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[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire March No. 2, piano version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners and readers, from your charmingly genial host John Derbyshire, brimming with another week's-full of news from far and wide. As you know if you are hearing or reading this, VDARE.com remains in suspense and I don't yet have another host. I shall continue to post the podcast and transcript here at my personal website — which, by the way, has many riches for you to browse among if you feel so inclined, commentary and reviews stretching back to the 1980s. Enjoy! Also posted at my personal website there will, as usual, be my monthly diaries. I'm glad to report that the diaries will continue to be cross-posted to The Unz Review, beginning with this year's July Diary, which just went up. I'm not only glad, I am grateful to Ron Unz, who went to considerable trouble on my behalf there. Thank you, Sir. Yesterday — Thursday, August 1st — I noticed that while the July 23rd announcement by Peter and Lydia of VDARE's suspension is still accessible at VDARE.com, nothing else of the website is: none of the archives, nothing. That is quite an extraordinary level of cancellation. My email from listeners and readers following last week's podcast has mostly been about the suspension of VDARE. Let me start with a short segment about that. |
02 — Why VDARE?. The question I have most often been getting from people who read those detailed accounts of VDARE's tribulations — the accounts, I mean, by Peter and Lydia Brimelow — the commonest question has been: Why VDARE? Lydia's account in particular of all the refusals and cancellations the VDARE Foundation has encountered from commercial and professional services, accountants and payment processors, banks and credit card companies, tech support and online communication services, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, has got people asking why other online news and discussion groups haven't been similarly afflicted. And now, following yesterday's complete blackout of VDARE's archives — which is, as I said an extraordinary level of cancellation — the question as to why VDARE, of all Dissident Right outlets, has been so singularly and decisively canceled, is even more pertinent. Internet hosting services are ten a penny. Not being able to access one is like not being able to hire a plumber. Yes, yes, I know: Other dissident outlets have faced insults and obstacles. American Renaissance has long since been shut out from payment and email services. I assume that the Unz Review, Occidental Dissent, Gates of Vienna, and other dissident websites have faced similar difficulties. The persecution of VDARE has been on a much broader scale, though. There have for example been those creepy cyberattacks that the website has been subjected to. As the techies told Peter Brimelow, quote: There's obviously somebody behind it, there's a human intelligence behind it, probably using AI. End quote. Why? Why is someone going to so much trouble to cripple this one Dissident Right website? What is it about VDARE that has so excited the savage vindictiveness of the Ruling Class? The biggest part of the answer is surely Letitia James, New York State's very big Attorney General. With all the power of the state at her command and all three branches of the state government in total, uncritical compliance with Ruling Class ideology, crushing a small private outfit like VDARE has been child's play for Letitia Lard-butt. The moral of the story is plain. If you hold opinions that are disapproved of by the elites of Western society, better stay the hell out of New York State. This isn't exactly news. Ten years ago the then-Governor of the state, Andrew Cuomo, told a talk radio host, speaking of conservative Republicans that, quote: Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that's who they are and they're the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that's not who New Yorkers are … End quote. Things have gotten much worse since then. The current Governor of New York makes Andrew Cuomo look like Barry Goldwater. People who are aware of all this are emailing in to ask why, this being the case, VDARE doesn't just de-incorporate out of New York and re-incorporate somewhere else. Answer: we can't. Such a move requires the assent of the state's Attorney General, so … you see the problem. And while New York State is the biggest part of the problem, I don't believe it is all of it. The vehemence towards VDARE still stands out, is still exceptional; and there are still those cyberattacks to be explained. I've only been able to come up with three possibilities, which I shall put under the headings: Quality, Success, and Replacement. • Quality. With no offense to anyone at all, VDARE's output is of a higher quality than what you find at most dissident-right outlets. We are literate; we are thoughtful; we are well-informed on history and the human