Excessive Immigration
Page 5
There is one further, very important and controversial point to make about the Holocaust and its commemoration, and how this affects most other group grievances. Norman Finkelstein’s parents both survived Nazi concentration camps, and all other family members were killed. But Finkelstein (2003) distinguishes sharply between the actual experience of murdered Jews (and others), and the ‘Holocaust industry’ that has grown up around and exploited those events. In a scathing and detailed attack, Finkelstein suggested that many had partly forgotten the terrible events ending in 1945 until the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, which re-stimulated Jewish suffering and re-stated the importance of the Jewish state of Israel. Finkelstein accuses Eli Wiesel and others of capitalising on The Holocaust in terms of publicity, fund raising, extortion of reparations from Swiss banks (he uses the term ‘shakedown’), and cynical exploitation of the event to construct an ongoing industry including worldwide ‘Holocaust education’. Finkelstein suggests that many careers, reputations and incomes have been carved out of this Jewish suffering by calculated machinations. He certainly does not minimise the gravity of the genocide, but argues that its uniqueness has been exaggerated, other genocides being overshadowed; its numbers may be questioned; its usefulness in defending Israeli actions is exploited; its future intergenerational and eternal nature is mythologised; and anti-Semitism may not be the epidemic we are constantly told it is. Some critics claim lower estimates of around 400,000 Jews killed by the Nazis, and details of the Holocaust are also often questioned, without actually denying its core reality. These add up to a scathing critique that has lessons for identifying the truth of other representations of oppression and social justice claims.
Unlike many others, Finkelstein is not afraid of straying into so-called stereotyping territory:
Per capita Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews; sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are Jews; 40 per cent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics are Jewish, as are 20 per cent of professors at major universities; and 40 per cent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington. The list goes on.
Although a minority, Jews are far from underprivileged. Although many died and suffered at the hands of Nazis, people of other eras and nationalities have suffered likewise, and many of their descendants continue to suffer. However, the practice of deliberately keeping alive memories or narratives of historical suffering (e.g. transatlantic slavery, the Irish famine, colonialism, etc.) and using these to stoke guilt and exact favours and reparations, should be questioned. It seems the more actual large-scale violence diminishes in our time, the more ‘hate crimes’ are invented and emphasised. The more human rights are granted and inflated, the more hollow the aggrieved feel and the more driven to call for further favours, promotion, publicity and infinite ‘ethnic and social justice’.
4
A Black and White Problem
Britain was an overwhelmingly white nation until the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, various commentators emphasise the metric of very low immigration levels between 1066 and the 1950s (e.g. Goodhart, 2014; Migration Watch UK, 2014). Sykes (2007) traces British lineage back some 6,000 years, and Conway (2007) examines very closely the debate about whether we are really a nation of immigrants. Small waves of migration and invasion had affected the British Isles across centuries, including the Roman occupation from 2,000 years ago, when about 125,000 Roman migrants lived here. Later waves of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Huguenots, Indians, Africans, Irish, Poles, Romani and Jews came, and one high estimate has it that perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 Africans lived in Britain in the 18th century. But the scale of immigration reached quite new proportions with an influx of ex-commonwealth immigrants and refugees in the 20th century. The British Empire initiated modest waves of black immigrants from the Caribbean and India. The Empire Windrush brought 500 Jamaicans to London in 1948, the majority of whom remained and were the foundation of further significant Caribbean immigration (Phillips & Phillips, 2009). They were sought for their labour following post-war shortages and endorsed by the British Nationality Act which included colonial people as citizens, and they regarded themselves as British, as coming home to ‘the mother land’. Between 1951 and 1961 the number of West Indians living in Britain swelled from 15,000 to 172,000. By comparison the ethnically Pakistani population was about 10,000 in 1951; 119,000 in 2001; and 1,174,700 in 2011. In 1972 approximately 27,000 Ugandan Asian refugees came to the UK. Kenyans, Nigerians, Ghanaians and other Africans too came in significant numbers.
