneer did not finance Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, this book relied heavily on the ideas and findings of the thirteen Pioneer grantees cited in it. As Prof. Jensen has said, “The name ‘Pioneer’ is indeed very apt.”
For its staunch and unyielding defiance of political correctness, the fund has drawn the abuse of journalistic and academic swastika-painters. This was especially true around the time of the publication of The Bell Curve, which may have publicized Pioneer-supported ideas more successfully than any other book in American publishing history. The Science of Human Diversity opens with a description of the media pogrom launched against the fund on ABC’s World News Tonight in 1994 by Peter Jennings, who spiced his commentary with pictures of emaciated victims of the Nazi camps. On the same program, journalist Greg Easterbrook called the fund “an Aryan crank organization,” and professional anti-racist Barry Mehler complained about its “dirty money.” Hysterical attacks of this kind have prompted picketing of Pioneer scholars, attacks by student groups, and abuse and obstruction by university officials.
Founders and Scholars
Although the 50-page preface by Harry F. Weyher, president of the fund from 1958 until his death in 2002, includes vivid portraits of a number of Pioneer founders and scholars, this book is mainly a summary of their work. Author Richard Lynn, an emeritus professor of University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and a major grantee, also provides valuable information about the calumny the pioneers have suffered, and describes some of their disputes with intellectual adversaries.
Persecution and hatred have been the result of Pioneer scholars’ powerful assaults on the great lie of this country’s intellectual and political elites: the lie that human nature could be molded to suit utopian political reformers. Assuming that human nature was infinitely malleable, these reformers believed they could eliminate racial divisions, make blacks equal to whites, integrate Third-World immigrants, abolish traditional sex roles, and otherwise rid American society of what they deemed to be backward prejudices (see March 2003 review of The Blank Slate).
Pioneer grantees stubbornly insisted on the biological obstacles to this utopian vision. They argued that social engineering could never overcome racial differences in intelligence and personality, that racial integration would fail because humans have a natural preference for their own race, that mass Third-World immigration was tantamount to white genocide, and that the elimination of traditional sex roles would have a devastating dysgenic impact on fertility. They maintained that biological problems require biological solutions, and that current social welfare programs encourage reproduction by the weak, the stupid, and the irresponsible. An improvement in the quality of a population requires a decrease in the frequency of undesirable genes and an increase in desirable ones. The wrath that has greeted Pioneer scholars is, in short, that of the charlatan and his dupes against the doctor who discredits quack cures and insists upon less palatable medicine.
Many of the scientific findings summarized in the book will already be known to readers of AR, but The Science of Human Diversity offers a wealth of detail on dysgenics, eugenics, and the biological bases of personality and race differences. This book also impresses on one’s mind just how long the basic facts about race differences have been known and how long the academic establishment has refused to recognize them. Certainly, this refusal has been unforgivable since at least 1958, when Audrey M. Shuey produced her encyclopedic The Testing of Negro Intelligence.
Original pioneer: Wyckliffe Draper.
The main force behind the establishment of the Pioneer Fund was Wickliffe Preston Draper, born in 1891, and heir to a fortune made in textile machinery. Draper’s life was characterized by a relentless thirst for knowledge and adventure. As a young man, he traveled on horseback through Mexico and witnessed the Zapatista revolution. Later, he did anthropological and archaeological research in Africa. He served in both World Wars, in the first as an artillery soldier and in the second as an intelligence officer in India.
Draper’s overriding intellectual interest was dysgenic trends in Western populations. In 1928 he established the Eugenics Research Association Prize, awarded to scholars who wrote about dysgenic fertility, the decline of white birthrates, and racial differences. He also believed America’s greatness was made possible by racial homogeneity, and was a strong supporter of the 1924 Immigration Act, which privileged the immigration of Northern Europeans. He supported activist groups that wished to repatriate blacks to Africa and that opposed racial integration. Draper also funded the work of two Congressional committees that opposed John F. Kennedy’s disastrous immigration reform in the 1960s.
Draper established the Pioneer Fund in 1937 with fellow eugenicists Harry H. Laughlin and Frederick H. Osborn. The Fund’s Certificate of Incorporation explained its objectives: First, it would provide financial assistance for the education of the children of parents who had “such qualities and traits of character as to make such parents of unusual value as citizens.” Especially to be aided were the descendants of the inhabitants of the original thirteen American colonies and those of “related stocks.” Essentially, Draper’s first goal was to pay gifted people of northern European descent to have more children. Second, Pioneer would fund the study of heredity and eugenics.
While the fund has been spectacularly successful in carrying out the second objective, the same cannot be said of the first. Pioneer has funded only one eugenic project, the Air Corps scholarship plan, which started in 1937. It began with a study of the fertility of officers in the US Army Air Corps (predecessor to the Air Force), who were thought to have the fitness, intelligence, courage, and character the fund wished to promote. This study found that the officers’ families were not replacing themselves, and that they wanted more children, but were restrained by financial considerations. The fund promised $4,000 for the education of every additional child born to families that already had three children. This assistance was provided only for children born in 1941, after which the plan was discontinued. Prof. Lynn estimates that it resulted in the birth of only seven children, and believes there were no more Pioneer eugenic programs because the Air Corps project proved how difficult and expensive they were.
Aside from their scientific work, fund recipients have opposed the racial integration forced on Americans since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Writing immediately after the historic case, Pioneer grantee Ernest van den Haag defended school and neighborhood segregation on the principle of free association. He argued that even if white preference for segregation were based on prejudice, prejudice is not illegal, and the Constitution gives the government no mandate to combat ideas. The policy of “compulsory togetherness” was more likely to exacerbate racial problems than solve them.
Writing in the 1960s, University of Hawaii philosophy professor A. James Gregor wrote that ethnocentrism was such a strong human attribute that it was unlikely racial integration would be successful. Anticipating J. P. Rushton’s “genetic similarity theory,” Prof. Gregor wrote that we prefer to associate with people of our own race because of innate aesthetic preferences. He wrote that feelings of racial identity emerge early in children, typically by the age of four or five, and that for this reason racial segregation is the natural human state. Prof. Gregor also found that racial integration lowered the quality of education because black/white differences in intelligence and behavior result in lower standards. He also noted that all-white communities are safer than mixed neighborhoods.
