EDITOR:
CHRIS BRAND (cbrand@cycad.com) --
THE BRITISH ACADEMIC PSYCHOLOGIST WHO DECRIED IGNORACISM, ENVIRONMENTOSTALINISM,
FEMINAZISM AND PAEDOHYSTERIA (THE MAIN INGREDIENTS OF INNOCUOUS-SOUNDING
'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS').
GUESS WHAT HAPPENED? CHRIS
BRAND'S BOOK, The g Factor,
WAS DE-PUBLISHED
by Wiley Inc. [New York] (1996) AND BRAND WAS FIRED
by Edinburgh University (1997) (and stayed fired after an internal
Appeal, 1998). Latest Press, Evening News [Edinburgh] 9 ii '99.
For 'Current State of Play in CB and GB versus PC', see
the end of this NewsLetter.
This newsletter for differential psychology appears on Tuesdays. See its Archives and related articles on psychology, heredity, individual liberty and William McDougall FRS. Only the McDNL gives the up-to-date answers of genes-realistic psychology to the tired social-environmentalism and political correctness of egalitarian ideologues and hysterical feminists. Only the McDNL challenges the media's worship of: (London) Profs Susan Greenfield, Germaine Greer, Steve Jones and Steven Rose; and (New York) Profs Jared Diamond, Ronald Dworkin, Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin. Only the McDNL has backed Nobelist Daniel Carlton Gajdusek, multivariate psychologist Raymond Cattell (1905-1998), and social philosopher Arthur Koestler* (1905-1983) as their names have given offence to today's neosocialists and kindred hysterics.
* After leaving the Communist Party in 1938, Koestler ran the anti-Nazi weekly paper Die Zukunft [The Future, with contributions from Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley] and remained a man of the left. He helped lead the British campaign to abolish hanging in the 1960's. Yet Koestler -- like William McDougall -- made a place in his thinking for science as well as for politics and philosophy. In particular, he recognized the force of biologically based intra-specific aggression in man (having a particular connection with "the hypnotic suggestibility of the mass mind"). ("The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums," Koestler wrote.) Like McDougall, Koestler believed that life was richly imbued with creative purpose; and he hoped that some confirmation might be found for Lamarck's idea of the transmission of learning between generations or for parapsychological phenomena. His book The Thirteenth Tribe speculated that Ashkenazi Jewry descended from Caucasian rather than Semitic stock. In 1968, Koestler followed Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell and Laurence Olivier as the fourth recipient of Copenhagen University's Sonning Prize for his "contribution to literature and European culture." The philosopher [now Dame] Mary Warnock compared Koestler's intellectual quest to the wide-ranging inquiries of Descartes, Leibniz, Goethe, Teilhard de Chardin, Jacques Monod and George Steiner: "…how extremely un-English it all is," she wrote. Unlike William McDougall, Koestler was a Babe Bagger -- marrying at 59 his South African-born secretary, Cynthia, 37 (PaedoScore 22)…. For defences of Koestler -- whose womanizing (aka "serial rapism") has appalled feminazie students at Edinburgh LUniversity -- see these NewsLetters, e.g. 9 iii '99.
MARCH 2
THIS WEEK: ANTIRACIALUNACY
WAKE-UP
WEEK IN U.K.
"APPALLING" UNIVERSITY GROVELLED TO GOVERNMENT -- Yes, Edinburgh LUniversity is at it again!
WHO
IS 'ABUSING OUR CHILDREN'? --
James R. Kincaid's Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child
Molesting REVIEWED.
Without a written constitution, it has
always been unclear how the liberties of British citizens (actually
subjects of Her Majesty the Queen) were to be defended. Over the
past week, everyone saw that there is in fact NO LINE
OF DEFENCE FOR LIBERTY IN BRITAIN.
As the Macpherson Report proposed
the withdrawal of historic liberties, barely a cheep was heard
for days from the supposedly freedom-loving press (despite newsies
being well prepared by the Report's having been leaked*); and
Parliament, Government and civil liberties groups were entirely
useless. (The Home Secretary even went on holiday, leaving a tinder
keg where any attack on police informants -- addresses supplied
by Macpherson -- would have yielded total 'anti-racist' hysteria.)
Everything in Britain is now
a matter of politics -- a matter for Emperor Blair to arrange
when he sees fit. The judiciary and its ancient principles (evidently
adhered to by London police) have proved quite irrelevant to what
will happen as the press bays for the blood of the Eltham Five.
Britain is now essentially a tyranny -- for all that Emperor Blair
himself is a nice boy with a good background and Oxford education.
Here follows a day-by-day
account of the week that showed the
Blair Government to be as incompetent, illiberal and untrustworthy
as the management of Edinburgh LUniversity.
* The press was active in restricting the injunction imposed by a censorious government to restrict the leak; but press interest in opposing the latest antiracialunacy was slow to develop.
It turns out that the charge of "institutional
racism" against the world's top police force is to be
met by grovelling promises by cops of amendment of life, more
jobs for 'minorities', and millions of pounds for propaganda exercises.
Faced with demands for the head of Sir Paul Condon (the Metropolitan
Police chief), the Blair government is seizing on the Macpherson
Report's notion that 'institutional racism' [itself defined as
a 'failure to serve minorities'] can be "thoughtless",
i.e. unwitting and unintentional. Thus no-one need resign following
six years in which the Met. had failed to convict anybody for
the assault on and death of Black youth Stephen Lawrence, and
resisted every suggestion that it was institutionally racist.
Instead, the Assistant
Commissioner for the Met., Des O'Connor, has announced that
he and all the lads have been on "a vertical learning curve"
and that they are ready to spearhead "a breakthrough in human
rights" (BBCR4UK 24 ii '99, 08:10). The Met. will
not be alone in needing constant monitoring for unconscious racism
in future. There will have to be change "across the whole
face of society -- including the BBC," Des told the BBC's
'Today' programme. In token of the Met.'s own good faith as a
penitent, Des announced that, in 1998/9, the force doubled
the number of members of the public arrested for 'racist' crimes.
The idea that racism is "endemic
in British society" was warmly supported by Mr Paddy Pantsdown
ooops Ashdown, the Blair-backing leader [till he resigns in May]
of Britain's 'Liberal' Party. In particular, the consensus of
Britain's neosocialist great-and-good is plainly to accept the
view of Black Sir Herman Ouseley, 'chair' of the Commission for
Racial Equality: "Education in Britain is institutionally
racist and racism is an inherent part of the education system."
