THE ISLAND RACE...RIOTS: The English have created their very own race problem
H8LIBS
problem
from scratch.
News/Current Events News Keywords: MULTICULTURALISM, ENGLAND
Source: National Review Online
Published: May 31, 2001 Author: John Derbyshire
What's all this about race riots in England?" my American friends keep
asking me. "Who are these
'Asians' that are throwing rocks at the police? What's their beef? Can
you explain this?" You bet I can.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
It is important to understand that England's race problem is nothing
like America's. The U.S.A. began her
existence with three different races in residence, and has never had any
choice but to make the best of
things. No white American, whatever he might think privately of his
black or red fellow-countrymen,
could ever, with a clear conscience, say to them: "You don't belong
here. Go live somewhere else." His
black neighbors came here in bondage, and the red ones were already here
long before either black or
white showed up. Nobody is going anywhere. The actual answer to Rodney
King's famous question —
"Can't we all just get along?" — is still not clear, at any rate not to
me; but we must surely try our best.
England is a completely different case. The country was essentially
monoracial until the 1950s. Multi-culti
propagandists try to fudge this, saying that the English have always
been a gorgeous mosaic of different
peoples — Romans, Saxons, Normans, and so on. These arguments do not
bear close examination. The
English have no folk memory of the Romans whatever; the Romans made
their impact on the Celtic
British (who have since turned into the Welsh), not on the English, most
of whom arrived long after the
legions had left. The French-speaking Normans and Plantagenets were,
demographically speaking, a thin
layer painted on to the top of Anglo-Saxon society, and had been
completely absorbed into that society by
the 14th century. Of later influxes, there is nothing to report but a
few thousand Huguenots (i.e., French
Protestants) in the 17th century, and a similar number of Russian Jews
in the 19th, all of whom were
easily accommodated and soon melted into the general population. The
last really big influx of foreigners
into England, displacing masses of ordinary English people, was that of
the Danes in the 9th century; and
since the Anglo-Saxons had themselves come from Denmark and its
neighborhood three or four hundred
years previously, this was an invasion of cousins. (It made a great
impression on the English, though. I
grew up a mile or so from Hunsbury Hill in Northamptonshire, an old Iron
Age hill fort. The locals
referred to it anachronistically as "Danes' Camp," still remembering the
great events of eleven hundred
years before.) The immigrants who arrived in the 1950s found the
English, as a people, pretty much
undisturbed since the Peace of Wedmore, A.D. 878.
These differences of origin explain the differences of feeling. The most
important, most fundamental
feeling behind America's race problem is the anger nursed by black
Americans over the enslavement of
their forebears, and over the indignities and insults of the "Jim Crow"
century that followed. The driving
force behind England's race problem is utterly different: It is the
resentment felt by native English people
toward the floods of foreigners that have taken over large parts of
their towns and cities. Most of these
foreigners are dark-skinned: blacks from the Caribbean and West Africa,
and south Asians from India,
Pakistan, and Bangladesh. However, though I am using "race problem" as a
convenient short-hand for the
topic under discussion, it is not clear that the issue of England's
black and Asian population has anything
to do with race. It is easy to imagine that very similar problems would
have arisen if the hundreds of
thousands of foreigners flooding into English cities had been Portuguese
or Polish. Indeed, some of the
nastier "racist" incidents of recent years have featured attacks by
white Englishmen on "asylum-seekers,"
most of whom are white-skinned Slavs from the Balkans.
It cannot be said often enough that the immigration policies of the
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were a great
and terrible injustice on the English working class. I have an aunt who
lives in the Aston district of
Birmingham, a large industrial city in the West Midlands. (Samuel
Johnson, who hailed from the much
more sedate, nearby city of Lichfield, said: "We are a city of
philosophers: We work with our heads, and
make the boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands.") When my
aunt went to live there as a
honeymooner in the early 1950s, Aston was a sleepy working-class
neighborhood with a community life
centered on churches, pubs, schools, and corner shops. Now it is all
Asian. My aunt and uncle are the
only white faces in their street, and feel, as they will tell you with
much bitterness, "strangers in our own
country". The neighboring Lozells district has suffered even worse,
being taken over by Caribbeans. In
the 1950s it was a cut above Aston, very nearly lower-middle class —
"Very bay window over there," as
Birmingham people say. Now it is a bedlam of vice and crime, and there
was a ferocious race riot there in
September 1985 when police launched a campaign against drug trafficking.
