Space Invaders

THE ABOVE BOOK was published in America early in 1995 and should have raised a storm except that in these times of moral and intellectual turpitude, the only storms discussed in the media are those in teacups. So far as this reviewer can ascertain, there are no plans to publish the book in Britain. This is less surprising given that the publishing houses in London will publish anything that will conceivably make a fast buck (even alleged novels by illiterate and moronic "supermodels") but nothing which will offend liberal sensibilities.

Liberal sensibilities would certainly be offended by this book because race certainly rears its head. Written by an ex-pat British journalist, the theme of the book is the racial (and cultural) transformation of the Great Republic into, who knows what, certainly into a nation totally different from the America we have known? Mr. Brimelow's book is about Third World migration to America during the last thirty years or so, immigration which is steadily and surely transforming the racial stock of the American people and, equally importantly, if coincidentally, is changing the national culture of that People.

It does not take any great leap of the imagination to realise that what Mr. Brimelow says of the United States applies only to a slightly lesser degree this side of the big pond, the only difference being that, despite the politically correct movement, there is still a greater intellectual honesty in America than here, and the big issues can, occasionally, be confronted, whereas in Europe they are consistently avoided.

Mr. Brimelow, once a great admirer of Enoch Powell, decided to emigrate to America twelve years ago, primarily, he says, because he thought that Britain was losing its national identity through its membership of the European Community. Having arrived in America, however, he was soon to find that the land of Mark Twain and Harry Truman was also being transformed. It is difficult not to feel a touch of Schadenfreude at his discomfiture. There have been large numbers of Europeans who have emigrated from Europe during the post-war years, because they thought European social and cultural problems were insoluble, only to find those problems duplicated in their chosen haven-America, Australia or, worst of all, South Africa. So far as Third World immigration is concerned, every Western society suffers from the same problems. Only that notional Western society, Japan, has had the gumption not to follow us down this particular road.

The core of Peter Brimelow's work, and this is of tremendous relevance to Europe, is that most modern Americans look on immigration with foreboding and yet they are resigned to its continuation, as if immigration is a natural phenomenon beyond the wit or capacity of human beings to control. This same feeling is deeply ingrained in the European peoples. Here also it is believed that immigration of non-Europeans is a fact of the modern world with which we simply have to come to terms. What Mr. Brimelow points out, however, is that non-European immigration into the States has been decisively affected by the "family unification" provisions of the 1965 Immigration Act. These provisions allowed for the entry of close relatives of already accepted immigrants. One of the wonders of the age is how politicians cannot seem to grasp the simple point, that ultimately, everyone is related to everyone else. Allow the close relatives of immigrants to come themselves, and, in due course, their close relatives will also come and so on, ad infinitum. Sooner or later, in theory, the whole of Africa or whatever could be emptied into the West on this principle alone.

The question of immigration is a more complex one for Americans than it is or need be for Europeans. For us, for Europeans, immigration is comparatively recent; those of us of middle-age remember a time when there were few non-Europeans anywhere in Europe and in fact, the assertions of liberals to the contrary, the European nations were not built by immigration. Most Americans would agree, on the other hand, that immigration is an essential part of their national myth; yet as Mr. Brimelow points out, the immigration which built the American nation before World War II was almost exclusively from Europe. this was so much the case, that only fifty years ago, the American people was still 90% white, with the remaining 10% consisting largely of black Americans with comparatively small numbers of Hispanics, the descendants of the original populations of those states wrested from Mexico (Texas, New Mexico, Southern California), native Americans (Red Indians) and the American Japanese.

This early immigration was halted or slowed from time to time in order to allow each wave to be thoroughly assimilated, the immigrants being subjected to "Americanisation" through public institutions and by social intercourse with other Americans. Now, as if the problems posed by assimilating vast numbers of immigrants from all over the world were not enough, the liberal desire to avoid imposing "white" culture means that many of these new immigrants retain their own culture and sometimes, certainly in the case of the Hispanics, their own language. In Mr. Brimelow's view, such fragmentation of the American nation must bode ill for the future. The author also alludes to the curious migratory patterns which seem to be taking place in America. These are, briefly, the retreat of large numbers of white people from California and elsewhere to the mid-West, the "Caucasian Hinterland", the return of large numbers of Afro-Americans to the South from the formerly industrialised North and the gradual, and ironic, re-absorption of much of the American South-West into a new Mexico extended de facto if not de jure across the Rio Grande.

As he claims, and in this Europe is equally concerned, the ethnic transformation of the American nation has no parallel or precedent in the modern world. The liberals, of course, with sublime and breathtaking arrogance, are sure that everything will work just dandy, unlike most of the rest of us, who suspect that multi-racialism is a disaster waiting to happen.