(Times Educational Supplement 19 ii '99). Britain's state
schools, already devastated by a generation of egalitarian ideology,
are now to be submitted to unremitting psychotherapy that will
be conducted and evaluated by well-paid representatives of ethnic
minorities.
For the big afternoon
in Parliament itself, no method of grovelling went unused.
At 14:00, the Lawrence parents, Neville and Doreen, were given
seats in the House of Commons normally reserved for visiting dignitaries
such as US presidents; Black Mrs Lawrence was allowed to read
(somewhat haltingly) a press release while being broadcast by
the BBC -- quite contrary to the usual journalistic practice of
refusing to use people's own words and harassing them from the
moment they start speaking; Home Secretary Jack Straw blamed "professional
incompetence", "institutional racism" and a "failure
of leadership by senior officers" and said the whole country
was racist and needed re-education; Met. chief Sir Paul Condon
said he and the Met were "ashamed" -- though of "incompetence"
rather than the "institutional racism" which interested
the media -- and that he would be staying in his job; and BBCR4UK
upped its analyses, chat shows and phone-ins beyond even the level
of the previous week. The Reverend Blair said it was a
moment to reflect, to learn and to change; he urged all Britons
to "look inside themselves" for institutional racism
which he thought affected everyone; and he appealed publicly to
"Doreen" to help Her Majesty's Government to rebuild
Britain.
There were media mentions
of "intense pressure" for Sir Paul Condon to resign;
but, while agreeing with other Black MPs that resignation would
have been better, Mr Bernie Grant (MP for the Broadwater
Farm estate, Tottenham, north London, where Black youths once
beat to death a young police constable) graciously agreed that
the Macpherson Report offered "a last chance" for Britain
to give him all the money ooops improve multicultural awareness.
Sir Condom comdemned
"the thugs, er, the brutal racist thugs who killed Stephen"
-- acknowledging the Met had abandoned its original theory that
Stephen Lawrence was a victim of traditional gang warfare over
drugs on south-east London's Eltham estate, but strangely implying
a certainty about the guilty parties that was hardly appropriate
from a policeman before a trial (let alone from a policemen after
a trial where the accused had just been cleared by a jury). London's
broadsheet newspapers accepted Sir Condom's effort -- only the
left-wing Guardian holding out and insisting the Lawrence
parents were still "angry." Meantime, the Lawrence parents
filed for financial compensation for their six-year ordeal.
Across the whole country,
the only sign of White disaffection with the Macpherson verdict
was that, in Eltham, white paint was poured on an engraved
paving stone that has served as a memorial to Stephen Lawrence.
Police quickly swarmed to the scene, where a security camera placed
to deter such vandalism was found to have contained no film despite
several previous attempts to deface the stone. Pleading with the
media that they had only had six years, er, six hours to deal
with the Lawrence affair, senior officers asked for patience as
the Met. mounted its fight-back against "ignorant and revolting"
people such as those who had defaced such a national monument.
Meanwhile, the BBC solemnly discussed whether people should not
be prosecuted for 'racist' statements made in their own homes.
(There exists a 1994 Metropolitan Police covert surveillance videotape
of two of the five White youths alleged to have murdered Lawrence
expressing their frustrations in the Eltham home of one of them.)
{Historically, Britain's police forces enjoyed considerable autonomy from Whitehall. Now, they are to accept gratefully the kind intervention of Emperor Blair which is to spare them from the media (today's equivalent of Rome's mob, or of Britain's House of Commons in days before one-party rule). Like the Queen [who ran down her flag at Buckingham Palace in 1997 when accused of Dianagrumpiness] and Chris Woodhead [who recently apologized when accused of undue jocularity about a post-school-girlfriend], Sir Paul Condon is to be allowed to put his unconscious naughtiness behind him. Now he will concentrate on organizing public entertainment -- the tossing of other 'racists' to the lions. The failure to nip the problem in the bud has allowed the Lawrence affair to become PC's Reichstag fire -- justifying an orgy of PC endeavour by Emperor Blair. And more breast-beating and dollops of cash will follow as the five White "thugs" are put on trial for something or other -- for they will surely plead at the sentencing stage that they had themselves been nothing but the products of Britain's (unconsciously) 'racist' schoolteachers. One wonders, would it not have been easier for MI7 to have lured the Eltham Five into Holocaust revisionism while holidaying in Bavaria? Or into a little paedophilia?}
As the Macpherson Report -- marking, according to Mr Blair, "a very important moment in the life of our country" -- was perused by London journalists, it turned out to propose:
Hilariously,
in view of concern not to prejudice any further prosecution of
the Eltham Five, the Appendices of the Macpherson Report had to
be withdrawn by the Home Office within 24 hours of publication.
They contained the names and addresses of people who had acted
as police informants against the five White youths. The Lawrence
Commission admitted the gross error was its own. {Generally, the
populations of Eltham, Lewisham, Plumstead and Chislehurst, in
south-east London, have been pretty loyal to the youths. Neighbours
standardly tell journalists the young men are quiet, polite, nice,
respectful, smartly dressed etc. The area is nouveau-middle-class,
with mock Tudor houses like the one where star suspect David Norris
lives, which has a high surrounding wall, tall iron gates, floodlights,
a home intercom system, other security protection, and Daddy's
Porsche.} The withdrawal was in vain: the addresses had already
been posted on the Net.
Anxiety about the serious
suggestions of the Report at last surfaced. The lead editorial
in the Times concluded: "the erosion of traditional
freedoms [proposed in the Macpherson Report] is not justified
at all." {It is astonishing that a report by an ex-High Court
judge should meet with such a reception from the Times --
still the paper for Britain's top people. Sir William Macpherson
of Cluny, 73, a keen parachutist, had always been known as
a 'tough' judge and had been given 'anti-racist' training prior
to taking on the inquiry. It may be that he became over-enthusiastic
for his new line of work. Alternatively, it could have been that
large parts of the Report were pretty much dictated to him by
others. -- The Times suggested Sir William became quite
fed up with the amount of time he had to spend in London, away
from his country seat at Blairgowrie, Scotland.}
Several south-east Londoners who had informed on
the Eltham Five went into hiding, fearing retribution from
the local community.
