This Week’s Show

Contents

• 02m11s Two types of isolationism?
• 09m21s (Some) Germans vote
• 17m41s Scrambling the poles of good and evil
• 27m51s Temporal isolationism
• 32m26s Much ADOS about nothing
• 37m37s The innumerate imagination
• 40m38s No Chi spy here!
• 41m55s The Bell Curve at 30
• 43m19s Hwæt!
• 44m55s Signoff: Remembering Blair Tindall

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a fragment of Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your generically genial host John Derbyshire covering the week’s news.

Before I begin the podcast proper, I should clarify the matter of donations.

VDARE is no longer posting at the website, but the VDARE Foundation is still a going concern and you can still make tax deductible donations to your genial host by sending a check via snail mail with a note on the memo line of the check saying the donation is earmarked for me.

The address for donations is, as before: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield, CT 06759. (That “Litchfield” has a “t” in it, by the way — “L-itch-field” — unlike the Lichfield in England that is so dear to the hearts of us Samuel Johnson fans.)

Thank you in advance for your support!

OK, on with the motley. [Clip:  Pavarotti, Vesti la giubba.]

02 — Two types of isolationism?     [Clip:  Hank Williams, Mind Your Own Business.] I am, as I have often confessed, an isolationist. It was therefore with some interest that I saw this heading at the American Greatness website, August 28th, heading: Two Types of Isolationism — Reject Them Both.

This was an opinion piece by Edward Ring, who is, so far as I’m aware, not involved in any way at all with a popular home-security system. Ring is a conservative commentator and activist who posts a lot at American Greatness.

So what, according to Ring, are these two types of isolationism?

Type One isolationism, he says, calls for, quote

America to fortify its southern border and count on the geographically isolated North American continent to provide a measure of security from other nations that is unimaginable in turbulent Eurasia. Let them fight among themselves. With vast oceans separating us from far-flung conflicts, we will stay out of foreign wars.

End quote.

That sounds a lot like my isolationism. Sure, we’re bound to have some interaction with other nations. There are unavoidable matters of international concern: safe trade routes, raw materials we don’t have, disease epidemics, and so on.

Ring says Type One isolationism can’t be made to work under modern conditions. My response: Let’s give it a try, allowing ourselves some minimum leeway on those unavoidables.

What is the author’s Type Two isolationism? It is — and here I quote the author again, quote —

a wish to focus so exclusively on protecting American traditions, prosperity, and freedom, that there is no room to make common cause with like-minded Europeans who face precisely the same threats in their own nations.

End quote.

The whole of the Western world is facing a threat, says Ring, a threat to, quote, “European traditions and values,” end quote; the threat of, quote, “demographic replacement combined with economic repression in the name of fighting climate change,” end quote.

We have to make common cause with other Western nations to counter this threat, he argues. If we don’t hang together we shall all hang separately.

He adds a caution, perhaps for self-protection against cancellation, that our battle, although Eurocentric, is not ethnocentric. Quote:

Millions of thoroughly assimilated immigrants are ready to fight with us and we should welcome them.

End quote.

Uh … okay. Speaking as the husband of a thoroughly assimilated non-European immigrant, I won’t take issue with that, except to repeat the words of the great Enoch Powell, quote: “Numbers are of the essence,” end quote. Let’s remember how we salt our stew.

I’ll admit I’m not altogether clear on the difference between Ring’s Type One and Type Two isolationisms. Type One: We stay out of foreign wars in places like “turbulent Eurasia.” Type Two: We have “no room to make common cause with like-minded Europeans.”

What’s the difference? If we did get involved in a foreign war, wouldn’t we have to make common cause with one side or the other?

I read Ring’s column twice but came out by the same door as in I went. I mean, I am as much of an isolationist after reading it as I was before.

Jolly good luck to the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Italians, and the rest of the Euros in shutting down the “climate change” rackets in their countries and deporting their illegal aliens. I really don’t see how we can help, though.

We are much better supplied than they are with domestic energy sources, for a smaller population with, overall, a warmer climate; and while we have issues with nations to our South, those issues pale by comparison with Europe’s situation, separated as they are from the African continent by just a few dozen miles of easily-navigable water.

Let’s push ahead with our own fight against globalist lunacy and leave the Euros to deal with their considerably different one. They are in fact, after a slow start, not doing too badly, in some respects better than we are. I’ll give over my next segment to an illustration of that.

Minding our own business looks to me like good policy.

03 — (Some) Germans vote.     The news here is from Germany. A little basic political geography before the news.