The fact that these immigration policies were cruel and unjust to the
English working class — who had
borne the brunt of the resulting social dislocations — does not, of
course, mean that the immigrants
themselves were to blame for them. The immigrants were seeking a better
life, just as I was when I
moved to the U.S.A. England in the 1960s was not an especially wonderful
place to live; but if your
standard of comparison was a village in Bangladesh, or a slum in
Jamaica, England looked like paradise.
The first generation of immigrants kept their heads down, worked all the
hours they could get, and put up
with the hostility of the natives. Their children have a different
outlook. Those who were bright and
disciplined enough to take advantage of the educational system rose
easily into the middle classes. The
last time I had a job in England — I was a systems analyst at an
investment bank in 1991 — my
department head was black, and my team leader from a Sikh family. Race
relations in the middle class are
very good — much better than America's, in my opinion. The problem is
with the left-hand end of the
bell curve: educationally unsuccessful young people from immigrant
families. They simmer angrily in
derelict post-industrial cities like Manchester, where this week's
disturbances took place, and organize
themselves into gangs. There is, of course, no easier way to mark gang
membership than by race.
In the case of the Asians there has been an unsettling transformation of
manners and even appearance.
The first generation of south Asian immigrants had the physique of
people raised on a subsistence diet,
and the manners of those who, to survive at all, have had to fawn and
scrape for centuries before callous,
arrogant landlords and bureaucrats. When I started doing office work in
London, the companies were full
of Indian bookkeepers who had to be restrained by force from beginning
their business letters: "Esteemed
Sir..." and ending them: "I beg to remain, esteemed Sir, with
consideration, you most humble, most
obedient servant...". Their children (who are sometimes called "boscos"
from the census-taker's category:
"British, of Sub-Continental Origin"), raised on an ample diet, tower
over them, and are physically a
match for any gang of white English skinheads. Products of modern
western culture and an educational
system steeped in psychobabble, they esteem no one but themselves.
Many of these young boscos say: "Why shouldn't we be here? The English
came to our parents' countries
without being asked, and lorded it over them, and insulted them, and
milked their economies, and looted
their historical relics, for 200 years. Well, now it's payback time!"
There are a number of things to be said
in response to this. (Other than the obvious: "Do you promise to leave
after 200 years?") The U.S.A., a
nation that broke free from the Imperial grasp, is naturally hostile to
imperialism, and most Americans
probably believe that the British Empire was what George Orwell said it
was — an exploitative racket. I
don't agree with this myself. It seems to me that the British Empire was
one of the greatest civilizing
forces the world has ever seen. At the very least, the post-Imperial
history of places like Uganda suggests
that there are worse things that can happen to a country than to be
ruled by Englishmen. (And I recall,
from my Hong Kong days, the 12-foot fence that separated that British
colony from mainland China,
erected so that the mainlanders would be unable to act on their
inexplicable impulse to flee from the
delights of Chinese government into the horrors of British Imperialism.)
But be all that as it may, and
whichever side of that particular argument you come down on — please
don't write to tell me, I've heard
it all far too many times — there are two things that cannot seriously
be denied: one, that the British
authorities could have kept the country closed to immigration if they
had wanted to, whatever the rest of
the world thought about it, and two, that those Englishmen who profited
from the Empire were not the
ones whose neighborhoods were flooded with strangers.
It is not easy to lay blame for this situation. As I have said, you
can't blame people for trying to better
themselves; and the black and brown young Englishmen who are now busily
erecting ghettoes for
themselves had no choice about where they were born. Though I am not a
big fan of victimological poses,
if the blacks and boscos are victims of anything, they are victims of
stupid policies enacted by British
governments. The British ruling classes were the ones who actually
opened the country's doors, and
people like the late Duncan Sandys, Commonwealth Secretary in the
critical early 1960s (and a son-in-law
of Winston Churchill — this English surname is pronounced "Sands," by
the way), have much to answer
for. Their motives as stated at the time, to the limited degree that
they bothered to explain themselves to
their people, were "to relieve labor shortages." This is not very
plausible. Any economist will tell you that
there is no such thing as a labor shortage, only an unwillingness to pay
sufficient wages to induce people
to work. My own neighborhood here on Long Island is currently infested
by illegal immigrants from
Mexico who work as laborers for local contractors and landscaping firms.