The Times revealed
how the Daily Mail (which has a 50% Conservative readership,
making it one of Britain's relatively right-wing papers) had come
to campaign so hard on behalf of the Lawrences against the Eltham
Five. Apart from any calculation of what made a good story, there
was a simple personal angle: Neville Lawrence is a house painter
and had worked in the home of Mail editor, Paul Dacre.
The lead editorial in the
Times dismissed the idea that any changes were necessary
so as to respond to the Macpherson Report. The "sensible"
Education Minister, David Blunkett, "should thank the Inquiry
for its work and then let teachers get on with theirs," concluded
the Thunderer. {It is
wonderful that the Report should at last be dismissed in this
way by the Times. The Times plainly takes the same
view as this NewsLetter: that Sir William Macpherson --
whether or not because he had banged his head while parachuting
-- had as little to do with the writing of the Report as he had
any hand in checking whether he liked the final result [with its
listing of police informers].}
Letters
to the Times were equally divided (as were the sentiments
of 451 Daily Telegraph readers who responded to requests
for opinion). One correspondent said Sir Paul Condon should at
least resign his knighthood; another, David Coleman, of Oxford,
pointed to the difficulties that would now be experienced in arresting
minority youths for lesser offences and in refusing minorities
promotion or immigration. "Another dismal consequence,"
Coleman continued, "will be the additional influence given
to the ideological zealots of the "anti-racist" movement,
whose intolerance and witch-hunts have already damaged standards
in some areas of education, social work and probation work."
After several days of piety, writers in the London
press began to call the Report by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny
"insane" (Independent, 27 ii '99) and
"Orwellian" (Financial Times 27 ii '99).
A Scottish Sunday newspaper
made contact with McDNL HQ to query the idea
that most muggings in London are by Black people (McDNL
23 ii '99). Apparently, the paper was unaware that such points
have previously been made in the UK media without causing a riot.
Thus, Maureen Widdup wrote in the Sunday Times (27 iv '97,
'COLOUR BLINDNESS THAT SHIELDS THE MUGGER -- Political Correctness
Prevents Us Facing Facts That Could Help Fight Street Crime'):
"Muggings have reached epidemic proportions: 40,000 are now
reported each year in London alone, where a high proportion are
committed by black men on white women....."
But hadn't the McDougall
NewsLetter been wrong to joke that the London Black community
might be 'institutionally criminal'? -- Hardly, when Sir William
MacLuny had chosen to denounce the Metropolitan Police Force as
'unconsciously institutionally racist' -- and, by implication,
any other British institution that 'anti-racists' might select
at their leisure!
The Macpherson Report was revealed to have cost £UK3.4million
to decide precisely nothing. No penalties had followed either
for Metropolitan Police officers or for the Eltham Five, and Home
Secretary Mr Jack Straw was said to 'have reservations' about
criminalizing breakfast table conversations in the home and making
kids confess their parents' heresies to schoolteachers each morning.
British Conservatives carefully
remained unamused. Amidst the 'anti-racist' dismay at how the
Report was being received, they criticized Mr Straw and his wife
for taking a weekend awaybreak in the south of France while police
informers were fleeing their homes all over south-east London;
and they repeatedly demanded the source of the leak of the Report
-- normally thought to be Black (well, marginal) junior Home Office
Minister Paul Boateng. (Boateng had supposedly wanted to get round
his Government's strategy of protecting Sir Paul Condon. Thus
he delivered the head of Sir Paul on a platter to the media before
the Government could announce its welcome for the Report and intention
to make multi-million pound antiracialunatic expenditures. Boateng
and Condon are not on speaking terms -- at least at London dinner
parties. One problem is that Boateng intends to make all stop-and-search
actions be recorded, with copies given to suspects to assist their
subsequent complaints to the Race Relations Board. -- At present,
doped-up Black youths often forget to ask the names and numbers
of officers who stop them to make inquiries.)
Genuinely disconcerted with
developments were writers for London's main left-wing Sunday broadsheet,
the Observer. For a start, the leading Black activist,
Lee Jasper, who sits on many government committees, is so fed
up that he will resign from everything if Sir Paul does not quit.
A resignation is "a prerequisite to ongoing dialogue,"
he says. Then there are all the other cases of police brutality
that are being forgotten: every year 36 young men die in police
custody, and 83 in Britain's jails. Most of them White, but still
it is embarrassing that the left has not taken up their cause.
Then there are the White racists themselves -- the people whose
jobs have already been filled by immigrants while Observer
readers have been able to rely on the fact that ethnic minorities
have not gone in for getting Oxbridge degrees. Something should
be done to reconcile them to neosocialism, though columnist Andrew
Marr declares miscegenation to be "the best answer"
-- if impractical. Where to start (apart from obviously following
the USA in setting up racial quotas on every middle-class job
in the land)? {The fact that the USA -- as seen in referenda in
California and Washington -- is beginning to pull away from quotas
escapes Marr.} Well, says Marr {who has a jokey style, but he
is not joking here} "repression can be a great civilising
influence for good." When that is the best a White leftie
can manage at Mr Blair's 'historic juncture for Britain', it is
small wonder that Black Trevor Phillips, who edited the Observer's
three special pages of news coverage of Macpherson, can do no
better:
"Should Macpherson have recommended that the law be extended to forbid racist speech in other than public places? Actually, yes, he should. ….Should the thickness of glass in a living room window protect racists and frustrate justice?"
Well, what about speech where no offence is intended, like when comedians perform at police retirement parties (many of which may soon occur)?
"[If you would protect racist jokes,] you surrender any claim on democracy immediately."
Oops! But didn't the darkies come to Yukay wanting to be a part of the British way of life where daily humour makes the wheels go round and has classically prevented the kinds of civil strife that have torn apart countries like Germany, France, Spain and Ireland over the past three centuries?
"The task must be to enforce equality now. ….To put it directly to you white folks: black people no longer care if you like them."
No wonder the mood at the top policeman's London pub Feathers
(aka The Racist's Return, used by officers from New Scotland Yard)
was sombre. "We made one mistake and suddenly we're evil
racists," moaned one officer. "This week it's race,
but they could use anything to have a go at us," echoed another.
{The capacity of the police to stick up for themselves on intellectual
grounds has been markedly slight over the past year. They long
ago lost the battle with the media to point out that their high
rate of stopping-and-searching Black youths is well in line with
Black criminality as reported in victim surveys and in countries
that are themselves run by Blacks. Never does a police chief mention
having read Phil Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior
or Chris Brand's The g Factor.}
More happily, by this weekend,
other newspapers were beginning to follow McDNL's lead.