Some tensions always existed between longstanding indigenous inhabitants and newcomers, and between government and the majority of people, especially at times of high unemployment. Would it not be strange, even foolish, for any country’s inhabitants to smoothly receive and accept quite significantly sized groups of foreigners? The territorial impulse is near-universal and surely perfectly understandable. It may not be the necessary trait it was in evolutionary history but it isn’t easily shaken off. Yet the reception of immigrants then and now is of a mixed kind, rather than only antagonistic (Nava, 2013). A contradiction rarely discussed is this: that SJWs will fiercely defend the identity and rights of indigenous Americans, Canadians and others, but mock any claim that indigenous white British citizens have any rights to their sovereignty, their land and their beliefs. Is this double standard about length of occupancy, or about romanticised conceptions of indigenous peoples who live far away and have never been colonialists? SJWs probably have torn loyalties here, sympathising with minority Welsh-speaking people, say, but hating their nationalist and Brexit tendencies. They nicely subvert this argument, however, by claiming that the attempt of white Brits to style themselves indigenous is an offensive far-right ploy (Mackay & Stirrup, 2010).
White Britons used to be criticised for saying that all blacks (like all Chinese) looked the same to them, and it is probably still true today that in spite of their diverse origins in Africa and the Caribbean, whites do not readily recognise the specific differences between blacks from different countries. The most visible immigrants have been ‘black’. Of course, nobody is truly black, just as nobody is white. It is more accurate to describe us as brown and pink, although these terms too are not quite accurate. What is called racism can be applied to any group differences (again, this is complicated) but is most vivid in relation to black and white differences. From a white British perspective, the blacker the skin colour of some immigrants, the ‘stranger’ they may appear. In general terms, darker-skinned people come from further away than lighter brown people, sub-Saharans being the blackest and in a white majority country standing out the most. But many whites have also been struck by the coiled hair, big lips, large nostrils, and sometimes large buttocks of blacks (the latter sometimes referred to as steatopygia) which contrast with their own features. Official explanations of such differences are hard to come by but generally insist that they are superficial or irrelevant in comparison with our commonalities.
Is it racist stereotyping to say that generally blacks have better rhythm, are more emotional and physical? Levin (2005) suggests that ‘Caucasoid classical music, emphasizing harmony and regularity, is patently unlike Negroid jazz, rhythm and blues, and rap, which feature improvisation and syncopation. […] Negroid dancing involves pelvic thrusting and other mimicry of intercourse absent from Caucasoid dancing’. He adds that ‘jazz, basketball and “sermonizing,” [involves] improvisation, aggression, intimidation, arrogance and the will to humiliate an opponent’. The flip side of this interpretation is that white Westerners (actually mostly northerners) have had to use their heads more (are ‘all in their heads’), are more unemotional (‘have no feelings’), and are lower sexed and poorer at many sports. Black Christian churches are more often characterised by oratory, emotion, expressive song, and unsophisticated fundamentalist beliefs. Russell (2010) argues tendentiously that black American slaves often had more fun than ‘free’ men, and that Americans should be grateful to blacks for tempering the
legacy of settler Puritans’ culture with jazz, dance, sex, drugs and other recreations. In Brazil, whites are often associated with greater rationality, and blacks with happiness and creativity (Nolen, 2015). Not all whites and blacks agree with such stereotypes but some do.