"Nobody else will do the work,"
moan these employers. Well, there is some level of wages at which plenty
of local people would be glad
to do it. Heck, for forty bucks an hour, I would do it.
The real motivation of British elites seems to have been guilt and
sentimentality. Most of these people,
especially those from the upper- and upper-middle classes like Sandys,
had done pretty well out of the
Empire. Their natural cast of mind was a guilt-soaked paternalistic
indulgence toward the black and brown
folk they and their parents had ruled over. And of course, it was not to
their neighborhoods that the
immigrants had poured. People like Sandys were in the happy position of
being able to assuage their
post-colonial guilt at zero cost to themselves. To the degree that they
were shareholders in industries that
used cheap immigrant labor, they actually profited from unrestrained
immigration. The costs fell on those
like my aunt and uncle, factory workers who were paid on a Thursday and
flat broke the following
Wednesday. Or on those like 76-year-old Walter Chamberlain, a veteran of
WW2, who was attacked by
a bosco gang in Manchester last month, thrown to the ground and kicked
in the face for having had the
impertinence to stray into "their" part of the city.
Yet as satisfying as it may to pin it all on Britain's insufferably
arrogant ruling elites, the country is a
democracy, and the people had plenty of opportunities to make their
voices heard. In 1968 a leading
English politician, Enoch Powell, made a well-publicized and colorful
speech in which he deplored the
incoming flood of immigrants, and predicted, pretty accurately, the
problems his country would face in
the future if the process was not reversed. Powell was promptly sacked
from his post in the Conservative
party (then in opposition) and all the panjandrums of the British
establishment denounced him. Yet a poll
taken at the time showed that 74 percent of the public agreed with his
opinions. Why did that 74 percent
not translate into actual government policies through the ballot box?
Presumably because, when time
came to vote, people thought other things were more important; and also
because citizens were willing to
be browbeaten by their elites into being ashamed of their own feelings —
to believe, because politicians,
intellectuals, clergymen, and TV talking heads told them so, that their
own instinctive national pride,
which had preserved their country's independence for a thousand years,
was a sinful thing, a species of
that greatest of all modern sins, "racism."
Orthodox modern thinking, of course, blames the whole business on
"racism," and sees the solution as
one of education and enlightenment. Even if there were any truth in
this, which I do not believe, it would
still be a deeply unhelpful point of view. These kinds of conflicts turn
up everywhere in the world that
people of different cultural backgrounds are obliged to live close
together, so if there really is such a thing
as "racism," it seems to arise from deep within human nature. And if
education is a solution, the prospects
are dim indeed, since the British educational system, like the American
one, is increasingly unable to instill
even the rudiments of literacy and arithmetic in youngsters, so that it
is hard to see how it will be able to
get across sophisticated ethical concepts like the brotherhood of man.
And in any case, as I have noted
above, it is not certain that race has much to do with it. Visitors to
England since at least Chaucer's time
have noted that the English simply do not much like foreigners.
There is, of course, nothing that can be done now. England has become a
multicultural society, though no
large number of English people ever wanted it to be. Through the folly,
arrogance, and sentimentality of
their well-insulated ruling class, and by their own inattention,
deference, disorganization, and reluctance to
appear unkind, the English have given up large tracts of their country
to foreigners, whom they dislike and
who dislike them right back. The English have created their very own
race problem from scratch —
possibly the greatest act of self-destructive folly perpetrated by any
civilized nation in the twentieth
century.
--
"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced
with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is
almost never given a fair hearing."- George Orwell
torresD
why don't the English deport their race problem,
back to their respective countries.
A clean sweep.
"H8LIBS" <H*LI...@THERIGHTWING.COM> wrote in message
news:3B1A4448...@THERIGHTWING.COM...