As you know, Germany is, like us, a federal republic. There are sixteen states in the federation. Before reunification in 1990 the country was divided into East Germany and West Germany, under separate central governments. Six of the sixteen states made up East Germany; the other ten of course were West Germany.

Federal elections to the national parliament are held every four years, give or take a few weeks. The system, as in most of Europe, is proportional representation, giving small parties a chance but usually obliging the bigger parties to form a coalition if any actual governing is going to get done.

The last federal election was in 2021. After the usual haggling, a coalition was formed with Olaf Scholz as Chancellor. Scholz’s party, the SPD, is center-left, roughly equivalent to our own belovéd Democratic Party. On the four-year cycle, there’ll be another federal election next year.

So much for federal elections. Each of the sixteen states has a government of its own, just like in the U.S.A., each with some autonomous authority and its own electoral timetable for seats in its own legislature.

Last Sunday, September 1st, two of the states held elections. The results were a fair-sized kick in the groin for the big old centrist parties that dominate German politics, like Scholz’s SPD.

The two states holding elections were Saxony and Thuringia. The headline news was that the national-populist party AfD, Alternative for Germany, won a solid victory in Thuringia, 33 percent over the next party’s 25, and only lost by a hair’s breadth in Saxony, 31 percent against 32.

Neither of the other parties sharing the top-two slots with AfD was Chancellor Scholz’s SPD, by the way. The SPD actually placed fifth in both Saxony and Thuringia. AfD’s companion in the top two slots was CDU, the center-right Christian Democrats, approximately our own dear GOP.

AfD, although increasingly popular, is not entirely respectable. This is Germany, remember, and AfD is national-populist. [Scream.] Any time AfD scores a win the shrieks of “Nazi! Nazi! Nazi! Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!” go up, inside Germany as well as outside.

That’s tiresome and silly; but there, as here, some big subset of the population knows no history at all other than what happened in Europe from 1933 to 1945, and they have only a fuzzy understanding of that.

Seats in these state elections, as in the federal ones, are assigned by proportional representation, so there’s going to be some busy negotiating to put coalitions together, the more so as most other parties have sworn not to join AfD in coalitions. Next year’s federal election, and any state elections in the interim, should be … interesting.

It’s not just populism of the right that won there. There’s a new radical-progressive party called BSW that also did well on Sunday. Interestingly, while far left on economic and foreign policy issues — they favor Russia over Ukraine — BSW also wants a big crackdown on immigration.

These are small states: Saxony only five percent of Germany’s population, Thuringia only 2½ percent. Chancellor Scholz isn’t running for the exits. Still, as I said, these election results are a kick in the groin for the big old centrist parties.

Like our own Republican Party, though, Germany’s center-right is adapting. Germany’s Christian Democrats, a fair equivalent of our Republicans, have, quote:

started to advocate closing Germany’s border to people who have requested asylum in another EU country, a blanket ban on Syrian and Afghan refugees, indefinite detention for migrants earmarked for deportation and — listen to this — emergency powers to suspend European law where it interferes with a robust response to migration.

End quote. I took that from a report by Andrew Neil in Monday’s Daily Mail.

That shift to immigration populism by the Christian Democrats surely helped elevate them to the top-two slots in Sunday’s state elections.

This is just one little instance of how the familiar political positions are shifting and changing all over. The days of the Uniparty are numbered, in Europe as in America.

I’m tempted to give you Yeats’ lines about how

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, …

That’s probably what it looks like to long-serving old-line politicians. I doubt it will end with anarchy, though. There will be a rearrangement, that’s all.

The center will hold; it’ll just be a different center, with more respect for widespread popular feelings and correspondingly less respect for special interests and ideological fads out of college sociology departments. Well, that’s my hope.

04 — Scrambling the poles of good and evil.     A few weeks ahead of us, November 30th, is Sir Winston Churchill’s 150th birthday. Social media — well, X, the only social medium I follow — have come alive with opinionating about Churchill, a good proportion of it negative.

That’s nothing new to me. As I mentioned in my podcast on the fiftieth anniversary of the old boy’s death, my father was a Churchill-hater.

Part of that was that Dad, a WW1 veteran, blamed Churchill for the fiasco at Gallipoli in 1915, which Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had urged on the British government’s war council.