Prof. Lynn describes some of the silliness Prof. Gregor was combating. One opponent was psychologist Marie Jahoda, who claimed that racial prejudice was a form of psychological disorder. She argued that in thinking blacks were lazy, childish, and promiscuous, whites were projecting on them their own repressed urges, and that the only solution to this problem was forced residential integration. Prof. Gregor’s position was that “speculative gymnastics” of this kind “obscures the nature and character of social problems.”
Several other Pioneer scholars opposed integration. In the 1970s and ‘80s, University of Northern Iowa psychologist Ralph Scott reported that busing did not improve black student performance, and that even black parents overwhelmingly opposed it. He argued that racial integration was the reason American education compared poorly to that of other developed countries, since the main effect of school integration was to hold back gifted students.
Audrey Shuey’s early classic.
In 1991, pscyhologist Lloyd G. Humphreys pointed out that many whites had fled to the suburbs to avoid racially integrated schools. He attacked the obvious hypocrisy of liberals like Senator Edward Kennedy, who advocates integration for public schools, but sends his own children to private schools. Rich liberals rarely support integration in their own neighborhoods, but insist on it for the lower classes.
An even more common target of fund recipients has been affirmative action. Prof. Humphreys called attention to lowered standards at Harvard Medical School, which began to let failing students take more repeat examinations, and stopped publishing students’ scores after it started letting in underqualified minorities.
University of Delaware psychologist Linda S. Gottfredson, an expert on aptitude tests, helped abolish “race norming.” Introduced in 1981, this was a system of separate evaluation standards for different races on employment examinations. Prof. Gottfredson and her colleague Jan Blits point out that race norming gave blacks and Hispanics an unfair advantage; race norming was banned by the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
In his 1998 book Why Race Matters, Pioneer grantee and City College of New York philosopher Michael Levin demolished the premises of affirmative action and other forms of reparations: that whites have harmed blacks, who therefore deserve compensation. He pointed out that almost all African slaves were sold to whites by other Africans, and that the descendants of slaves enjoy a much higher standard of living than Africans. It is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that the slave trade benefited blacks. He argues further that in light of black criminality and destruction of housing stock, it would be more reasonable for whites to demand reparations from blacks.
As part of a detailed analysis of racial differences in intelligence and behavior, Prof. Levin applies his subversive common sense to the question of discrimination. If blacks are ten times more likely than whites to commit certain crimes, it is rational to be more suspicious of them. Likewise, it is no more reprehensible for an employer to deny a job to a black than it is for a landlord to refuse to rent a room to a motorcycle gang member, since blacks and Hell’s Angels are more likely than others to be criminals or behave obnoxiously.
Among Pioneer grantees, the most significant advocate of immigration reform has been ecologist Garrett Hardin, emeritus of University of California at Santa Barbara. Prof. Hardin estimated that the carrying capacity of the earth was reached during the last quarter of the 20th century, and that further population growth would lower the quality of life. In the United States and Europe, fertility is low, so whites would not suffer the ills of overpopulation unless there was immigration. He popularized the metaphor of the lifeboat: When the boat is full, no one else should be allowed on board. Letting on more is a perverse variant of compassion that will sink the boat.
Prof. Hardin also wrote that Western societies practice a strange reversal of ethnocentrism that he called “ethnofugalism:” “that which is foreign and strange, particularly if persecuted, [has become] the ideal.” He noted that, like the citizens of Beirut, we are not likely to find it ideal for long. That city, once called the Paris of the Mediterranean, was torn apart by ethnic conflict. Prof. Hardin believes immigration is genocide, albeit of a relatively bloodless kind. Genocide is the elimination of one people by another, and is inevitable when highly fertile non-white immigrants arrive among less fertile whites. (It displaces natives even when immigrants are not especially fertile — see AR, Feb. 2003.)
Several fund recipients have proposed eugenic improvement of the American population. The outstanding figure in this field was William Shockley, the colorful Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who became a tireless advocate of eugenics, after realizing the dangers of dysgenic fertility. He said he was converted by a news story about a teenager who blinded a delicatessen owner during a robbery. The criminal was one of 17 illegitimate children of a woman with an IQ of 55 who could remember the names of only nine of her children. The robber himself had an IQ of 65, and Dr. Shockley was horrified to think that some day such people might become a majority in America.
Dr. Shockley proposed several eugenic policies, one of which has already been put into effect: the establishment of sperm banks for gifted donors. Some of his other ideas were very imaginative. He proposed that people with below-average IQs be paid to be sterilized. For every point below 100, they would receive $1,000, so someone with an IQ of 90 would get $10,000, and one with 70 would get $30,000. He also proposed that girls be fitted at puberty with contraceptives that could be removed only by a doctor. Every woman would have a license for 2.2 children and would have to buy the licenses of other women if they wanted more. Dr. Shockley predicted that poor women would sell their licenses to rich women, which would skew fertility toward superior people.
Another eugenicist Pioneer grantee is Seymour Itzkoff, psychology professor at Smith College. Prof. Itzkoff believes the quality of the population is declining because welfare raises the fertility of the poor, feminism encourages intelligent women to have careers rather than children, and because of Third-World immigration. He suggests that high-paying jobs be given preferentially to married men with families, that the tax code be amended to reward higher-earning people who have children and punish those who do not, that strong measures be taken to discourage illegitimate births, and that illegal immigrants be repatriated.
Although Pioneer grantees have been called many names, they have diagnosed the nature and causes of American social problems more accurately than conventional thinkers. Just as Profs. van den Haag, Gregor, Scott, and Humphreys predicted, the attempt to integrate America’s schools and neighborhoods has been a failure. Demographers tell us American neighborhoods are almost as segregated today as they were before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just this year, Harvard University scholars announced that schools are still highly segregated and are becoming more so. Forced busing has encountered fierce resistance and has been, for the most part, abandoned. Similarly, affirmative action programs in education are under attack for precisely the reasons Pioneer grantees have specified. The notorious under-performance of today’s students and the rise in prison populations suggest that Pioneer grantees have been correct about the declining quality of the population. The ever-increasing percentage of immigrant minorities in America and Europe confirms Prof. Hardin’s prediction of white genocide.