The Independent on Sunday claimed the Report was "mired
in controversy" as legal eagles deplored its threats to liberty
(p. 1); the Sunday Herald (Scotland) banner-headlined a
former Strathclyde police chief saying the Report was "outrageous"
(p. 1); and Classic FM Radio News said criticism of
the Report was "widespread." The paper(s) that contacted
McDNL (probably Scotland on Sunday and Scottish
Mail on Sunday) apparently found HQ views too reasonable to
print. Even Britain's main Labour-backing tabloid, the Daily
Mirror (circulation 5 million; retailed as Daily Record
in Scotland), was unhappy with Straw's handling of the Report;
so it offered to pay all the legal fees of the Eltham Five to
allow them to sue the Daily Mail (which has called the
Five "murderers") for libel. {Just
how much worse the fate of the embattled Eltham Five could become
after losing a libel action is not obvious. But it is nice to
think of Britain's processes of civil law being given a whirl
when the criminal law has failed to jail Stephen Lawrence's murderer(s)
and when the Inquiry process has done nothing but expose British
civil liberties as being seriously at risk from 'anti-racist'
media frenzy.}
Returned from France, Mr Straw said it was his view that all the recommendations of the Macpherson Report without exception deserved "very serious consideration" -- e.g. by the Law Society. After that, matters would rest with the House of Commons -- where only 9 of 690 MPs are Black but where the Labour Party pressured its own constituency parties to select more female candidates in 1997, producing the 100 female MPs usually called 'Blair's Babes.' If the Labour Party is to embark on a system of affirmative actions, set-asides and quotas for Britain, it will arguably have to start by putting its own house in anti-racist 'order.'
Hot-footing it around London broadcasting studios, Mr Jack Straw
explained his problem with vetting the Macpherson Report when
he first received it two weeks ago. He had been told that various
names had been omitted from the Report. So when he saw the list
of informants he could hardly ask why they had not been
omitted, could he? -- Straw thus revealed that he had had two
weeks to ponder the Report's antiracialunatic proposals (double
jeopardy etc.). Yet still he talks of such illiberalism
requiring "serious consideration" and legislation in
the autumn.
Meanwhile, Conservative home
affairs spokesman Norman Fowler demanded Straw consider his position
(parliamentary language for 'consider resigning'). After all,
Straw had popped off to replenish his duty-frees leaving Britain
at the mercy of any Anti-Nazi League supporter inventive enough
to stage an apparently 'racist' attack on a police informer.
Adding fuel to the flames
licking at liberty and meritocracy, Her Majesty's Inspectorate
of Constabulary for England and Wales issued a report saying some
police were individually racist and that 40% of police forces
had failed to develop conspicuous programmes for racial equality
(e.g. for monitoring retention and promotion rates of Black and
'Asian' entrants). Metropolitan police were actually praised for
their enlightened response to the HMIC's anti-racist directives
of fifteen months ago; but the Forces of the West Midlands and
Merseyside [Birmingham and Liverpool -- areas of high ethnic minority
concentration] were especially criticized for making insufficient
efforts to lick Black ass ooops develop an ongoing programme of
community relations.
What is happening here?
Partly, Britain is just swimming along behind the USA which has
for thirty years been embarked on the process of making its inner
cities uninhabitable by paying for family break-up. (Today, the
USA can only deal with Black crime by keeping nearly two million
of its citizens in prison -- when it hasn't executed them.) Partly,
the British psychology is ideal for PC -- for English people have
always stressed good manners, classically making parliamentary
government a possibility.
What? 'Britain hardly has any Black
people'? Sure, Britain's immigrant population is principally
from Pakistan and has done very well -- drink-free, AIDS-free,
making a real contribution with every street corner shop and annoying
feminists with its successful patriarchalism. Yet, though Britain
has fewer people of African descent than does the USA, it long
ran the world's biggest and best empire from its cold and damp
island fastness. It has always been renowned for melancholy and
for the all-day-drinkable restorative of ale -- a ritual central
to the national sport of cricket. Sure, Britain may have few Blacks;
but it makes up in that ailment of thoughtfulness, tolerance and
compassion, White guilt.
EDINBURGH -- Top UK historian Count Nikolai
Tolstoy, who is well known to Spectator readers, is
furious with Edinburgh LUniversity's "totalitarianism."
In 1990, the LUni withdrew a book of his, The Minister and
the Massacres from its Main Library following a libel action
against Tolstoy in London. Tolstoy believes British Army officers
in 1945 forcibly repatriated captured Cossack soldiers to Russia
-- as demanded by Stalin -- knowing full well that these troops
faced slave labour camp or instant death.
Even though Tolstoy lost his
libel action and was bankrupted, owing £UK1.5 million, his
book was not withdrawn by the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen.
(The libel action had concerned a pamphlet by Tolstoy rather than
the book itself.) Tolstoy told Student (25 ii '99): "Edinburgh
University has behaved appallingly. Things have reached a pretty
pass when university libraries volunteer to act as censors for
the state. Even in Soviet Russia that did not happen. ….They
have behaved very creepily."
Last month, Tolstoy's book
was restored to E.LU. shelves as Tolstoy was invited to address
the university students' Russian Society and repeated his 'libellous'
claims; but Tolstoy said the move came too late.
The Tolstoy family is descended
from a trusted agent of Russia's Peter the Great (1645-1729).
{Well pleased with Edinburgh University's 'creepy' 'authoritarianism', the Government has had Dame Stewart Sutherland in charge of explaining why old people (deprived of relatives in a Britain of collapsed marriages) have to bankrupt themselves before the state will spend a penny on providing them with home helps and nursing care. -- The British principle is that it is quite OK to spend £UK100,000 on surgery to keep a seventy-year-old alive for six months but impossible to spend the £UK3,000p.a. that would provide a young part-time personal assistant and thus a reasonable quality of life for the old person's next thirty years. Now, after spending a million pounds collecting evidence, Dame Stewart has announced that the Government might try socialism as the answer -- and give Britain's oldies free nursing care at a bill of £UK6billion annually by 2020. So imaginative! Fat chance that Mr Blair will revert to Old Labour socialism after all he has been through! The Dame has not even thought of letting people themselves select what insurance they want for old age. Most would far rather have a comfortable, cannabis-based euthanasia than the astonishing efforts to keep old people alive which mean that most hospital beds in Britain are occupied by people over 70 who can barely be kept alive, let alone restored to health; and the money thus saved would fund their needs for occasional nurses, part-time housekeepers and odd-job men several times over.}
According to the Times (26 ii '99), "A schizophrenic woman who earned almost £UK200,000 after fooling a university into giving her a senior post was yesterday sent to a secure psychiatric unit after two years on the run."