sciences; we are often funny and sometimes self-critical. • Success. VDARE has for all its twenty-five years been entirely donor-supported, which speaks to high levels of managerial and promotional skill on the part of Peter and Lydia. They have responded to difficulties with bold, imaginative solutions — notably, by buying the Berkeley Springs castle as a conference center when commercial hotels wouldn't host them. A literate and thoughtful outlet for dissident-right opinions is bad enough, but successful? Bring out the dogs! • Replacement. Against my realist instincts, I keep finding myself wandered off into metaphysical speculations about the Great Replacement. It really does seem to be driven by some relentless cosmic force above all reason — an irresistible suicidal impulse bringing down our civilization. The ruling classes of Western Europe, Britain, the U.S.A., and Canada really do seem to be seized by a passion to swamp their own people with limitless numbers of Third World settlers, favoring especially the least assimilable of all such: Muslims and black Africans. Under occasional conservative administrations there are feeble, half-hearted efforts to stem the flow; but then, as Progressives regain control — as in the U.S.A. in 2021 or the U.K. just last month — the floodgates are flung wide open again. With our elites in the grip of such a fierce, unquenchable passion for demographic replacement, of course anyone who speaks out against it consistently, doggedly, year after year for twenty-five years, will be the particular target of state repression. Perhaps Peter and Lydia Brimelow are lucky not to be in jail. |
03 — Iranophilia, wha? I hope my friendly remarks about The Unz Review back there will not jeopardize the very generous monthly check I get from AIPAC for my occasional remarks in support of Israel. Hey, I have a family to feed. Sarcasm aside, my support for Israel is passive, philosophical, and pessimistic. • Passive: I don't want my country to engage in a war on behalf of Israel, nor of anyone else. We should fight if our own nation is attacked, not otherwise. I favor getting out of NATO on the same grounds. I particularly don't want my son, a trained paratrooper, to be sent off to fight on behalf of Israel, or anyone else. Fortunately the Israelis themselves don't seem to want it either. Some intensely religious minorities aside, Israelis seem willing — in fact, they seem eager — to fight their own battles. • Philosophical: I cleave strongly to the belief that civilization is better than barbarism. Israel is a civilized nation surrounded by barbarians. On the other hand Iran, the leader of the mob against Israel, is certainly barbaric: a brutish theocratic dictatorship whose rulers are hated by big sectors of their own population. Iran is barbaric. What else can one say about a country whose leaders declare their primary national goal to be the annihilation of another country — the annihilation of a nation whose population is one-eleventh of Iran's own; which is, at its closest point, six hundred miles away; and which has never done any harm to Iran, other than in retaliation? And please don't tell me Israel has done barbaric things in Gaza. War is a desperate and lethal business. Civilized nations at war do what they must do — dropping atom bombs on Japanese cities, for example. Iran doesn't have to fire rockets at Israel. They could stop doing so, at no disadvantage to themselves. They won't stop because they are driven by religious fanaticism. So yes, my sympathies are with Israel. And again: no, I don't want Americans fighting there on Israel's behalf — or anywhere, except to defend our own soil. I am, though, willing for my federal government to spend reasonable sums to help Israel defend herself: a sort of civilization tax. • Pessimistic: It's a very elementary logical error to believe, against good evidence, that the world will come out the way you wish it to. OK, my sympathies are with Israel. Of course, I wish for Israel to survive. Will she, though? I'm pessimistic. I expressed my pessimism at length way back in January 2002 when I posted at National Review Online an essay titled "Does Israel Have a Future?" I'll give you the opening words, quote, slightly edited: In his splendid … new book The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan relates a story about his days working with President Nixon — who was, as Pat quotes Golda Meir saying, one of the best friends Israel ever had. In the story, Nixon had just hung up after receiving a phone call from Yitzhak Rabin. Pat's wife Shelley asked the President what he thought of Israel's prospects. End quote. So there are two Israel-supporting Israel pessimists: me, and Richard Milhous Nixon. To me that seems like good company. Since the current hostilities are plainly, to an excellent first approximation, between the nation of Israel and the nation of Iran, I find myself wondering what it is that the Israel-haters over at The Unz Review and elsewhere like so much about Iran. I understand of course that they don't want our country involved in a war on Israel's behalf. I don't either, as I have already made clear. OK, I disagree with them on material support for Israel. They don't want us to give any; I'm willing to yield up a cent or two on my tax dollar in civilizational solidarity. Fair enough. Those minor points aside, why do they favor Iran? Is there, in the Washington, D.C. swamp, some Iranian equivalent of AIPAC writing out checks for them? Nothing would surprise me. |