Prof. Lynn points out that much Pioneer research has been pursued in the teeth of fierce resistance from academics. In the 1990s, three universities refused to accept Pioneer grants made to their scholars because of negative publicity about the fund. In only one case, that of Hans J. Eysenck of University of London, was this refusal allowed to stand. In the two other cases, those of Linda S. Gottfredson and Seymour Itzkoff, the refusals were overturned by the courts. Universities have also tried unsuccessfully to revoke tenure and dismiss Prof. Rushton and Prof. Levin.
Universities have tried to repress Pioneer-funded research with threats and red tape. Courts have eventually enforced most university obligations, but litigation ties up scholars’ time and is a huge worry. Prof. Levin’s and Prof. Rushton’s ordeals are well summarized in Samuel Francis’s essay in The Real American Dilemma, but Linda Gottfredson’s case is just as interesting, and reveals much about the current university mentality. Trouble began in 1989 when a linguistics professor at University of Delaware wrote a letter to the dean complaining that the fund that was aiding Prof. Gottfredson sponsored racist research. In 1990, Prof. Gottfredson got menacing calls from university officials calling her a “lightning rod,” and advising her to get a lawyer. The university then refused to administer the Pioneer grant, claiming that the fund’s aims and the research it sponsored were “clearly and unambiguously in conflict with the University’s commitment to racial and cultural diversity.” Administrators told Prof. Gottfredson that if she found some independent way of receiving Pioneer money, she could not use university facilities, and it would not count towards her research requirements. It took two years of litigation to overturn the university’s strictures.
Besides being harassed by their universities, many scholars have been picketed, hectored, and physically attacked by radical groups. Students invaded and vandalized Seymour Itzkoff’s office and attacked his home. Radicals have demonstrated noisily at Profs. Lynn’s, Jensen’s, and Eysenck’s classes.
A more insidious and effective method of silencing scholars is to refuse to publish their work. Audrey M. Shuey’s carefully researched The Testing of Negro Intelligence could find no publisher until Draper financed the book in 1958. Eight publishers turned down Prof. Jensen’s authoritative The g Factor before it was finally published in 1998, and Prof. Jensen has found that politically incorrect articles have to pass an unreasonably stiff review process. Many prominent journals search out reviewers who can find, or invent, some flaw in the methodology of any article that may be politically insensitive. Small presses are often the only ones that publish “insensitive” books, and may have to charge exorbitant prices. The Science of Human Diversity, which costs $54.50 in paperback, is an unfortunate example.
Prof. Lynn is very optimistic about the future of the fund. He believes the public is becoming more open to IQ research and the evolutionary-genetic approach to human behavior because of the largely positive publicity behavioral and medical genetics have received in the press. Citing a positive 1994 New York Times review of The Bell Curve and of books by Prof. Rushton and Prof. Itzkoff, he says the tide has started to turn, and he looks forward with excitement to the next 60 years of Pioneer-funded research. Another reason to be optimistic about the future of Pioneer is that Prof. Rushton is its new president.
I hope Prof. Lynn is right. Widespread hostility has not so far stopped Pioneer scholars from stating their ideas, but it may well have discouraged younger scholars from pursuing these topics. All of the currently living Pioneer grantees are over 50 years old. One wonders how many young scholars are willing to take the risks the pioneers have taken. Prof. Jensen has noted that adopting the hereditarian position limits a Ph.D.’s job opportunities and can jeopardize promotions, honors, and grants. Even stating well-established findings about the nature of the races can be prosecuted as hate speech on some university campuses. The non-whites pouring into white countries have never been known for their commitment to free speech. Unless this tide is stopped, our country may cease to be one in which the Pioneer Fund and its grantees can continue to operate freely.
Dr. Jobling lives in Buffalo, New York. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.
Censored in Texas
Race-conscious inmate punished for writing.
William Bryan Sorens has been in a Texas prison for 19 years, serving a 60-year sentence for rape. He has used his time constructively, earning two Master’s degrees, and writing articles about prison life and other topics for publication, for which he is usually paid. His work has appeared in Christian and racialist publications, newspapers like the San Antonio Express-News, and even Playboy. He has been in discussion with American Renaissance about several articles.
Mr. Sorens supports harsh punishment for criminals — he says it has worked for him — and he was scheduled to be considered for release in December 2005. However, on March 18, prison authorities gave Mr. Sorens another year as punishment. His crime? Receiving pay for writing. According to Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) regulations, inmates may not establish or operate businesses, and Mr. Sorens, they say, was in the business of selling articles.
Mr. Sorens says he is being singled out because for the last two years, he has criticized the TDCJ for lax security and for coddling Islamic prisoners. He also writes with a clear understanding of racial matters the TDCJ prefers to ignore. During the hearing at which he was sentenced to the additional year, Mr. Sorens says Warden Gary G. More of his unit told him he was being punished “for all those newspaper articles you wrote.”
Mr. Sorens has written for pay almost as long as he has been in prison, and no one objected. Other Texas inmates are paid for articles and even books, and have not been punished. Jorge Antonio Renaud, an armed robber, writes regularly for Texas newspapers and had a book — Behind the Walls — published last year by the University of North Texas Press. “I have never been threatened with disciplinary action for my writing,” says Mr. Renaud. “It’s not as if they don’t know I’m getting paid,” he adds, pointing out that his checks are deposited in the Inmate Trust Fund, which prisoners use to buy things at the commissary.
Mr. Sorens may sue the TDCJ, and appears to have case law on his side. In 1998, the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a Pennsylvania court’s ruling and ordered that convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal be allowed to receive payment for articles and radio programs. Still, a TDCJ lawyer believes he can convince a court there is a clear “penological rationalization” for punishing Mr. Sorens. In the meantime, Mr. Sorens has been silenced; who knows how many more years of prison he would get if he continued to write?