A secure lunatic asylum for a senior lecturer? After two years "on the run"?!
Yes, it's all true. Soraya Yuksel (an overweight mother of two) had gained herself a lectureship at the University of Reading by forged references and photocopies claiming she had Honours in Arabic and Islamic History from the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham. Reading University said her work as a teacher was perfectly satisfactory, but they took her to court for fraud when given a tip-off in 1995. At this point Yuksel absconded -- but re-surfaced under another name as a senior lecturer at the University of Warwick.
This sorry reflection on what it takes to work in a British university these days -- so long as students are fawned upon -- is reinforced by Yuksel's psychiatric record: she was hospitalized for schizophrenia in 1977, 1971, 1983 and 1996.
This time, a High Court judge has sent the lecturer to Queen Charlotte Hospital's secure unit, near Hastings.
That absurd job creation programme, the 'war on drugs' (meaning that drugs are never labelled with sell-by dates, toxicity warnings, Health Warnings and advice on genetic modifications), has claimed another British victim. Thirteen-year-old Leah Lawson of Grimsby purchased for £UK10-00 a 'cocktail' of three pills -- of Valium, Mogadon and methadone -- on the by no means run-down housing estate in Grimsby where she lived. The small green pill alone contained enough methadone to kill a novice user; and within four hours Leah was found dead by her mother on the sofa in front of the Lawsons' sitting room tele. It is true that Leah had one sister who is alcoholic and another who is a heroin addict. (The latter made a collection from the estate after Leah's death to buy a wreath -- but spent all the money she collected on heroin.) True, too, that Leah had been mixing with a 'bad crowd', that she had been planning to have a belly ring, and that her mother had thought of putting her into care. Nevertheless, no 13-year-old should have to die to show it is time for drugs to be legalized and controlled in the same manner as drink.
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, USA (U-WIRE 22 ii '99) -- Affirmative Racism Reduced -- In response to changing legal standards across the country, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst announced that it would reduce the role race and ethnicity play in admissions and financial aid decisions. The changes at UMass are expected to decrease minority representation in next year's class by up to 200 students -- five percent of the 3,700-person class.
JASPER, Texas -- In the pickup-truck trial, it emerged that John King -- now sentenced to death by lethal injection for the grisly murder -- was, like his beheaded-by-towing victim, Black James Byrd Jr., a recidivist who had experienced bitter times in prison in the USA. King had been on the receiving end of Black racism while in prison and joined the Confederate Knights of America in response. His lawyers pleaded that executing him would keep racial tensions inflamed in Jasper; but King himself was defiant rather than contrite. In a statement issued later through his attorney, King maintained his innocence of the crime and said, ``It's been obvious from the beginning that this community would get what they desired, so I'll close with the words of Francis Yockey (a neo-Nazi writer who died in 1960): 'The promise of success is with the man who is determined to die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.''' {Hopefully, King will now be able to read The g Factor in prison and explain to waiting newshounds its importance as a way of settling the race question in the States for good and all. There are 451 people currently on 'death row' in Texas. Conditions for White males in US penitentiaries are vividly described in Tom Wolfe's new novel, A Man in Full, Chapters XV and XVII.}
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Radio shock jock Doug Tracht was fired for making a remark linking the music of Black hip-hop singer Lauryn Hill and the gruesome Texas pickup-truck murder. Tracht, a popular personality on Washington's WARW-FM radio station, played part of a song by Hill and then joked to listeners: ``No wonder people drag 'em behind trucks!'' The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) commended WARW's swift action against Tracht. "Doug Tracht is entitled to his beliefs and he is entitled to express them. In our opinion, his bigoted and offensive views should not be given air time,'' said ADL, articulating the modern censorship conducted by the likes of Wiley DePublisher. While working for a different radio station in 1986, Tracht caused controversy when he made a joke about the Martin Luther King holiday: ``Kill four more and we can take a whole week off!''
Sidney Cooke, 73, Britain's star 'paedophile' {in fact a paedosadist -- see McDNL 23 ii '99, PAEDOPHILIA DISTINCT FROM PAEDOSADISM, ADMITS FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY EXPERT} has been remanded in custody to face more charges from over twenty years ago.
Professor David Canter, Britain's star forensic psychologist {who recently distinguished paedophilia from paedosadism -- see above} has been demonstrating his familiarity with 'harassment' in court. Canter, 55, who is employed by Liverpool University, told a court of how a former secretary, Gillian Hartshorne, 50, made him scores of "frightening" phone calls after he had dumped her for a younger model ooops secretary, Samantha Lundrigan. {Just why Prof. Canter should have needed the law to help him deal with Ms Hartshorne remains unclear. It may be that Prof. Canter has a wife or children who were frightened by the calls; or that Ms Hartshorne had made many such calls and Prof. Canter was the only person with the presence of mind or facilities to tape what she said.} PS Hartshorne was finally convicted of the heinous crime and Prof. Canter (photo on p. 60 of Times Higher, 5 iii '99) said merely that "the intensity of the harassment was such that police had to be called." One evening, insisting that her lack of promotion was due to the professor's adulterous liaison, Hartshorne had made 50 calls to the professor's home.
NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE (Times 24 ii '99) -- An 11-year-old boy from Edinburgh has been placed for life by a court on the UK's new Register of Sex Offenders. He had apparently done something with a 2-year-old girl, but no-one can be told the name of the offender or the victim or the crime -- such is modern justice. (The age of criminal responsibility in England is 10.)