That wasn’t altogether fair. The general in command of the Gallipoli expedition, Sir Ian Hamilton, was operating above his level of competence. Training and provisions were poor. Wrote historian A.J.P. Taylor, quote:

Their generals lacked drive, and Hamilton failed to provide it. He was too polite to be a successful commander. He drifted helplessly up and down the coast on a warship, refusing to interfere with his subordinates. The Turks recovered from their surprise and pinned Hamilton’s men to the shore.

End quote.

Churchill’s political enemies kept blaming him for the Gallipoli debacle anyway. They were still doing so even after a postwar committee of inquiry found him not at fault.

Following the Gallipoli failure Churchill went off and served with a combat regiment on the Western Front, presumably in hopes of restoring his reputation. I’m trying to imagine one of our own politicians atoning for, say, the Afghanistan debacle in a similar spirit, but … I can’t.

My Dad, a working man of not much education, absorbed all the anti-Churchill slanders and added them to his dislike of Britain’s upper classes, to which Churchill indisputably belonged. In the first British election after WW2, Churchill’s party lost in a landslide. I have no doubt my father was one of the millions who voted against him.

When I grew up and got out into the world, and read some books — including some written by the man himself — I acquired other perspectives on Churchill.

Thoughtful, well-educated people — schoolmasters, college academics, veterans both civilian and military of WW2 — mostly gave positive reports, although 1945 voters often ended their reports with: “…  but I didn’t want him for our peacetime Prime Minister.” (Presumably some number of them changed their minds six years later; Churchill was elected to a second term as Prime Minister in 1951.)

So far as I can gather from reading what he wrote and growing up among people who voted for or against him in elections, I believe I would have liked the man. He was worldly, witty, well-mannered and well-read.

Now here I am browsing social media and learning that he was a drunken brute and war criminal controlled by evil Jews.

The evidence offered is not very persuasive.

• He initiated the aerial bombing of civilian populations. Citizens of Guernica and Warsaw might have something to say there.
• He declared war on Germany. No, that was Chamberlain in September 1939. Churchill didn’t become Prime Minister until eight months later.
• He was a tool of the Jews. Strange, then, that in the five thousand pages of his WW2 memoir Churchill doesn’t even mention the Holocaust. (The Jew-haters have jiu-jitsued (jew-jitsued?) this to be proof that the Holocaust never happened.)
• Gallipoli. Uh-huh.
• He did nothing to relieve the terrible 1943 Bengal Famine in what was then British India. There was nothing he could do. The Brits needed all their shipping for the North Africa campaign. Churchill tried to get the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia to help with relief, but they couldn’t spare shipping either. Historian A.J.P. Taylor again, quote: “A million and a half Indians died of starvation for the sake of a white man’s quarrel in North Africa.” End quote.
• He launched the project to destroy Britain by mass Third World immigration. Really? Quote from The Guardian, August 4th 2007, quote: “On 3 February 1954, under the agenda item ‘Coloured Workers,’ Churchill is quoted, with abbreviations, by Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook as saying: [inner quote] ‘Problems wh. will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK? Attracted by Welfare State. Public opinion in UK won’t tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.’ [End inner quote, end quote.] Churchill believed, and said, that the U.K. should maintain a white super-majority … and he was of course right.

This denigration of Churchill is part of a larger project to convince us that everything we thought we knew is wrong — to take a sledge-hammer to the myths and legends that normal citizens carry around in our heads.

I saw this sentiment expressed very crisply and clearly the other day by Melissa Chen of The Spectator. I hope the lady won’t mind if I quote her at length. quote:

In rehabilitating Hitler and villainizing Churchill, the Right has its 1619 Project and the goal is the same: moral inversion.

Scrambling the poles of good and evil and destroying the entire foundation upon which the post-WWII order is built is to decimate Western civilization and to ensure that everything good about our way of life shall no longer endure.

The stakes are very high.

This is not to say that one can’t apply a critical eye to discuss the missteps of even our cherished historical figures. This is not to say that the West is not in decline.

But to obfuscate the moral vectors of these characters that played an outsized role in shaping our history is a huge existential risk that tears at the very foundation of our society, of civilization itself.

End quote. Thanks, Melissa.

05 — Temporal isolationism.     Wait, though. Shouldn’t we prefer facts and truth to myths and legends?

Well, yes, we should; but facts and truth about past events are hard to disentangle. Outside the Academy, few of us have the time or talents to do the necessary research.