You can help Mr. Sorens by writing to these three Texas state representatives (or you can send them e-mail by searching for them at https://www.capitol. state.tx.us/capitol.htm):
Rep. Terri Hodge
Rep. Ray Allen
Austin, TX 78769-2910
Sen. John Whitmore
Austin, TX 78711-2068
You can also write or call:
Admin. & Constituent Services
Office of the Governor
Austin, TX 78711-2404
If you write, please include the words: “Information of Public Interest Complaint, Texas Government Code Sec. 493.016, E.D. 02.03.” Also, it is useful to explain how Mr. Sorens’s punishment harms the public, i.e., by denying people the right to read his articles.
|IN THE NEWS|
O Tempora, O Mores!
Reality of Race
| Hard to find him when
you are looking for a
For some time, Baton Rouge was terrorized by a rapist-serial killer. Police had DNA evidence to link the murders but did not know how to use DNA to determine the killer’s race. On the basis of a purported eyewitness description and a behavioral profile from the FBI, they were looking for a white man. A Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force formed in August 2002 collected more than 600 DNA samples from potential suspects — all white.
In February 2003, Tony Frudakis, CEO of DNAPrint Genomics (see “Race Denial: The Power of a Delusion,” in last month’s issue) contacted the task force, explaining that his company had a new DNA test that could determine the killer’s race with 99 percent accuracy. While his lab was analyzing the sample the killer struck again, murdering his fifth victim and fourth white. That same week, in early March, Mr. Frudakis told police the killer they were looking for was black — 85 percent African and 15 percent American Indian. The task force began collecting DNA from black suspects.
Detectives already had DNA from a different murder investigation for Derrick Lee, a 34-year-old black man, and on May 25, a police technician matched it to the samples recovered from the five victims. The next day, police issued a warrant for his arrest, and captured him a day later in Atlanta. [Rachael Bell, The Mystery of the Baton Rouge Serial Killer, CrimeLibrary.com. Josh Noel, Florida Lab Pointed to Race, The Advocate (Baton Rouge), June 4, 2003.]
It would be hard to think of a more dramatic demonstration that race is a biological fact and not a “social construct.”
Race Cannot be Wished Away
The New York Times has recently been quite bold in upholding the common sense view that race is not a mere sociological artifact but a biological reality. In a recent article, Nicholas Wade writes:
“A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians.
“Biologists, too, have often been reluctant to use the term ‘race.’ But this taboo was broken last year by Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University.
“Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal [of Medicine (NEJM)] that declared that race was ‘biologically meaningless,’ Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.”
The news peg for Mr. Wade’s article was the appearance in the NEJM of two articles that reopen the debate on race two years after a staff-written editorial dismissed its scientific validity. The debate is accompanied by a new editorial taking the view that it is “unwise to abandon the practice of recording race when we have barely begun to understand the architecture of the human genome.”
Mr. Wade goes on to point out that although the same genes are usually implicated in the same diseases worldwide, there are still important racial differences: “Inheriting two APOE4 genes, one from each parent, raises the risk of Alzheimer’s 33 times in Japanese populations, 15 times in Caucasians and only 6 times in Africans. This suggests that some unknown factor modifies the effect of the APOE4 gene in different races …” [Nicholas Wade, 2 Scholarly Articles Diverge on Role of Race in Medicine, New York Times, March 20, 2003.]
The notion that race is not based in biology has made significant inroads in popular thinking but appears to be in serious retreat among specialists.
His Keeper’s Brother
A new study by biologists at Wayne State University in Detroit has concluded that humans and chimpanzees are so closely related genetically that chimps should be included in the Homo genus, along with humans. A genus is the first-level grouping of closely-related species. The genus Canis, for example, includes dogs, foxes, wolves, coyotes, jackals, etc., and Equidae includes nine species of horses, donkeys and zebras. We are currently the only member of genus Homo, although we have a number of extinct relatives such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis.
Long lost cousin clinging to our
branch of the evolutionary tree?
The authors of the Wayne State Study, which has just appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, argue that although traditional zoologists decided chimps were more closely related to gorillas than to humans, DNA studies show otherwise: We are the chimps’ closest relative, having diverged from a common ancestor five or six million years ago. The authors point out that many species that diverged longer ago than that are included in the same genus, and they say it makes no biological sense to give humans special treatment with a genus all their own. DNA analysis gives varying figures for the extent of genetic similarity between chimps and humans depending on which part of the genome is studied, but the authors have found that for long stretches of important, functional DNA there is 99.4 percent similarity. They propose that chimpanzees, now called Pan troglodytes, be renamed Homo troglodytes and be welcomed into the family. [John Pickrell, Chimps Belong on Human Branch of Family Tree, Study Says, National Geographic News, May 20, 2003.]
If there is so little genetic difference between us and chimps we belong in the same family, it is clear that very small genetic differences can produce very significant physical differences.
There have been many atrocities in the civil war that has raged in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the past four years. In May, fighting between rival tribal militias in the eastern province of Ituri killed more than 300 people. According to church leaders in the area, one group of combatants, the Lendu tribesmen, cut open the people they killed and ate the hearts, lungs, and livers. “The sight of a corpse with a missing liver or heart is horrific, especially when you know those parts were eaten, and that the same thing could happen to you,” says Acquitto Kisembo, of the town of Bunia, where much of the fighting took place. Father Joseph Deneckere, a Belgian priest who has lived in the Congo since 1970, says tribesmen also cut off the genitals and fingers of enemies, and tie them to their weapons as charms.
Fighters have also been eating pygmies, 600,000 of whom live in the jungles of the Congo. Soldiers of both the government and various rebel factions think pygmies are sub-human, and believe their flesh confers magical powers when eaten. According to UN human rights officials, Congolese have cooked and eaten more than a dozen pygmies this year. Sinafari Makelo, a representative of the Mbuti pygmy tribe, wants the UN to try the cannibals before an international court. “In living memory, we have seen cruelty, massacres, and genocide, but we have never seen human beings hunted down as though they were game animals,” he told the UN’s Indigenous People’s Forum. [Michael Dynes, Pygmies Beg UN for Aid to Save Them from Congo Cannibals, Times (London), May 23, 2003.]
