The Other Imperial War

 

Image source

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has held the world spellbound. Not since the Yugoslav wars has Europe seen such a conflict on its doorstep. The massive land-driven invasion brings to mind images of WWII.

Polish tanks in Cieszyn, Czechoslovakia

As always in the fog of war, propaganda is flying on all sides. The first European conflict of the social media age has whipped up the western world into a frenzy of virtue-signaling.

 

Berlin, Paris, Sydney

 

Steve Sailer reports:    

The Metropolitan Opera said it would cut ties with Russian artists or institutions “allied” (to use state-funded NPR’s word) with President Vladimir Putin. … In Wales, an orchestra removed Tchaikovsky. … The University of Milano-Bicocca postponed a series of lectures on Fyodor Dostoevsky “to avoid any controversy.”

The great vodka pour-out

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire signed an executive order directing state-run liquor stores to stop selling Russian products. Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah have done the same.  … FIFA has banned Russia indefinitely, meaning the country won’t be able to compete for the World Cup. The International Paralympic Committee has also banned Russian athletes.

What prides itself as the “United Nations of cat federations” (FIFe) has banned Russian-owned and Russian-bred cats from all competitions because it “cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing.”

 

 Corporate world flees Russia

Russia's 'imperial' ambitions have shocked the West. Images of bombs falling on homes, tanks rolling through cities, dead children on stretchers—it is appalling. 

So appalling, in fact, that it is easy to forget the murder and mayhem perpetrated by that other great imperial power these last 80 years. As 'Physicist Dave' puts it, 

'Try to name all the countries that have been attacked, invaded, bombed, conquered, or had their governments overthrown by the US just during your lifetime.

Really — get a piece of paper and try to write them all down.

There are so many that I bet that you cannot even remember them all.'

 

We will take up the challenge.

U.S. patrols the Pacific

America's imperial adventurism has become so omnipresent on planet Earth these last three-quarters of a century that we hardly seem to notice it.

In condemning the suffering caused by Mr. Putin's war, most Americans seem oblivious to the fact that their own tax dollars support a world-spanning empire that has its claws sunk into every inch of the globe, spying, prying, arming, meddling, funding, bombing, and starving. The 80-year 'Pax Americana' has come at an unimaginably heavy cost.

 

We thus propose to scrub off the blue and yellow greasepaint, just for a moment, and to remember that other long, long imperial war.

 

 

I. The Cold War

 

As the two big teams jockeyed for position on the planetary chessboard for half a century following WWII, the U.S. developed a mortal fear of anything even remotely redolent of socialism, be it near or far.

 

This led to regular covert and overt U.S. action against democratically-elected governments and in favor of dictators pledging allegiance to free-market capitalism.

 

 

A stroll down memory lane…

 

 

Hunting Asians for Sport: A Trans-Atlantic Tale

 

Oakland: 91-year-old attacked for fun

In an age more and more prone to mass hysterias, a new one is sweeping the U.S.: That East Asian immigrants are being violently attacked en masse by white supremacists.

From John Derbyshire:

The message we’re getting here from the Gods of the Market Place is, that because the sinister, evil Donald Trump told us that Covid-19 was a Chinese virus, his followers—who are, of course, all gap-toothed white supremacist persecutors of nonwhites—have been attacking anyone who looks Asian: sucker-punching them, shoving them under subway trains, and so on.

... But then, just as I was rolling my eyes and scoffing, along came a Great White Defendant, who for a moment looked as if he might rescue the Narrative. This was 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, a white man from Georgia, who shot nine people at three massage parlors in Atlanta Tuesday night. Eight of the nine died, the ninth is in hospital, seriously injured but stable.

A Southern Baptist who watched porn all day and was in therapy for ‘sex addiction,’ Long had just been kicked out of his parents’ house. This caused him to snap, buy a pistol and go kill the ‘source of his temptation'--workers at the Asian sex trafficking parlors he'd frequented.