A decade or so ago, just home after spending a week in Russia, I wrote the following thing, with that country in mind. Quote from self:

A nation, certainly a big nation that’s been around for a century or two, is an impossible thing for a non-native to know fully. This is even the case with “cousin” nations like Britain and America, sharing a common language. After 30 years in the U.S., I am still banging my shins against peculiarities of the American national character. With a nation culturally more remote from the one you grew up in, the case is hopeless. I can only shake my head in wonder at the arrogance of State Department and military types who claim to have fathomed the Afghan or Iraqi national character.

End quote.

Now I’ll form a syllogism. Just yoke that observation I made there with the famous line that L.P. Hartley wrote a half-century earlier, quote: “The past is a foreign country.” End quote. (Often misquoted as “the past is another country.” End quote.)

If the past is a foreign country and foreign countries are ultimately unfathomable, then the past is ultimately unfathomable, at any rate to those of us who can’t give over their entire lives to studying it.

I do believe that. I’m not a trained historian. My knowledge of the past has accumulated from a few decades of random reading. Where the early-to-mid twentieth century is concerned, those readings have been seasoned and colored somewhat by things I’ve heard from adults that I grew up among, some of them older than Churchill.

Do I understand, for example, the origins of WW2? Well: better than Condoleezza Rice understood the Iraqi national character, I hope, but … not much better.

In that spirit, and looking back to my first segment, I’m going to suggest what seems to me a sensible outlook.

That first segment was about isolationism, about the virtue of not giving much of a damn what’s happening in foreign countries. I’m going to call that “spatial isolationism.”

The sensible outlook I want to introduce is similar, but in the fourth dimension: “temporal isolationism”: not giving much of a damn what happened in times past.

As with spatial isolationism, we can’t help but give somewhat of a damn, but we’d be wise not to make a hobby of it unless some university will pay us a salary to do so.

With apologies to Edward Ring, that is my Two Types of Isolationism.

06 — Much ADOS about nothing.     Two weeks ago, in the August 23rd podcast, I wondered aloud why we’ve never had an ADOS candidate for President. ADOS, A-D-O-S, there stands for American Descendant Of Slaves.

There is more to that than I reckoned. For one thing, as I noted in the transcript of that podcast, Ann Coulter improved ADOS in a nationalist direction by reshuffling the letters to DOAS, D-O-A-S. That’s “Descendants of American slaves.” Not Haitian slaves, not Moroccan slaves, … not anyone else’s slaves.

For another thing, I failed to notice that there is an ADOS Movement, founded in 2020 by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore. The movement has a website, a podcast (I think), a Wikipedia page, a hashtag, and I’m guessing, from what I know about black-activist outfits in general, a handsome real-estate portfolio.

Note that the ADOS Movement takes Ann Coulter as its inspiration, although I’m sure they would rather die than admit it. They represent only descendants of American slaves.

I have learned, in fact, that by touching on this topic I have landed on a mighty iceberg, nine-tenths of which was utterly unknown to me.

For example: Let me introduce you to GAASA. No, that’s nothing to do with current ructions in the Levant. GAASA is G-A-A-S-A. It stands for “Generational African American Students Association” at Harvard University. GAASA takes the Coulter view of authenticity. To join, you have to be descended from enslaved black Americans.

You can read all about it in an articled published by the Harvard Crimson in October 2020. I’ve just been browsing that article, and a couple of things stopped my eye.

Thing One, quote:

Harvard has over fifteen Black organizations.

End quote.

That seems like a lot to me. “Over fifteen”? How much over? Why so many? Is it a departmental thing: Black Math Students Society, Black Anthropology Students Society, and so on? Or an identity thing: Disabled left-handed black trans male students, and so on? Or what?

Thing Two, quote:

As a first-year, I once heard from a teaching fellow of the Introduction to African American Studies course that GAA students make up 10 percent of Harvard’s Black population. For the Class of 2022, that would mean roughly 17 students.

End quote.

“GAA” there means “Generational African Americans,” what Ann Coulter — who gets a passing mention in this Crimson piece, by the way — would call DOAS. If they are only 10 percent of Harvard’s Black population, presumably the other 90 percent are foreign blacks or the offspring thereof, not descendants of American slaves.

As I said, a mighty iceberg. Would you like to hear about HASA, the Harvard African Students Association? You wouldn’t? Eh, I can’t say I blame you.

07 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Another follow-up here. In last week’s podcast I told you, with supporting evidence, that Kamala Harris is seriously innumerate.

Innumeracy on the Kamala scale is not just a matter of being bad at arithmetic. For all I know, the Vice President might be a whiz at long division … I make no judgments there.