A Warning to Us All
C.G. Tracey was one of the first white farmers to welcome black rule in the former Rhodesia. He had a farm in what is called the Enterprise farming district, which includes some of the best land in Zimbabwe, and is only about 20 miles east of the capital, Harare. He was active in the handover of power to the Mugabe government, organizing some of the important conferences that made it possible. In the early days of black rule he served on a number of agricultural committees and was held in high regard.
This spring, the number two man on the Zimbabwe supreme court, Paddington Garwe, decided he liked Mr. Tracey’s farm and sent in some thugs to kick him out. Mr. Tracey, now in his 80s, is said to be “heartbroken and confused” by his eviction from the farm that has been his life’s work. No doubt he thought his cooperation with blacks would save his neck, but as a former neighbor who has moved to South Africa explains, “Now he is just another white man and they want him to go.”
Before Mr. Mugabe ordered the land grab three years ago (see cover story), there were 66 white farmers in the Enterprise area. Now there are fewer than a dozen. The rest have not been distributed to “war veterans.” Instead, they are in the hands of cabinet ministers, generals, and other Zanu-PF bigwigs. [Peta Thornycroft, Zimbabwe Judge Secretly Grabs White-owned Farm, Electronic Telegraph, April 19, 2003.]
Despite the efforts of the Belgian political establishment to ban it (see April issue), the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Blok party scored big gains in Belgium’s national elections on May 18, receiving 19.5 percent of the vote — its highest total ever — a significant increase over the 15 percent it won in 1999. The Blok favors independence for the northern Flanders region of Belgium, and campaigned on a platform calling for closing the border to further non-European immigration and deporting foreign criminals and illegal aliens. Its motto is “Our People First.”
Muslims in Belgium: send them home.
Although the Blok is the largest party in the city of Antwerp, it does not have a majority, and other parties have banded together to form a majority and keep it out of city government. Even the “conservative” Christian Democrats refuse to work with the Blok, though their leader Stefan De Clerck admits that this “cordon sanitaire” has not checked the Blok’s increasing popularity. “They’re still growing and that’s a problem,” he says.
Mr. De Clerck should rethink his position. The Christian Democrats won 21.5 percent of the national vote in May. The combined vote totals of the Christian Democrats and the Vlaams Blok leave them within striking distance of the left-of-center Liberal-Socialist ruling coalition — 41 percent vs. 44.5 percent. If the Blok continues to gain votes while the Christian Democrats maintain theirs, a Blok-Christian Democrat coalition would have a good chance of governing Belgium after the next election.
According to Dyab Abou Jahjah, a failed parliamentary candidate and spokesman for the Belgian Muslim “Resist” movement, the Vlaams Blok is already influencing the government. “Vlaams Blok talks about security, so they start talking about security. Vlaams Blok talks about assimilation they speak about assimilation. That’s the power of the Vlaams Blok,” he says. “It is imposing itself on the governing parties without being in government.”
Mr. Abou Jahjah, 31, who gained Belgian citizenship through a brief marriage to a Belgian, doesn’t want Muslims to assimilate. He demands separate schools for Muslim children, and wants Arabic to be an official language in Belgium. Instead of trying to force Muslims to adopt to Belgian culture, Mr. Abou Jahjah thinks the prime minister should learn Arabic. [Raf Casert, Belgium’s Arab Nationalist Touches Nerve, AP, May 16, 2003.]
One of the stars of the Vlaams Blok is Anke Van dermeersch, a lawyer and former Miss Belgium. She has no use for “Belgians” like Mr. Abou Jahjah. On the campaign trail on her way to a seat in the Belgian Senate, Miss Van dermeersch told the BBC, “We still are very much against the multicultural society. We need people who emigrate here to adapt. If they don’t adapt to our systems, to our laws, to our values, they should go back where they came from.” [Stephen Castle, Belgian Coalition Wins Polls as Far-Right Gains Ground, Independent (London), May 19, 2003. Shirin Wheeler, Belgian Far Right Poll Boosts Fears, BBC Online, May 20, 2003.]
Fade to Brown (Con’t.)
In 1990, whites were the majority population in 70 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, making up more than 52 percent of their total populations. By 2000, whites were a majority in only 52 of the largest cities, and were just 44 percent of their total populations. It is mainly Hispanics who are reducing whites to urban minorities. During the 1990s, Hispanics living in the 100 largest cities increased by 3.8 million, or 43 percent. In the 20 fastest-growing cities, the number of Hispanics increased by 72 percent while the number of whites increased by just five percent.
Hispanics are not heading only for Sun Belt cities like Las Vegas. Chicago gained more than 200,000 Hispanics during the 1990s, reversing a decades-long population decline that saw the city drop from second- to third-largest in the US. Without an influx of Hispanics, Boston, Dallas and Los Angeles all would have lost population during the ‘90s.
So far, Hispanics have yet to turn their numbers into political power. While whites are now a minority in California, they were still nearly 75 percent of the voters in last fall’s statewide elections. But as their numbers in California continue to decrease (only 36 percent of the state’s public schoolchildren are white), their political power will fade. [Whites a Minority in US Cities, BBC Online, April 30, 2003.]
Tolerance, Leftist Style
As we reported last month, the British National Party (BNP) enjoyed its greatest electoral success to date in Britain’s May 1st local elections. In Burnley, scene of anti-white rioting in 2001, the BNP added five seats to the three it already held, making it the second-largest party on the town council — much to the dismay of the Bishop of Burnley, John Goddard, who said, “It is now seen as not impossible to vote for such a party. We have crossed a line, a line which is against everything that is best in our culture.”