Some blacks can and do complain bitterly now about the history of slavery and colonialism. But when they do, they play down or are ignorant of the extent of ancient slavery, and the trading of slaves among other African blacks, Muslims and others before and while whites colonised parts of the world (Davis, 2004). They seem unware of historical systemic racism towards, and enslavement of, blacks by Muslims (Azumah, 2001; Segal, 2002). They do not ask why no real black diaspora is evident throughout Muslim lands when up to 14 million African slaves were taken, many of them women for concubines and domestic servants, and many black men were castrated. They do not ask why the Bible fails to condemn slavery. They ignore the topic of ongoing, modern slavery (ILO, 2017). They do not ask what would have happened in those colonised places without white intervention but it’s likely they would not have developed to anything like successful Western industrial levels. On coming to dislike aspects of the USA, the UK and elsewhere in the West for their oppressive racism, some may change their names to African names or wear African clothes, but a negligible number decide to go and live in Africa. Many black British return to the Caribbean to see relatives or to holiday in the winter, but few return there for good. A small number of African Americans have in fact moved to countries like Ghana. The argument that the West thrived mainly due to the slave trade is often made (Baptist, 2014), just as anti-colonialism rhetoric and criticisms about foreign policy and military interventions are always used to justify large-scale immigration. Reparations and apologies are often demanded, and some serious scholarly cases have been put for this (Beckles, 2012). However, some tacitly concede that most blacks — even if the stranded descendants of a kidnapped or displaced people — are better off today in wicked Western nations than they ever would be in Africa.
Some black writers like Larry Elder (2008) and Thomas Sowell (2011a) refute the routine narrative of oppression and racism, Sowell even using the term ‘playing the slavery card’. Berny Tree, a black American woman, says on YouTube, ‘I don’t give a shit about slavery’, a statement that infuriates blacks who want to hang on to centuries of resentment but that recognises current levels of relative affluence even among many blacks, in worldwide relative terms. The American Rev. C. L. Bryant challenges the standard narrative of welfare-dependent blacks oppressed by racism (Bryant, 2017). A young black Republican woman, Candace Owens, reveals on her Red Pill Black YouTube channel that her black peers disliked her ‘Uncle Tom’ articulateness and success. She claims that after casting off her earlier ‘gung ho liberal’ identity and leaving the ‘democratic plantation’, she was subjected to online threats from black activists, and that she knows that fake racist attacks are sometimes constructed in order to stir up anti-racist feelings.
Given the visible and lifestyle differences between many whites and blacks, it is not surprising that two-way racism arose. To coin an understatement, human history has not been non-violent. Many blacks were enslaved and dispersed, many were lynched in the USA (about 4,000 by some accounts), and still today some are disadvantaged by historical factors (although some including Morgan Freeman dispute this latter point). Black men, drug-addicted and drug-peddling black men, black gang culture, blacks who struggle to achieve through conventional academic channels and prefer to aspire instead to fame and fortune via music, entertainment and sport — these are not mere stereotypes (Epstein, 2014; Russell, 2010). African and African-origin tendencies towards beliefs in indigenous superstitions, evangelical Christianity or fundamentalist Islam — these are not only stereotypes. Conversely, white supremacist thug culture is not a myth. There obviously are whites (usually men) who hate the sight and behaviour of blacks, resent their presence in their otherwise white majority country, and who form organisations like the Ku Klux Klan or other far-right vigilante groups, and are physically violent towards blacks (Collins, 2010). These are usually but not only young white men of low intelligence. Goodhart (2017) suggests that ‘real bigots represent between 5 and 7 per cent of the population’ (a figure I suspect is rather too high). A confounding factor too is the view that many white ‘chavs’ have become infected by black youth violence, gangsta rap, and Jamaican patois; they speak ‘Street’; they have even ‘become black’ (or wiggers) culturally, according to the historian David Starkey (Phillips & Webster, 2013). Now, one of the problems we have with ‘racism’ (or accusations of racism) is that the least discussion about race that has negative features is charged with racism, often in extreme terms. Many politically correct leftists reading this book would call me a fascist, or neo-Nazi, and conflate my even raising this discussion with the violent actions and attitudes of Nazis, the KKK, the EDL, Britain First and other contemporary far-right groups (Stocker, 2017). This is nonsense but it is persistent, and it shuts down discussions.