Mr. Brimelow writes that according to the estimates of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, total immigration into the United States during the nineties is likely to be in excess of 18 million, of whom no more than 10% will come from Europe and even many of these will be "Third Worlders" using Europe as a staging post to America. In consequence, by the time the author's young son is middle- aged, it is likely that scarcely one half of the American people will be white. Obviously in many localities, therefore, whites will actually be in a minority. Just as we have lived to witness the collapse of communism and the break-up not only of the Russian Communist state but of the Tsarist Empire which was territorially preserved by that state, so also we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the United States of America. Even if Mr. Brimelow's worst fears are not borne out, and the centripetal forces at play prove more powerful than the centrifugal, an America where at least half the population is not of European descent will not be the same as that with which we have shared the last two centuries of Western history.

If America does not fragment into a Balkans writ large, then at the very least America will become much more like the other nations of the Americas (Canada excluded), specifically a kind of northern-hemisphere Brazil. That America will, in either case, cease to be the epicentre of the West within the next twenty to thirty years must have a profound significance for all of us in Europe. The long post-war history of American protection of an enfeebled, divided and demoralised Europe is coming to a close. Anyone who doubts the extent of European dependence on American leadership and military hardware need only recall the bombing of Tripoli seven years ago, when, it seemed, 300 million Europeans cowered before the prospect of retaliation from 3 million Arabs living on a sand dune, or the shambles in Bosnia before American intervention. These illustrate the present incapacity of the Europeans to effectively defend themselves, to impose order within the European continent or to advance their interests "out of area". If this is so and America no longer plays a Rome to our Greece, who will?

Although Mr. Brimelow has given an excellent account of the emergence of the immigrant problem in America and has also given plausible reasons why this new America is unlikely to remain the "last and best hope of mankind", he is on less sure ground when dealing with the causes of this post-war phenomenon. In every country in Europe, certainly in Britain, and probably in the United States, there was overwhelming initial opposition to Third World immigration. This was not only or even mainly philistine bigotry, as liberals like to think, but the people's instinct that immigration would bring immense, perhaps unsolvable, problems; yet in these Western democracies, the desires of the majority were set aside by an unholy alliance of the liberal cultural elite and the politicians. The politicians of all parties acquiesced in immigration because it was easier to do so than oppose. With some few and honourable exceptions, the majority of politicians faced with the really important issue of the time swam with the tide for no better reason than the fact it was easier to do so than to swim against it. British democracy having saved Europe in 1940, was instrumental in opening Europe's gates a generation later. Unfortunately, democracy only works well when there is at least one great man to give it a lead; there was no Churchill on this occasion.

Mr. Brimelow is at some pains to discount the idea that he may be a racist. His arguments are based on the idea that cultural rather than racial tensions pose the danger for America's future. In this Mr. Brimelow is probably being disingenuous. Although cultural antagonisms are a reality-the horrors perpetrated in the former Jugoslavia until recently were powered by cultural rather than racial differences-these differences are compounded by race. Unlike culture, race is inescapable. One wonders how far Mr. Brimelow would object to the spread of Hispanic culture in the United States if it were being spread by continental Spaniards, i.e. fair-skinned Europeans rather than by the mixed-race descendants of Spaniards and Amerindians?

No doubt Mr. Brimelow's avoidance of the tag of "racist" was necessary even in America in order to get the book published at all; yet by accepting what seems a necessary subterfuge, if that is what it is, he has also accepted the liberal definition of "racist". It is by means of this definition that the liberals have managed to do such harm to Western society. Liberals have cleverly silenced all criticism on the subject of immigration by raising the spectre of extreme racism, tarring everyone with the same brush. In reality, as we racists know, "racism" as an idea, an ideology or an emotion, contains a very wide spectrum of thought. Very few of us are dreaming of a world fit only for German- speaking blue-eyed blondes! (This reviewer is a black-haired Englishman). Some of us are racist simply because it is natural and human to love one's won kind and wish to see it preserved, along the lines of the Sikh in Kipling's Kim who says, " a true man, like a true horse, runs with his own breed". This does not and should not imply ill- will towards other races.

Liberals will argue no doubt, that so long as racial differences are maintained, so long exists the danger of racial strife. This is perfectly true, but human beings will always band together in tribal groupings. What happened in the former Jugoslavia among white Europeans or in Rwanda among black Africans, shows that cultural strife is just as horrendous as the racial variety. We cannot strip ourselves of that which determines our individuality for the sake of safety alone. Liberalism in this area, and in many others, is not really a political doctrine at all but the elevation of defeatism to the level of ideology. In this liberalism is truly a mark of the political decadence of the modern West, although hopefully only a mark which may in time be erased by a more sensible and robust defence of the American way of life. In the kind of world in which we now live and in any probable future, co- operation between peoples of different races is inevitable. That does not mean that we white Europeans are therefore obliged to accept mass immigration from any quarter of the globe that cares to send its offspring to us.

Whatever shortcomings Alien Nation has, it is nevertheless highly recommended to all those fortunate enough to get hold of a copy. Mr Brimelow at the very least has dared to mention the unmentionable and to imagine what America will be like, and through similar circumstances Europe, when genuine multi-racial societies come into place. Better by far to have written this book than to have held any number of Offices of State in any one of our sham democracies.

Posterity will remember Mr. Brimelow either with gratitude or with regret; it will have nothing to say about those political pygmies who gave away the civilization that was meant to be in their safe- keeping.

Jim Harraway

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