Little Saigon, Westminster, CALIFORNIA (Reuters) -- A shopkeeper from former North Vietnam who had won the right (under the US Constitution's First Amendment) to hang a poster of Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh in his shop was met by scores of protesters and knocked to the ground when he once more tried to do so. Truong Van Tran has taunted local residents from former South Vietnam to run him out of town, and his shop and poster had attracted demonstrations by as many as 10,000 people. Most of the Little Saigon community's 200,000 residents are former political prisoners or refugees who despise the communist government.{Now the question is whether the USA will continue to protect Truong's free speech or apply the multicultural-diversity principle that immigrants should expect only the rights that they would have in their cultures of origin…. This question will be of interest in view of likely disputes and riots in future between Muslims and Hindus in Britain. Under the US Constitution, free speech can presently be restricted only if it is personally libellous or immediately seditious.}
AUSTRALIA (www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins99/) -- Dymocks, a national book store chain has written to Scott Balson, the author of the book, Murder by Media, exposing Aussie corruption but now banished from all Dymocks' stores by a top executive's order. The letter is a shameful admission of Dymocks' cowardice in the face of the truth, and a sad example of the state of affairs in Australia's media. Here is what Dymocks' managing director had to say: "Even if that is in fact the case [that the book contained the truth], we have been advised that truth alone is not a defence to defamation actions in Australia." {The censored author can be contacted at: gwb@gwb.com.au.}
HARVARD UNIVERSITY (Observer 28 ii '99) -- Happiness is largely a matter of personality, not of 'life events' or 'situations.' Psychologist Daniel Gilbert has rediscovered this core truth of personology while studying his fellow academics. Thinking that winning tenure would cheer them up, Gilbert applied taxpayers dollars to the study of the problem. The result was that winning tenure made no difference to self-reported happiness at all -- or to anything else detectable. Says the surprised Gilbert, discussing his result: "Most people are reasonably happy for most of the time, and most events do little to change that for long." {The lack of and simple influence of the environment is documented in PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY & SOCIETY, Quotes II; and the nature of neuroticism vs stability/contentment as a personality variable is explained in Chris Brand's article 'The n factor' and in Quotes XIV -- currently the basis of research in Spain on sex, romance and personality.}
SCOTLAND -- Recent literacy research at St Andrews University concluded that a group of pupils taught synthetic phonics outperformed those who learned to read through analytic phonics. The analytic variety encourages pupils to start with a word and split it into its constituent sounds. The synthetic rival -- believed to have the backing of HM chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead -- starts with sounds which are then combined to form words (Times Educational Supplement 19 ii '99). {For McDNL's own reading scheme for infants, see SPEAK-and-SPELL ALPHABET.}
CAIRO (Reuters) -- Sensational McDNL Babe Bagger Entry! -- An Egyptian farmer said to be 114 years old plans to marry a 17-year-old, despite opposition from his family and intervention by police (Putative PaedoScore 97!). Egyptian police sources say that Fayez Sultan's son Mohamed, aged 80, had complained that his father planned to give his farm to the would-be bride. Police have set up a traditional committee to settle the dispute in the province of Sohag, some 250 miles south of Cairo. Sultan has 45 grandchildren from seven sons and daughters.
LAGOS (23 ii '99, http://www.nandotimes.com, Peter Cunliffe-Jones) (McDNL MiniNewsFeature) -- Loaded into a sprawling evangelical church, in a run-down district of Lagos on a sweltering Sunday last month, around 2,000 people watched as Pastor Temitope Joshua, a self-proclaimed prophet and healer, went through his weekly ritual. This particular day the crop was a good one. Twelve people living with AIDS shuffled forward to receive a longed-for blessing. They were admonished for the sin of fornication which, they were told, brought on their condition, and asked to cast out the evil spirit. Pastor Joshua then "blessed" them and they were "healed". "Hallelujah!" Immediately, smartly-dressed church workers went round with collection boxes and everyone present was urged to contribute. At 20 naira or 50 naira (25 to 60 U.S. cents) a throw, and with a congregation of 2,000, the Sunday service was indeed a profitable business. ….With Nigeria's population set to double by 2020, the number of those carrying the virus is expected to reach as many as 75 million. ….Funding for oil-rich Nigeria's National AIDS and STD (sexually-transmitted diseases) Control Program has been "almost non-existent" in the past five crucial years, and there is almost no attempt at a government-level education campaign, say the Program's officials.
ANN ARBOR, Michigan (Michigan Daily [U. Michigan]) -- "We won't take resegregation; we want quality education!" Dozens of students chanted this slogan as they marched in a 'Student and Youth National Day of Action' rally. "This is a real movement," said constipated ooops concerned student Jessica Curtin, a member of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary. The rally was a way to support "complete equality and complete integration of society," said Curtin, a Michigan Student Assembly representative. She added that Day of Action participants fought for equality in areas including Kindergarten-to-12 education, employment and housing.
TRENTON, North Carolina (Associated Press) -- This tiny town has already been torn by a lawsuit alleging that blacks have been denied a voice in local government. Now the mayor is quoted as saying that blacks have no capacity for leadership and would rather work for whites. Trenton Mayor Joffree Leggett told The Free Press of Kinston that if blacks were working together in a store, "within a few years, they'd be stealing from each other and they'd be out of business." "They're not leaders," he said in a story published Wednesday. "A black man would rather work for a white person." ….State NAACP President Skip Alston said he would ask local chapters of the civil rights group to investigate immediately. If the statements attributed to Leggett are verified, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will push for his removal, Alston said. PS The Mayor resigned.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Civil rights leaders demanded a White House summit on race-related police brutality, after what they called excessive force by police in New York and California. Amidou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, had been shot 19 times by New York police February 4 as he stood in the doorway of his apartment building in the Bronx. ….In Riverside, California, a black teen-ager had died December 28 in a hail of police gunfire as she sat in her locked car in a gas station. All the officers in both cases were white, except for one Hispanic in Riverside.
TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's Supreme Court to retain a ban on the import a collection of photographs by the late American artist, Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his homoerotic images. The work was deemed obscene because it contained photos "emphasizing male genitals," said a court official.
WASHINGTON, DC -- Until the breakthrough by UK electronics wizard Patrick 'Rub-I.Q.' Brossert (McDNL 23 ii '99), the main 'millennium bug' problem came from lawyers and the absence of proper contracts and statutes of limitation. US Republican David Dreier (California) estimated there might be $1 trillion in lawsuits filed because of the glitch and urged adoption of an industry-backed House bill to allay "a great deal of fear regarding out-of-control litigation."