The American civil rights movement was coming to maturity when the film In the Heat of the Night was released in 1967. Starring Sidney Poitier as Detective Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger as the police chief Bill Gillespie, it focuses on a murder in Mississippi. Initially suspected as the culprit, it turns out that Tibbs is in fact a homicide detective from Philadelphia, who then becomes involved in investigating this case. Tibbs is mistrusted by local whites and physically threatened by a gang of them, until rescued by Gillespie, who has a grudging but growing respect for Tibbs. At one point, in response to a slap given him by the racist plantation owner Eric Endicott, Tibbs slaps him back. This slap remains emblematic for many blacks. The film inverts traditional perceptions, with Poitier’s character embodying all that is attractive, smart, and morally superior, while the southern whites are a mixture of dumb, criminal and unattractive. Some dubbed the film Super-Spade Versus the Rednecks for this reason. The development of such interracial strife and facing up to it occurred somewhat later in the UK.
Enoch Powell’s epochal, cautionary, so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 marked a turning point in race relations in Britain. Among many other riots in the following years, those in Southall in 1979 and Brick Lane in 1978 featured Asian people in clashes with the National Front, and involved mass violence and deaths. Two of Britain’s largest race riots took place in Tottenham, North London. A violent protest against the shooting in 1985 of Cherry Groce in Brixton was followed a week later by the death of Cynthia Jarrett at Broadwater Farm social housing estate in Tottenham; she had a heart attack during a police search at her home. A riot ensued in which petrol bombs were thrown, and fires and looting occurred. A white police officer, Keith Blakelock, was hacked to death. In 2011 a young black man, Mark Duggan from Broadwater Farm, was shot and killed by police who believed he had a gun and was about to shoot. Local protests quickly became London-wide, and then nation-wide riots broke out involving violence, fires and looting. These are some of the worst cases encapsulating poor housing, high unemployment, high crime levels, mutual mistrust between the African-Caribbean community and police, and violent consequences. Nobody believes these tensions have gone away or been resolved, and there are reasons to suggest that Powell was right in his fears about the perils of increasing immigration and failed multiculturalism (Heffer, 2015). If anything, the ingredients and indicators of further and worse civil conflicts are perhaps growing.
Militant journalists, activists and academics among the UK’s black community appear to be at the forefront of calls for apologies, financial reparations, and affirmative action by quotas. One regularly reads about black celebrities like Sir Lenny Henry lamenting the dearth of good roles and awards for black actors, and insisting that action be taken to correct this. Similar calls are made for greater recognition of black novelists and poets. The cry for there to be a black James Bond (with Idris Elba always being nominated) is an example. In an otherwise quite authentic film
, Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill is placed in a fabricated scene in 1939, in a London Underground train, where an attractive young West Indian man improbably recites lines from Thomas Macaulay’s poem Lays of Ancient Rome, the director presumably having succumbed to the pull of politically correct historical revisionism. The over-representation of BAME television newsreaders demonstrates how touchy the media are; and even some Asians are embarrassed by this ‘rampant tokenism’ and over-compensation (Revoir, 2008).
The questionable prominence of Benjamin Zephaniah as a dub (performance) poet and indeed Professor of Poetry may attest to unconscious affirmative action in the arts. Zephaniah, whose parents came from Barbados and Jamaica and had eight children, is best characterised as an entertainer and anti-racist activist. His poetry and other books (many for children) are highly autobiographical, emotional, rhythmic, usually in Jamaican patois, and focused on themes of racism, veganism, and anarchy. The much-fêted, dreadlocks-sporting Rastafari Zephaniah is an anti-monarchist who proudly refused the OBE offered him, yet accepted the 14 honorary doctorates showered upon him in spite of his declared ambivalence about academia. The 2008 Times list of the 50 top post-war writers included Zephaniah (at 48) alongside George Orwell, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Martin Amis, John Fowles, J.K. Rowling, and the like. Yet Zephaniah’s eminence is nothing compared with that of the American Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose ethnomasochistic adoration by white liberals seems inexplicable, given his monotonous prose on the evils of whiteness (O’Neill, 2017a).