On May 15, as the BNP councilors entered the hall for their first meeting, Anti-Nazi League protestors broke past police barricades and threw eggs and flour at them. During a brief skirmish with mounted policemen, at least seven people — most of them ANL protestors — were injured. Inside the council chamber, the Labour members, led by Stuart Caddy, refused to shake hands with their BNP counterparts, whom Mr. Caddy regards as fascists and racists, “whatever they say.” For their part, the BNP councilors, led by Len Starr, a former sergeant in the British army, calmly went to work on council business. [Nigel Bunyan, Violence as BNP Group Takes Seats on Council, Telegraph (London), May 16, 2003.]
Wallpapering the Privy
South Central Los Angeles has a reputation as a violent, poverty-stricken, gang- and drug-infested, crime-ridden horror. Its 16 square miles, which take their name from Central Avenue, were for decades LA’s main black neighborhood but, like most of the city, it is now increasingly Hispanic. Still, “South Central” is code in California for “black,” and when blacks move into adjacent areas south and west of downtown LA it is called “South Central creep.” South Central was the scene of the 1965 and 1992 riots, crack-inspired gang warfare of the 1980s and ‘90s, and has been the setting for several Hollywood films about life in “da ‘hood.”
On April 9, the LA City Council voted 14-0 to rename South Central “South Los Angeles.” Councilwoman Jan Perry, who sponsored the motion, says the name change will make residents feel better about their neighborhood and themselves. It’s “about empowering a community to lift itself up and about how we can help communities regain a sense of dignity and pride over their history and culture,” she says. Although he voted for the name change, Councilman Nate Holden says it won’t solve problems and won’t improve a bad reputation. [Gail Schiller, City Council Vote to Erase Notorious South Central Name, AP, April 10, 2003. Calvin Sims, South Central Los Angeles, Associated with Violence and Poverty, Will be South Los Angeles, New York Times, April 10, 2003.]
On May 3, Nicole Bilbo, a twenty-year-old white woman, broke up with her black boyfriend of two years, Kevin Townsend. She gave him the bad news in Martin Luther King Park in San Angelo, Texas, and he did not take it well. He told three girl cousins who were nearby — Catrina Miller, 30, Nina Miller, 21, and Joann Miller, 18 — to beat up Miss Bilbo. With a shout of, “We’re going to whoop this white bitch,” the Miller sisters pounded Miss Bilbo with their shoes, and Joann Miller broke a beer bottle and cut her with the jagged edge. On May 9, police arrested the sisters on aggravated assault and hate crime charges. At last report, Mr. Townsend had not been charged. [Erin Quinn, Arrests Made in Hate Crime Assault, San Angelo (Texas) Standard Times, May 11, 2003.]
Not for long.
Since 1942, the Richmond-area Boy Scout council has called itself the Robert E. Lee Council, but in May, the executive board voted “overwhelmingly” to change the name, effective June 2004. It is now soliciting suggestions for a new name. Robert Tuggle, an executive board member, says there was no outside pressure. He claims the board is simply trying to be more inclusive — presumably by excluding a Confederate. King Salim Khalfani, director of the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, cheers the council’s decision. He says a name-change will encourage more non-whites to join the Scouts. [Patrick Badgley, Richmond Boy Scouts Drop General Lee’s Name, Washington Times (National Weekly Edition), May 19-25, 2003, p. 17.]
(African) America Online
This year, for the first time, America Online (AOL) had a net loss of subscribers. Of AOL’s 27 million US members, approximately 14 percent (4 million) are black. Since AOL expects the number of black Internet users to increase 8.4 percent from 2003-2007 — double the rate for whites — it wants to reverse its slide by designing content aimed at blacks. AOL Black Focus offers news, beauty and style tips, hearthrob chatrooms, and entertainment from a “black perspective.” AOL members can access Black Focus by typing in AOL keyword “black focus.”
Unfortunately for AOL, there are already several Internet services geared toward blacks, for example BET.com and BlackPlanet.com. Scott Mills, chief operating officer of BET.com thinks AOL cannot offer “black content” to rivel BET. [Paul Davidson, AOL to Launch Area for African-Americans, USA Today, May 28, 2003.]
California, New York, Texas and Utah all let children of illegal immigrants pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities. On July 1, Washington will join the club, with Oregon likely to follow soon. Washington’s new law applies to children of illegals who have lived in the state for at least three years and requires them to say they will take steps toward citizenship. The new law will save them a lot of money. Non-residents pay $15,267 a year to attend the University of Washington; residents pay $4,566.
The state Senate amended the original bill to apply only to the children of non-resident aliens here legally, but Washington Gov. Gary Locke vetoed the amendment. Now illegal immigrants enjoy benefits not granted to full, legal US citizens who live in other states. Jorge Padrazo, Mexico’s Consul General in Seattle, says the Mexican government, which lobbies states to adopt similar laws, is “very encouraged and happy with this piece of legislation.” [Illegal Workers’ Children Get Tuition Break, AP, May 8, 2003.]
For years, non-white agitators have been complaining that network television is too white, and groups like the NAACP have threatened boycotts if the networks did not add more non-white faces. Judging from the line-up of new shows appearing on the TV schedule this fall, the networks appear to have gotten the message.
No fewer than 18 new programs featuring non-white stars will debut this fall, including eight new sitcoms. Among the new shows are an NBC comedy featuring black actress Whoopi Goldberg, and two comedies on Fox with Hispanic actors in lead roles. The WB network will launch “Like Family,” about a troubled poor white teenager sent to live with a affluent black suburban family.
The UPN network, which currently airs a block of black-oriented comedies on Monday nights, will adopt a “fade to white” strategy on Tuesdays, running shows that feature more white actors as the evening wears on. [David Bauder, TV Cranks Up Diversity Volume, AP, May 21, 2003.]
What Race are Hispanics?
Three point four million Puerto Ricans live in the United States, and 3.8 million live on the island. Nearly 81 percent of the ones on the island tell the census bureau they are “white,” while only 46 percent of the ones in the United States say they are white. The 81 percent figure would make Puerto Rico “whiter” than the United States, where only about 73 percent of the overall population describes itself as white. There are other examples of the bleaching effect of geography. In Texas, 61 percent of the Hispanics from Mexico say they are white, whereas in California only 40 percent do. In Florida, 92 percent of Cubans say they are white, whereas in California only 68 percent do. [Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, For Millions of Latinos, Race Is a Flexible Concept, Los Angeles, Times, March 11, 2003.]