 

Steve Sailer has been following this moral panic closely. He quotes the New York Times’ “particularly shameless work of fake news”:

Confronting Violence Against Asians, Biden Says That ‘We Cannot Be Complicit’

The vice president offered little doubt about what she believed and whom she blamed for stoking the violence, alluding to — without directly naming — former President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly blamed the pandemic on what he called the “China virus.”

“For the last year, we’ve had people in positions of incredible power scapegoating Asian-Americans,” she said. “People with the biggest pulpits spreading this kind of hate.”

…Anti-Asian attacks have soared during the past year, part of a pattern that Mr. Biden called “wrong” and “un-American” last week during a speech at the White House.

What, you may wonder, does a whore-monger murdering the Korean objects of his lust have to do with Donald Trump pointing out that the Wuhan Flu is Chinese? As it turns out, Trump’s words have pushed scores of Americans—mainly black ones, whom we know are his biggest voting bloc--over the edge into violence. On the West Coast:

In January, a local television station showed footage of a young man sprinting toward, then violently shoving to the ground, a man identified as Vicha Ratanapakdee, 84, who had been out for a morning walk in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco. He later died.

Another video shows a 91-year-old man in Oakland’s Chinatown neighborhood being pushed facedown into the sidewalk cement from behind in an apparently unprovoked attack.

 On the East Coast: 

Asian Woman Leaving Asian-Black Solidarity Rally Gets Punched (by a Black Man)

Later Sunday on the Lower East Side, police sources say a 54-year-old woman was smashed in the face with a metal pipe by a man who allegedly shouted an anti-Asian slur.

… Police are also looking for another man in connection to a similar crime. They say he yelled and punched a 66-year-old Asian man in the face on Allen Street on the Lower East Side on Saturday at around 9 a.m.

... Police arrested 36-year-old Marc Mathieu over the weekend, charging him with assault as a hate crime for a subway attack Friday afternoon. He allegedly punched a 68-year-old Asian man on the 1 train.

Blacks violently attacking Asians, which is an everyday occurrence in this country (as is Blacks attacking Whites, Hispanics, and each other), is suddenly being painted as Trump-inspired bigotry.

 

But it's tricky to make surveillance footage lie. 

The victims:

 The perpetrators:

But these are just anecdotes, after all. Surely the data show that Whites are indeed mowing down Asians left, right, and center?

 

From Andrew Sullivan, via Steve Sailer:     

But what about hate crimes specifically? In general, the group disproportionately most likely to commit hate crimes in the US are African-Americans. At 13% of the population, African Americans commit 24% of hate crimes.

Data Source

But hate specifically against Asian-Americans in the era of Trump and Covid? … The best data I’ve found for 2020, the salient period for this discussion, are provisional data on complaints and arrests for hate crimes against Asians in New York City, one of two cities which seem to have been most affected. They record 20 such arrests in 2020. Of those 20 offenders, 11 were Black, 7 Hispanic, and 2 White. 

Data source

As far as Black-on-Asian versus Asian-on-Black crime:

In 2018’s Table 14, the BJS broke out the black vs. Asian offending rates. According to inadequate sample sizes, blacks aggressed against Asians 50,000 times vs. a little over 500 times that Asians attacked blacks, for an 89 to 1 racial ratio of total incidents. Because there are almost twice as many blacks as Asians, on a per capita footing that would be 46 to 1.

 

The data unequivocally show, then, that Asians are being massively victimized by Blacks. And yet certain members of the community are in complete denial of this fact:

When Ariel Hsu saw a graphic video last week of an Asian American senior citizen in San Francisco being pushed to the ground and the growing social media response around it, she said she was concerned — about both the victim and the outcry. 

Hsu, a chapter leader at the National Asian American Pacific American Women’s Forum, said that given that the suspect in the incident is Black, many in the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, including herself, were concerned about anti-Black sentiment that appeared to be present in some of the online calls for justice.

 

For organizers like Hsu, seeing the actor Daniel Dae Kim offer a $25,000 reward for information on the suspect felt like a “bounty,” she said, and the increased calls for more police presence seemed like a backwards step.

 

“If addressing violence against Asian Americans entails furthering stereotypes about Black criminality and the policies associated with those stereotypes … we’ve misdiagnosed the problem,” said Janelle Wong, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Maryland.