04 — Zio-pessimism. In the previous segment I quoted from an essay I posted back in 2002 under the title "Does Israel Have a Future?" After pulling the article out of my archives and copying the quote I wanted, my eyes wandered a bit further down the article and then stopped dead. In my essay I had just mentioned an article by Norman Podhoretz in Commentary magazine. Then I wrote, quoting myself again now: That article naturally generated a lot of mail to Commentary. Amongst it was a letter from Ron Unz, the West Coast entrepreneur and policy intellectual who campaigned successfully against bilingual education in California. Unz (who, like Podhoretz, is Jewish) puts the pessimistic case with great force: End quote. You see what stopped my eye? It was the name Ron Unz, which I have mentioned, at least in passing, in every segment of this podcast so far. Then, when I went looking in my archive for a quote about President Nixon and Israel, whose name should I come across in my text but … Ron Unz's! Small world, or what? And not only that: coincidences multiply here. I am a keen regular reader of the Z-man's blog, so I read yesterday's post there. Its title is: "The Eighth Decade Curse." It's a long piece, more than eleven hundred words. I'll leave you to read it for yourselves if so inclined. I'll just give you the closing paragraph. Z has been chewing over the possibility of the current ructions in the Middle East resulting in a disastrous outcome for us, the U.S.A. Then, quote: If this comes to pass, the American empire would not be the first to face its mortality in the Middle East. The Romans eventually learned that the Middle East was more trouble than it was worth. Perhaps it also spells the end of the Zionist project. It has been eighty years since the birth of the Zionist state, so maybe they are about to succumb to the curse of the eighth decade. Of course, the Global American Empire is in its eighth decade as well, so maybe there is something to it. End quote. "The curse of the eighth decade?" I never heard of that. What is Z talking about? He helpfully provides a hyperlink for the word "curse." The link goes to mizrachi.com, a website promoting religious Zionism. The particular article at the link bears the title "The Curse of the Eighth Decade," by Menachem Rahat. It seems to have been written in reaction to the terrorist attacks on a Jerusalem synagogue in January last year. Opening lines, edited quote: The threat of national disintegration, which destroyed the two sovereign Jewish states that preceded ours, remains an ever-present danger in the third iteration of Jewish sovereignty … End quote. OK, so what's the Curse of the Eighth Decade? The writer goes on to give a sketch of the two previous attempts at a sovereign Jewish state: the one founded by King David in the tenth century b.c., and the Hasmonean kingdom that ended in 63 b.c. when the Roman general Pompey sacked the Temple and made the Jews subjects of Rome. Both these attempts, says Mr Rahat, went down the tubes in their eighth decade, or very shortly thereafter. He goes on to generalize into modern times. Edited quote: Small comfort can be found in the fact that other nations have also experienced the "curse of the eighth decade" in a very painful way. The bloody American Civil War broke out 85 years after the adoption of the Constitution … Italy became fascist and Germany became a Nazi terrorist state in the eighth decade after each nation's unification. The Third Republic of France, founded in 1871, surrendered to the Nazi boot in 1940, in its eighth decade, while the communist monster that was born in the October Revolution of 1917 began to disintegrate in the 1980s and was finally shattered into pieces 74 years after its founding in 1991. End quote. Wow. I'm no more susceptible than the average browser to grand theories of historical development, but that one got my attention, particularly after just having read Ron Unz's speculation about Israel, quote, "surviving for seventy or eighty years following its 1948 establishment," end quote. And as the Z-man points out: Next year, 2025, will be just eighty years on from the end of WW2. Uh-oh. |