PRAGUE (Reuters) -- The Czech Interior Ministry, irritated by a recent surge in uncontrolled prostitution and related crime, hopes to bring order to the world's oldest profession by taxing and regulating it. {McDNL editor Chris Brand has applied for a job as an under-cover tax snooper….}
LONDON -- Hearing that Prime Minister Blair is 'changing gear' and preparing for Britain to enter 'the single currency' (aka United States of Europe), former Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen who, with Roy Jenkins, broke the Labour Party in 1979, giving Mrs Thatcher her ten years to end the union domination of British politics, has declared himself a neoeuropean -- wanting a Europe Des jeunes filles without the boring bits. Chris Brand's one-time colleague and housemate, Labour MP Austin Mitchell, the funniest man in British politics, is also coming out for New Europe, as are such revered 'characters' as Britain's top left- and right-wing politicians Tony Benn and Norman Tebbit, and NATO's Denis Healey (the only man who could ever put down Milton Friedman). {Unless the USA should choose to pay a lot of dollars for Britain to be the Trojan horse at Brussels, neoeuropeanism seems the best bet. I am one of the very few psychologists ever to have any substantial work published in a Continental language -- Spanish. However, over three years, the affair of The g Factor has demonstrated that both race realism and free speech are topics in which the overwhelming interest is from the English-speaking countries. Whatever France and Germany think about race and freedom, their thoughts do not arrive in Britain -- even in the most up-market publications of which I have been able to read more since being fired by Edinburgh LUniversity. Further integration into Europe may well be sensible, and should doubtless be undertaken if America wishes; but it would not be much fun. Already Mr Blair has Imperial airs, and he might well be a very good Charlemagne as Charlemagnes go. Yet when London is about to lose its best club, the House of Lords, it would seem sheer folly to consign the House of Commons to the scrapheap as well.}
(Journal of the American Medical Association 281, 764-765, 24 ii '99, Richard P. Kluft)
WHO IS 'ABUSING' OUR CHILDREN'?
A sustained exploration of the theme of child abuse in modern culture has been provided by James R. Kincaid, the Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California (Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, pp. 352 pp, with illustrations, $US24.95, ISBN 0-8223-2177-7, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1998). Kincaid's theme is that repression of Freud's claim that children are 'sexual' allows a continuing Gothic fantasy scenario for the modern West in which 'innocent' children are pursued by adult demons. When this game becomes too boring, roles are reversed: 'demons' are revealed to be martyrs of children's 'recovered memories', and social workers and kindred professional helpers of children are found to be sexually repressed religious maniacs.
Whether Kincaid's effort will be enough to expose paedohysteria is doubtful. There is a more important Freudian analysis that Kincaid leaves to one side. This concerns the sexual feelings of parents for children -- and especially the love of mothers for their sons, intensified as this is in days when White women have few children and can often get rid of their husbands by divorce soon after their Oedipal affair has become the central item of their lives. Arguably, it is repression of Freud's exposure of parental sexuality that provides the skeleton in the last locked coffin in the Gothic castle. Incestuous feelings may provide the essential psychodynamic momentum which yields 'revulsion' at adult sex advances to children. Horror at the slightest sexual overtures to children by adults persists even while young teenage girls regularly fall pregnant by irresponsible, immature, illiterate and spotty teenagers -- especially in Britain.
Not that this is the whole of the story. As Freud maintained, most things are 'over-determined', and paedohysteria is no exception. As well as discharging parental guilt feelings and self-loathing on to 'dirty old men' (and a few women gym teachers), paedohysteria is also very pleasing to the feminist movement which likes the most normal adult man to feel under threat of jail sentence at every turn. What can be cuter than a long-running media scare, backed by the denizens of Britain's council estates, against any man who fancies a fifteen-year-old? (At present, the campaign has gone so far that it would be a daring pop star or football manager who even dated a seventeen-year-old.) To have that wider campaign against male sexuality backed up by immediate jail for any adult who ever groped a twelve-year-old ten years ago is ideal for feminazies. Let men tremble at what unspecified molestations or down-loadings of twenty years ago may ever be proved against them on the unsupported testimony of child witnesses who themselves are not publicly identified! That's what wymmin like to see!
Kincaid is surely right to think that adult fantasies are being savoured as entertainment while children themselves are left without any serious sexual morality and even without understanding of sexual and contraceptive techniques. That girls should be discouraged from their traditional major goal of finding their wonder-man and offering him devotion and virginity is itself a far more serious abuse than allowing 'paedophiles' to do some social good by serving cheaply as priests, schoolteachers, social workers, choirmasters and youth club leaders. Only worse is the major abuse of today's children by egalitarian educators: the failure to allow children and their parents a choice of school track (or set, group, stream or band) is a national crime against kids that has eroded educational standards for over a generation. Now that even the supremely powerful Mr Blair has proved incapable of reading The g Factor and introducing choice within state schools, the crime will have to be met by a veritable neoliberal revolution that will sweep away egalitarian fancifulness and all those who have practised it. Roll on Kids Lib!
Leading Scottish novelist Allan MASSIE, after declaring that Rudyard Kipling's Kim is perhaps the best novel of all time, notes (Literary Review i '99) : "Angus Wilson {the esteemed modern English novelist, normally assumed to have been homosexual} believed that Kipling was an unconscious pederast -- principally because he wrote so lovingly of Kim and Mowgli. Certainly [Kipling] enjoyed the company of boys. But that again proves nothing, or wouldn't to any but our sex-obsessed age."
{Polls have shown Kipling's poem, If, is the favourite poem of British people today.}
(Times Literary Supplement 8 i '99, Kenneth Minogue [Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of London])
A sensible individualism is now beckoning intellectuals for the first time since William McDougall's suggestion that society's 'group mind' has -- as we might say today -- the same relation to the individual mind as does crystallized to fluid intelligence.*
In Lorenzo Infantino's Individualism in Modern Thought (1998, Routledge, £UK50) there is a fundamental acceptance of the theses of Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville** and Adam Smith that, within the rule of law, private vices actually constitute public benefits -- yielding not least the dynamism and innovativeness of the West since the collapse of the mediaeval quest for virtue via hierarchically ordered duties. Infantino rejects the collectivist thinking of both the traditional left (Hegel, Marx, modern constructivism) and right (Salisbury, Scruton, American fundamentalism). People are not -- either essentially or actually -- the creations of society, argues Infantino; nor can they be morally purified by the crusades of dominies and their hypocritical politicians. However, while denying the sociologists' thesis that society is a matter of conscious choice and overpowering influence, Infantino is happy to allow that the society created by the work of human choice (via the economists' 'hidden hand') is nevertheless a distinct creation which has a life of its own. Via its 'group mind', it allows us to draw on the previous individual minds that yielded its rules, principles and conventions. Infantino rejects the idea of sociologist Talcott Parsons that we are all rule takers; but he is happy with the idea -- central to William McDougall's analysis -- that we are all rule makers.