 

Is it denial, or a conscious effort to ape the current anti-white zeitgeist?

 

 

Hard to say. But this complex dynamic of Black violence, Asian victims, and White scapegoats… does it have parallels anywhere else in the world?

 

In fact, yes. There is a strikingly similar phenomenon at work in France. An indigenous white majority, a melanated predator class (mainly Arab, a bit black), and an East Asian minority of easy targets. Join us for a tour d'horizon...

 

 

 

Islam: Why We Culturally Profile It

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Paris, Nov. 13, 2015: The Indian summer meant many were enjoying a meal out on the patio

Four years ago this week, France experienced its "9-11": The Bataclan terror attacks. Shortly after, we published this body of data on why, exactly, Europeans are becoming so wary of the mass of Muslim immigrants streaming into their countries.

We publish it again on this terrible anniversary, with the footnote that all of the tendencies described therein have only intensified in the intervening four years.

We hope you appreciate this food for thought.

The Europe to come?

[Re-post, original post here.]

At the height of the Trayvon Martin affair, we met a young Afro-Canadian who strongly objected to being racially profiled. Drawing on the pool of data at our disposal, we presented, to the best of our ability, the reasons such profiling exists.

Today, as hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants pour into Europe to claim asylum, profiling again rears its ugly head. Not racial/ethnic this time, but religious:

At least five European countries have signaled that they prefer to grant asylum only to Christian refugees flooding the continent from the Middle East, not to Muslims.

“I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country,” Hungarian Prime Minister Orban said.  ... “Refugees from a completely different cultural background would not be in a good position in the Czech Republic,” said Czech President Milos Zeman.

 Lodz, Poland, September 2015

On what are these fears based? Ignorance, prejudice? We have been told for years that immigration is a gift, an economic boost, an injection of fresh blood, and that our new guests will culturally enrich our lives with their differentness (all while assimilating seamlessly thanks to their sameness). We at TWCS have thus decided to take a deeper look at the data.

But is Islam a religion, a culture, or a civilization? Has it genetically changed its adherents over time like Christianity has (cousin marriage enforced vs. forbidden)? In the absence of any genetic connection, does it culturally push its believers to certain behaviors? Could these beliefs and behaviors really, as the critics charge, prevent their assimilation into the West?

In a word--is this cultural profiling of Muslims based on fact or fantasy?

So, Where Does Multiculturalism Work?

Englischer Garten, Munich

Today's progressives have a seemingly unshakeable belief in the doctrine of Multiculturalism. All societies should be a zesty mix of different melanin levels, languages, religions, and cuisines. Anything else would be not only immoral, but boring.

Despite Putnam's evidence that diverse neighborhoods make everyone living in them less happy, this unflappable belief in the tonic effects of diversity seems to have gripped the modern leftist with claws of steel. 

U.N. Migration Representative and diversity evangelist Peter Sutherland

So we ask him: What is an example of a diverse society that actually works? To which we in the West may aspire?

Rue Polonceau, Paris, 2015

As it turns out, Multiculturalism is not such an easy beast to wrangle.

But we aim to try, to once and for all get our harpoon into that elusive animal: the Diversitopia on which we, in the West, may model ourselves.



Where to find it?

Governments Are Us

Harper's Weekly, 1869

David Brooks has a history lesson for Donald Trump (via Steve Sailer):

The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens.  …  This is a tribal story.  

Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity.

Naturalization ceremony, 2010

This lovely fiction from Mr. Brooks is as quaint as it is ahistorical. But it does go back a fair way. Not as far as our founders, bequeathing a nation 'to ourselves and our posterity.' Not as far as our first naturalization act, in 1790, extended to 'free white persons of good character.' 

Not as far as Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Alexander Hamilton:

Not multiculturalists

'The opinion advanced in [Jefferson's] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. 

'They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? 

'There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.'