> THE ISLAND RACE...RIOTS: The English have created their very own race
> problem
> from scratch.
>
> News/Current Events News Keywords: MULTICULTURALISM, ENGLAND
> Source: National Review Online
> Published: May 31, 2001 Author: John Derbyshire
>
>
> What's all this about race riots in England?" my American friends keep
> asking me. "Who are these
> 'Asians' that are throwing rocks at the police? What's their beef? Can
> you explain this?" You bet I can.
> Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
>
> It is important to understand that England's race problem is nothing
> like America's. The U.S.A. began her
> existence with three different races in residence, and has never had any
> choice but to make the best of
> things. No white American, whatever he might think privately of his
> black or red fellow-countrymen,
> could ever, with a clear conscience, say to them: "You don't belong
> here. Go live somewhere else." His
> black neighbors came here in bondage, and the red ones were already here
> long before either black or
> white showed up. Nobody is going anywhere. The actual answer to Rodney
> King's famous question -
> "Can't we all just get along?" - is still not clear, at any rate not to
> me; but we must surely try our best.
>
> England is a completely different case. The country was essentially
> monoracial until the 1950s. Multi-culti
> propagandists try to fudge this, saying that the English have always
> been a gorgeous mosaic of different
> peoples - Romans, Saxons, Normans, and so on. These arguments do not
> the 1950s it was a cut above Aston, very nearly lower-middle class -
> "Very bay window over there," as
> Birmingham people say. Now it is a bedlam of vice and crime, and there
> was a ferocious race riot there in
> September 1985 when police launched a campaign against drug trafficking.
>
> The fact that these immigration policies were cruel and unjust to the
> English working class - who had
> borne the brunt of the resulting social dislocations - does not, of
> course, mean that the immigrants
> themselves were to blame for them. The immigrants were seeking a better
> life, just as I was when I
> moved to the U.S.A. England in the 1960s was not an especially wonderful
> place to live; but if your
> standard of comparison was a village in Bangladesh, or a slum in
> Jamaica, England looked like paradise.
> The first generation of immigrants kept their heads down, worked all the
> hours they could get, and put up
> with the hostility of the natives. Their children have a different
> outlook. Those who were bright and
> disciplined enough to take advantage of the educational system rose
> easily into the middle classes. The
> last time I had a job in England - I was a systems analyst at an
> investment bank in 1991 - my
> department head was black, and my team leader from a Sikh family. Race
> relations in the middle class are
> very good - much better than America's, in my opinion. The problem is
> was - an exploitative racket. I
> don't agree with this myself. It seems to me that the British Empire was
> one of the greatest civilizing
> forces the world has ever seen. At the very least, the post-Imperial
> history of places like Uganda suggests
> that there are worse things that can happen to a country than to be
> ruled by Englishmen. (And I recall,
> from my Hong Kong days, the 12-foot fence that separated that British
> colony from mainland China,
> erected so that the mainlanders would be unable to act on their
> inexplicable impulse to flee from the
> delights of Chinese government into the horrors of British Imperialism.)
> But be all that as it may, and
> whichever side of that particular argument you come down on - please
> don't write to tell me, I've heard
> it all far too many times - there are two things that cannot seriously
> be denied: one, that the British
> authorities could have kept the country closed to immigration if they
> had wanted to, whatever the rest of
> the world thought about it, and two, that those Englishmen who profited
> from the Empire were not the
> ones whose neighborhoods were flooded with strangers.
>
> It is not easy to lay blame for this situation. As I have said, you
> can't blame people for trying to better
> themselves; and the black and brown young Englishmen who are now busily
> erecting ghettoes for
> themselves had no choice about where they were born. Though I am not a
> big fan of victimological poses,
> if the blacks and boscos are victims of anything, they are victims of
> stupid policies enacted by British
> governments. The British ruling classes were the ones who actually
> opened the country's doors, and
> people like the late Duncan Sandys, Commonwealth Secretary in the
> critical early 1960s (and a son-in-law
> of Winston Churchill - this English surname is pronounced "Sands," by
> be browbeaten by their elites into being ashamed of their own feelings -
> race problem from scratch -
H8LIBS
supposition,eh dickhead?