05 — National suicide; it happens. It may be — I'm just going to air some half-baked ideas here, so don't take what follows too seriously — it may be that civilizations are subject to self-destructive cycles like that. I made the case nine years ago on VDARE that, yes, nations really do commit suicide. It was stretching the word "nation" a bit, but my prime exhibit in that column was the cattle-herding Xhosa people of Southern Africa. The story in very brief. A teenage Xhosa girl — a sort of African Greta Thunberg — had a vision in which she met two angels. The angels told her a new world was coming when all want and suffering would disappear, along with all white men. There was a catch, though. This new world couldn't appear until the Xhosa people had killed all their cattle and scattered all their corn. The vision was taken up by a Xhosa witch doctor. He kept setting dates for when this new world would happen, but of course it never did. As I wrote, quote: Belief generated more belief; each failed prediction set off a new frenzy of cattle-killing. It must be that we have not killed enough! Anger was directed against the dwindling minority of Unbelievers. End quote. The end result was of course mass starvation with tens of thousands dead, followed by total subjection to the white men. So yes: a nation can go collectively nuts and commit national suicide. Whether it happens on eighty-year cycles … discuss among yourselves. What brought all that to mind was that tableau at the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris, the one mocking Christ's last supper. In a French context, it wasn't particularly surprising. Anti-clericalism has a long history in France. It was a Frenchman, the 18th-century philosopher Denis Diderot, who wrote that, quote: "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest," end quote — and that was fourteen years before the French Revolution. During the course of that revolution, so-called "refractory priests," which is to say priests who refused to swear an oath in support of the regime, were frequently executed. Checking online to see that I had remembered that Diderot quote correctly, I stumbled on an article by an American pastor of the Reformed Church, name of Chase Replogle — I hope I pronounced that right. The article is about that same Olympic opening parody of the Last Supper. The author puts the Diderot quote right at the top as its title; although in the article he says, incorrectly, that Diderot wrote it "during the French Revolution." In fact Diderot died in 1784, five years before the Revolution broke out. Still, Pastor Replogle has written a good, engaging article. Along the way he refers to a recent book from the Christian sociologist Aaron Renn. Renn, says the Pastor, describes the recent trajectory of Christianity in the West as going from positive, through neutral, to negative. Quote from Pastor Replogle: For my grandparents, to be a Christian was considered positive. In fact, being a Christian was an expectation and probably assisted in finding jobs, building social relationships, and gaining social standing. End quote. "Exactly," I found myself muttering. What's that got to do with the suicide of nations? Something, but I'm not sure what. Hey, I told you this segment was half-baked. |
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items. Just one item this week, actually: I'm a little short of time. Imprimis: In my July 24th podcast I reported on a July 2nd event in Northern India, when more than 100 people died in a stampede of enthusiasts at a Hindu religious ceremony. I then committed the following, quote: This story … brought to mind something I read somewhere decades ago, I think in the London Spectator, although I can't remember the writer, and that's annoying me. End quote. Well, I have been reassured. The mystery writer whose observation I was quoting from memory was … me, myself. To be precise it was me, six years ago, quoting China observer Paul Midler when reviewing Paul's 2017 book What's Wrong with China?. Wrote Paul Midler, re-quote: Whenever you read about a stampede in India, you can rest assured that it has taken place during a religious festival. In Europe, stampedes that result in death usually happen at sporting events. In China, the mad rush of a crowd almost always has something to do with economics. A sales promotion on cooking oil and rumors of a rice shortage have both sent Chinese into frenzied action. End quote. My apologies to Paul Midler for not having remembered that it was his words I remembered; and apologies to myself for having forgotten having quoted him … or something … |
07 — Signoff. That's all I can offer, ladies and gents, this second day of August. Thanks as always for your time and attention, your encouragement and support. For signoff music, something old and English. I have a strange affinity for things that are old and English, I don't know why … This piece is really old. The words are by Ben Jonson, an acquaintance of William Shakespeare, although we don't know how close the two of them were. These lyrics were first published in 1616, more than four hundred years ago. The music is a bit more up-to-date, from 1780. The voice here belongs to tenor John Potter, with the Broadside Band. There will be more from Radio Derb next week. |
[Music clip: Broadside Band, Drink to Me Only]