Last August, a black woman named Laguana Perry leaving the drug treatment clinic at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, got into an argument with a white security officer, Mary Russello. She drove up onto the sidewalk in an attempt to run Miss Russello over, and knocked over a street sign that struck the security guard in the head, injuring her severely. Miss Perry then tried to hit Miss Russello again, and smashed into five people — injuring two seriously — who were trying to help Miss Russello. She then fled the scene. When police caught up with her, Miss Perry at first said her foot slipped off the brake, but then admitted she tried to hit Miss Russello, who deserved what she got.
Miss Perry was facing up to 25 years in prison and copped a plea, but the plea saved her only five years: On March 17, Monroe County Court Judge Patricia Marks sentenced her to 20 years. “I didn’t kill anybody,” Miss Perry complained. “It was an accident.”
“You were intent on causing some harm,” replied the judge. “And didn’t care.”
“That’s [expletive],” said Miss Perry, who added: “I feel this is all about prejudice because of the color of my skin and because of who those people are [at least three of her victims were white] … what is it, because you’re taking another black person off the street? That’s prejudice. Straight prejudice.” Miss Perry will be eligible for parole in 2020. [Greg Livadas, Reckless Driver Gets 20 Years, Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester), March 18, 2003.]
The authorities in Madrid, Spain, estimate that on a typical Saturday night, as many as 700,000 people are carousing in the city’s 1,000 bars and nightclubs. The 2,000 bouncers who control access and keep the peace sometimes must use force. Last year two people died in fights between bouncers and patrons. The National Association of Nightclubs and Concert Halls is now offering bouncers voluntary classes in customer service, anger management — and civil rights. SOS Racism, a Spanish human rights group, says many doormen are under orders to keep blacks, North Africans, Gypsies and Latin Americans out of trendy nightspots. The classes will include lessons on the Spanish Constitution, and teach bouncers they cannot keep people out for ethnic reasons. [Daniel Woolls, Classes Aim to Take the Bully Out of Spain’s Club Bouncers, AP, March 23, 2003.]
Slaves Sued for Freedom
Historians in St. Louis, Missouri, have recently uncovered records of hundreds of suits brought by black slaves seeking freedom. The hand-written documents, which date form 1806 to 1865, were locked away in a court house for more than a century and were recently exhumed with the help of a federal grant. Slaves in Missouri had three grounds to sue for freedom: that they were free blacks who had been kidnapped, that they had been freed by their masters but were still in bondage, or that they had spent time in a free state and should therefore be considered free. The third argument, “once free always free” was the most common.
Like a number of other slave states, Missouri had well-established procedures for protecting the legal rights of slaves. It set aside taxpayer money to hire lawyers for slaves. Top lawyers sometimes traveled hundreds of miles at state expense to get witness statements, and some cases included hundreds of pages of testimony and legal briefs. Slave-owning defendants were required to put up a substantial bond — as much as $2,000 — which they would forfeit if they did not show up in court or sold their slaves before trial. In order to protect slaves from retaliation, judges sometimes took custody of plaintiffs and housed them in jails. They were rented out as day laborers, and could collect their wages if they won their freedom. Trials were heard before all-white juries but of the 283 “freedom cases” for which records have been found, many were victories for the plaintiffs. Some slaves won substantial damages from their former masters.
Until this find of documents, it was generally thought the Dred Scott case was an anomaly. Scott claimed that because he had lived for years in free, northern states with his army surgeon master, he should be free even if he moved back to a slave state. Scott brought the case in 1846 and won in circuit court. His master appealed, and the US Supreme Court finally ruled in 1857 against the “once free always free” doctrine. This undercut most freedom suits, though a few Missouri slaves continued to sue on other grounds. [Stephanie Simon, Cries For Freedom Still Ring, Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2003.]
Standards are ‘Racist’
Like many states, Florida has adopted a standardized high school graduation test, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT. Students started taking the test in 1998, but this is the first year they will be denied diplomas if they flunk. Nearly 13,000 or nine percent of seniors have, in fact, flunked and will not graduate. Some school boards have decided to let them walk around in a cap and gown on graduation day, but they won’t get diplomas.
Needless to say, blacks and immigrants are the ones most likely to fail, and the word is out that the “racist” test must be abolished or at least ignored. Blacks are threatening to boycott Florida’s theme parks, stop drinking Florida orange juice, and stop playing the lottery, if they don’t get their way.
At Miami Senior High, nearly 90 percent of the student body are not native speakers of English, and 100 out of 500 seniors failed the test. On May 8, 200 students demonstrated outside the school, waving signs and chanting “No FCAT.” Their big beef is that they had to take the test in English. “We are a Hispanic-based society,” says Gerrter Martin, who failed twice. “My dreams are [over],” says Jessica Duran. “I want to be a doctor and because of that I can’t do it.” State Rep. Ralph Arza, who is also a Miami High teacher, says he will introduce legislation to offer the FCAT in other languages.
This year’s Florida seniors have had at least five chances to pass the test, once as sophomores, and twice each as juniors and seniors. If they want to, they can retake the text every year for the rest of their lives until they pass. [HS Graduation Crisis in Florida, CBS.com, May 20, 2003. Students: English-Only Test Unfair, WorldNetDaily.com, May 9, 2003.]
Whites Clearing Out
The Los Angeles Unified School District has a system of “charter schools,” under which a school can petition the district for the right to set its own curriculum and run its own finances. The system was set up mainly as a last resort to try to save the worst schools that are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic.