The problem — her problem, which her high office makes our problem — is a problem not so much of calculation as of imagination. People who are innumerate like that have no feel for numbers, no imaginative grasp of what they mean.

Veterans of the immigration-restriction movement like your genial host here are all too familiar with this particular deficiency. “Let them come!” say our opponents. “They will bolster our workforce and enrich our culture!” To which we reply wearily: “Do you know HOW MANY OF THEM THERE ARE?”

It sometimes turns out that, yes, they do know. At any rate, they know the words for the numbers. They just have no imaginative feel for what the numbers mean.

Visual aids are useful here. When I was a high-school math teacher I bought a book of graph paper ruled in millimeters and got to work with scissors, paste, and a big board of plywood. A million is a thousand times a thousand, so a million square millimeters fits into a square one meter on each side, which is to say a little over 39 inches.

My students could then see, every day, on the classroom wall, a million on plain display. I hope it stayed with them.

For the immigration issue in particular, a classic visual aid was the Gumball presentation given by Roy Beck of NumbersUSA back in 2010. It’s on YouTube: just put the words “gumball immigration” into the YouTube search box. If you fear that you may be down there in the innumeracy swamp with Kamala Harris, I urge you to check it out.

Item:  Browsing on X the other evening I suddenly found myself looking at Mrs Derbyshire in a post by the intrepid Andy Ngo.

My thoughts shot off on a tangent. Andy? He’s gay, isn’t he? Then I looked at the accompanying text. No, it wasn’t Mrs D, just a lookalike, a doppelganger.

The lady in Andy’s image was in fact Linda Sun, charged the other day in a New York City federal court along with her husband for acting as an undisclosed ChiCom agent.

In case anyone else spotted the resemblance, let me make it perfectly clear that the John and Rosie Institute for the Study of Xi Jinping Thought receives no funds whatsoever from the ChiCom government, and that our monthly visits to the New York City Chinese consulate are strictly for social purposes only.

Item:  Last Sunday, September 1st, marked thirty years since publication of The Bell Curve, the book co-authored by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein on intelligence and class structure in American life.

In case you never heard of it, The Bell Curve shamelessly peddles the totally discredited pseudoscience of so-called “intelligence testing” and purposefully trashes our nation’s Declaration of Independence by asserting that all men are not created equal. Some of us, these mountebanks claim, are smarter than others.

To his everlasting shame, Charles Murray has never apologized for this disgusting screed. He is, quite rightly, shunned by all respectable people. If you see him coming towards you on the sidewalk, cross to the other side of the road. You will thereby deliver a small blow for truth and justice!

Item:  Hwæt! Over the pond in England the University of Nottingham are expunging the term “Anglo-Saxon” from their courses. This, we are told, is part of a move to a move to “decolonise the curriculum.”

Quote from a report in the Daily Telegraph, August 31st, quote:

Teaching staff at Nottingham also ensure that module content aims at [inner quote] “undercutting nationalist narratives” and “essentialist ideas” [end inner quote] about nationality, meaning the belief that English identity is distinct and confers fundamental characteristics.

End quote.

Heaven forfend that students at an English university should stray into the belief that English identity is distinct!

Oh, and if you’re wondering what that syllable was that I barked at the beginning of this item, it was a “Hwæt!” If you have ever tried to study Anglo-Saxon — oh, I beg your pardon: “Early medieval English” — you will understand.

08 — Signoff.     That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time and attention, for your emails and donations. And concerning the latter, let me just repeat the mailing address for checks earmarked to your genial host: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

To see us out, I thought we’d hear some oboe music. I opened my August Diary with a long segment about Blair Tindall’s 2005 book Mozart in the Jungle, which gives a vivid account of the underside of life as a concert musician. Ms Tindall knew all about it, having made her living playing the oboe in orchestras and concert ensembles.

Ms Tindall died in April last year aged only 63. Browsing on YouTube I found a rather touching tribute to her there on William Wielgus’ channel.

The visual component here is still pictures of Blair Tindall progressing through life from infancy to her later days — the kind of things that funeral parlors do for a photo display. Of course you are not getting visuals on a podcast, but there’s a link in the transcript.

The soundtrack is Blair Tindall playing Carlos Franzetti’s Oboe Concerto. It’s 26 minutes long in the YouTube tribute. Here on the podcast I’ll just give the first two and a half minutes. That’s longer than usual for my signoffs, but it’s a lovely piece of music. And come on, confess with me: when was the last time you listened to a performance in which an oboe was the main feature?

There will be more from Radio Derb next week.