The idea that the U.S. was meant to become a League of Nations avant l'heure dates back to the mid 19^th century, when America's first nativist party, the 'Know-Nothings,' agitated against Catholic immigrants (both Irish and German). They were  lambasted by people like George Julian, VP candidate:

'Know Nothingism . . . tramples down the doctrine of human brotherhood. It judges men by the accidents of their condition, instead of striving to find a common lot for all, with a common access to the blessings of life.' (1)

By the 1912 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson was currying favor with his new electorate by trumpeting:

'America has, so to say, opened its doors and extended its welcome to men who were Americans everywhere in the world. She has invited all the free forces of the modern civilized peoples to come to America where men can be free, and where all free forces can unite and forget all their differences of origins.' 

Wilson-style multiculturalism: No Asians or Blacks, thanks

But even a 'proposition nation' man like Wilson wasn't a true multiculturalist—he did not extend this welcome to Blacks or Asians:

'The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.'

These days, things have gone so far that we're being told that not letting masses of Mexicans or Africans into our countries is the equivalent of turning away the Jews in 1940, or runaway slaves in 1840.

Forcing Africans to be governed by their own: Worse than slavery

This is an astounding statement. Forcing a Mexican to be governed by other Mexicans, or a Senegalese to be governed by other Senegalese, is akin to committing genocide upon them. What a statement on the governing abilities of Mexicans or Senegalese! Perhaps Jefferson was onto something after all…

The 'magic dirt' theory, of course, says that once these foreigners set foot on our soil, they are suddenly blessed with the qualities that have allowed us to govern ourselves so successfully all these years.

Coming to take part in the Great Democratic Experiment

But we at TWCS suspect that, on the contrary, Jefferson was right—Governments Are Us. 'That temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism' has not been equally distributed on Planet Earth. 

We mostly rule ourselves now--the age of empire is over.  If we rule ourselves badly, that's because we are somehow ill-equipped to handle the running of a large, modern representative state.

(Formerly 'Failed States Index')

So if we few in well-run countries usher in the many fleeing ill-run countries,  what will be the result? Is it possible such people will recreate the conditions they've created in their own countries, right here on our soil? If so, we should be very, very careful which groups we let in the door.

What is the evidence?

Progressives: the New Race Realists

I will save you from your people

One hundred years ago, progressives referred to people of color as 'backward races,' 'degenerate and unprogressive,' 'non-adults.' Today's leftists, of course, believe no such thing. They think all humans are equal, as they tell us at every available opportunity.

Don't they?

Careful: TWCS is noticing a sea change.

The rhetoric and the actions emanating from the left as of late show that they have perhaps taken a U-turn—a salutary one.  People of Color, they are now saying, in fact have little agency, are near-prisoners of their instincts, and thus can't be held to the same standards as other ethnies.

 Take up the Leftist's burden

In other words, today's progressives have become de facto race realists.

On what do we base such a claim?

The Diversity Tax

Historic Carpetright Building in London, 1930: Built, 2011: Destroyed by Diversity

It is in our day an undisputed fact, almost a religious dogma, that 'diversity is our strength.' This credo is endlessly repeated by our leaders, including the heads of state of the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and France.

Former University of Michigan President Lee Bollinger:

Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-run education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare. For our students to better understand the diverse country and world they inhabit, they must be immersed in a campus culture that allows them to study with, argue with and become friends with students who may be different from them.

By 'diversity,' of course, Mr Bollinger does not mean diversity of opinion (verboten on many campuses), but diversity of melanin content.  

Nearly every political, religious, academic, and cultural leader in every Western country today agrees that (racial) Diversity is, indeed, Our Strength. Or as the French say, 'La diversité est une richesse.'

Are they right?

We at TWCS propose, on the contrary, that in Western countries diversity has proven to be much more like a tax. A tax that falls, like medieval manorial dues, disproportionately on the working classes.

Fort Hood Massacre: Diversity über alles

A tax is not ipso facto a bad thing. Most of us happily pay income or sales tax knowing it helps fund our roadways, police, garbage pick-up, etc.

But how much is the Diversity Tax costing us per year?  And what, exactly, are we getting in return? Is it worth it?

In order to get a closer look, we invite you to join us on a trip through the modern Multicultural West.  It may be wise to bring your checkbook.