Now, the whole district is more than 90 percent non-white, and many of the few schools with more than a token number of whites have decided to play the charter game and go their own way, too. Granada Hills (43 percent white), Palisades (43.7 percent white), and El Camino Real (50.6 percent white) high schools all want to kick over the traces, but LA Superintendent Roy Romer is having none of it. At a recent public meeting to consider charter petitions, Mr. Romer explained why he didn’t want them to break away: “Let me tell you, they represent a large proportion of white students in the district.” He added that they are also “the upper economic groups of the district.” He could have pointed out that the schools that still have whites are the only ones with good academic programs. [Helen Gao, Romer Warns Charter Highs Will Harm District, Los Angeles Daily News, April 22, 2003.]
It is fine for whites to stick around and help pay the bill when non-white students go independent and try something new. They just better not try the same thing themselves. One of the reasons whites do not attend Los Angeles public schools and why campuses with whites want to leave is that the district is full of awful schools. This spring has seen the usual spree of race riots, with as many as 300 students battling it out in one day at Alain Leroy Locke High School, and Washington Preparatory High School is working its way through a succession of principals who cannot maintain standards.
On April 11, blacks and Hispanics at Locke High School swung pipes and bats at each other after a lunchtime fight erupted into a riot that went on for an hour before police restored calm. Police arrested six students on charges ranging from weapons possession to assault on a peace officer, but school administrators were relieved to find that no one was killed or had to be hospitalized.
In just the previous week, on March 28, a similar riot broke out at Washington Prep, and the school district announced it was firing the principal, James Noble. Mr. Noble, who replaced Margueritte LaMotte because she could do nothing to raise the school’s rock-bottom test scores, had lasted less than a year. [Solomon Moore and Jose Cardenas, Melee Erupts at High School, Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2003.]
20 Acres and a Mercedes
Every tax season, a certain number of blacks claim some kind of imaginary tax exemption as reparations for slavery, and 2003 was no exception. This year, Robert Foster of Richmond, Virginia helped people file for bogus refunds of between $8,000 and $500,000 each.
The amazing thing is that these scams sometimes work. In 2000, Mr. Foster arranged a $504,490 refund for his daughter Crystal, which the government actually paid. She claimed she had overpaid $500,000 in capital gains taxes on a non-existent “Black Capital Investments” fund at the US Treasury. The IRS has recovered $266,000 and a Mercedes Benz.
Mr. Foster, who has been happily helping people file false returns ever since, says his dispute is not with the IRS but with “racist white rule.” [Indictment: Father, Daughter Claimed Slavery Reparations, Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 20, 2003.]
|LETTERS FROM READERS|
Sir — While I appreciate Prof. Steven Farron’s description of my review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in the March 2003 issue of AR as “perceptive,” I have to disagree with him and maintain what I said in the review, that “much of what the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society did or tried to do was justified in terms of the blank slate doctrine.” Prof. Farron writes that he “cannot see how any of the programs of the Progressives … or New Deal … were motivated or justified by” that concept.
But the “blank slate doctrine” is essentially the idea that the minds and behavior of human beings are not the products of nature or genetic inheritance but of the social environment. As historian George E. Mowry wrote of the intellectual atmosphere of the American Progressive movement in The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912 (p. 37), “Central to this new intellectual formulation was the firm belief that to a considerable degree man could make and remake his own world … Both the rising social sciences and the new social gospel promised that basically men were more alike than different and that they were not evil by inheritance, but, if anything, were inclined by their own nature to be good… the great inequalities existing among them at the moment were not natural, and from the viewpoint of social peace and human welfare were decidedly bad.”
Historian Eric Goldman in his standard account of Progressive Era political thought, Rendezvous with Destiny (pp. 78-79), explains how the thought of Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty, the “most rounded and powerful note in a growing chorus,” helped popularize the idea that “an environment that had been made by human beings and could be changed by human beings” “determined all men, institutions, and ideas,” and that “legislating a better environment, particularly a better economic environment, could bring about a better world, and bring it about before unconscionable centuries.” Goldman also discusses the role and impact of Franz Boas himself on Progressivist thought and policies about race.
Historians Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick write in their monograph, Progressivism (p. 24): “Since social scientists accepted environmentalist and interventionist assumptions implicitly, they believed that knowledge of natural laws would make it possible to devise and apply solutions to improve the human condition. This faith underpinned the methods used by almost all reformers of the time: investigation of the facts and application of social-science knowledge to their analysis; entrusting trained experts to decide what should be done; and, finally, mandating government to execute reform.”
The New Deal ideology was not distinct from that of the Progressive Era from which it emerged. As historian William S. Leuchtenberg writes in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (p. 33), “The New Dealers shared John Dewey’s conviction that organized social intelligence could shape society, and some, like [A.A.] Berle [Jr.], reflected the hope of the Social Gospel of creating a Kingdom of God on earth.”
Sociologist and historian E. Digby Baltzell in his classic work, The Protestant Establishment, also discussed the importance of Boas as well as of John B. Watson, founder of behaviorist psychology, and his brother-in-law, New Deal Interior Secretary Harold C. Ickes, who was so solicitous of blacks that he was sometimes called the “Secretary for Negro Affairs.” “It is important to see,” Baltzell wrote (p. 271), “that the New Deal’s efforts to change the economic and cultural environment, largely through legislating greater equality of conditions between classes of men, were a reflection of the whole intellectual climate of opinion at the time. In almost every area of intellectual endeavor — in the theories of crime, in law, in religion, and in the arts — there was general agreement as to the sickness of the bourgeois society and the need for environmental reform.”
Prof. Farron describes the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal eras as consisting of “direct election of senators, referendum and recall at the state and municipal level” and “social security [and] the National Labor Relations Act.” These were certainly reforms of those eras, but much of their theoretical rationalization as well as that of the many other measures supported by reformers in these periods was grounded in the environmentalism advanced not only by Boas and Watson, but also by even earlier environmentalists such as Charles H. Cooley, Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As Baltzell also writes (p. 162), “All were opposed to racism, Social Darwinism, imperialism, and all forms of hereditary determinism; and all assumed the malleability of human nature which was capable of responding to improved social conditions,” and (quoting Dewey), “there must be a change in objective arrangements and institutions; we must work on the environment, not merely in the hearts of men.”
Samuel Francis, Arlington, Va.
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