As talk of the full-blown Marxist project*** grew sheepish in universities of the 1980's, it became fashionable to assert the values not of communism and the Comintern but of sweeter-sounding 'collectivism' and 'communitarianism.' Mrs Thatcher's elemental individualism, when she told the Church of Scotland 'there is no such thing as society', was particularly grasped as giving the left an opening for a 'compassionate' but essentially corporatist come-back. Even though many left-wing policies had to be burned on the altar before emperors Clinton and Blair would agree to wear robes and provide the new leadership, the prospect of a happy-clappy Hegelianism still beckoned. (Mr Blair retains genuine personal enthusiasm for religion -- as apparently does Mr Clinton.) Mrs Thatcher's reductionism would be met by an equally persuasive reduction of the individual to society -- with even right-ists welcomed on board for their affecting if antique insistence that moral values and social traditions should over-ride individual choice. In fact, the only 'moral values' allowed centre-stage have been those of relativism. The new collectivity of the West condemns not what is demonstrably false or harmful or plain wrong, but beliefs and sayings that are 'insensitive', 'anti-social', 'uncomfortable' and 'unacceptable'. The new collective ethic of neosocialism -- in so far as it does not just borrow the clothes of that old right-wing heroine, 'Laura Norder' -- swings into action not against demonstrable harm or preventable psychopathology but against whatever the mob and the tabloids happen to find 'offensive.' Thus does PC accrue justification for proceeding against other 'outrages to decency' that are brought forward by feminazies and 'antiracists.'
It is therefore a relief to find Infantino's cogent individualism back on the table. His is not an individualism that denies the reality of society, but one that specifies society's authority as that of a diary to a diarist -- providing access to thinking rather than a substitute for it. As the reviewer for TLS, Kenneth Minogue, points out, individualism requires that thought, conscience and intelligence should be at work in individuals. -- Without these mental functions, individualism would be nothing but that expression of 'the passions' which Hume's work led German idealists to fear. Plato's balance of Reason and the Passions must, under individualism, be achieved within individuals themselves -- encouraged by laws that allow both choice and full acceptance of the consequences of choice. Infantino, says Minogue, has added an important Italian contribution to coherent individualism -- previously a fief of British and Austrian thinkers.
Such assistance against the dominant corporatism
and collectivism of Euroland is to be welcomed. Enormous progress
in knowledge, affluence and liberty has occurred since individualism
replaced mediaevalism. Even though some passengers on the journey
have grown nervous and predicted 'Decline and Fall', the liberal-capitalist
West has survived and now provides the world's only super-power.
Kenneth Minogue puts it well: "Individualism….[is] the
practice of living in terms of coherent desires under the rule
of law…. [It] unleashed, for better or worse, everything
that makes the modern West dynamic and innovative." It is
good to see individualism finding a Continental supporter.
* William McDougall, who classed himself as an individualist (Group Mind, 1920, Preface), rejected any idea of societies having a "collective consciousness"[Hegel] or a 'will' or 'conscience' of their own, let alone an 'unconscious soul' (Chapter 1). He feared that even to discuss the group mind would lead him to be accused of collectivism, syndicalism, socialism, communism or immoderate patriotism. Instead, McDougall reserved the term 'collective mind' for groups such as nations having "an organized system of interacting mental or psychical forces" -- as in their constitutions. He expressly rejected the idea that the mental or psychic world had to be conscious -- thus anticipating the distinction made by Karl Popper between the realm of mind and the realm of the products of mind. In its highest state, McDougall thought society would be a "contractual organism" (Chapter 12). The degree of 'crystallization' required to yield the group mind may be judged from McDougall's view that 'public opinion is due more to the dead than to the living' (Chapter 13). This was not to under-rate the state's importance: 'In the infancy of nations, men shape the State; in the maturity of nations, the State shapes the men' (Chapter 15). (Of course, even well-established societies could be rapidly undermined by the breeding of people who would prove incapable of hearing the ancient drumbeats. McDougall regarded mulattos, Eurasians [in India] and the Dutch Javanese as illustrating the ease with which cross-breeding can fail; and he cautioned the West against coloured migration and intermarriage.)
** The Dutch-born Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) was a medical doctor whose satirical writings on political economy predated those of Adam Smith (1723-1790). Though settled in London from 1692, Mandeville's analyses of all 'virtues' as forms of selfishness led to his impious writing being condemned by a Grand Jury of Middlesex.
*** Marx's anti-individualism led him to approve the concept Gattungswesen -- usually translated as 'species being' or 'species life.' The idea, which had come from Hegel, was that human beings have no true existence in isolation from others of their kind. -- Forget the scholar who works largely alone (as did Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, and indeed Marx himself)! On a Marxist analysis, he does not exist!
The fine Black US economist, Thomas Sowell, has recently contributed another volume* to his series intended to explain that Black people had bad luck, historically, in not enjoying much 'cultural capital'. However, reviewing TS's oeuvre in PINC, Gavan Tredoux was not impressed:
"It may well be true, following Sowell, that sub-Saharan Africa suffers from an unfortunate geography severely restricting the use of rivers for navigation and impeding certain kinds of economic development. It may also be true that the tropical diseases infesting much of central Africa restricted human development in those regions, and made animal husbandry less rewarding. Yet, not all of Africa has these problems -- for example, Southern Africa is disease free for the most part -- and it has many fabulous advantages. Fertile land and a treasure trove of mineral wealth, large inland seas and decent weather are just a few of these. We know that many great civilizations have sprung up in very adverse circumstances, only to melt away despite very little change in those circumstances. The Egyptian civilization ploughed out a living on a flood plain surrounded by desert, while the Sumerians made enormous advances in inhospitable surroundings. The Greeks, likewise, produced a civilization unsurpassed until recent times despite the fact that Greece itself has little to offer economically or geographically. It is not surprising that an economist concentrates on factors he considers conducive to economic development, but civilization is not simply a state of economic advancement. Classical Greece was poorer in all respects than Europe in the Middle Ages, but incomparably more civilized and accomplished. Roman Britain could not match the England of Henry the Eight economically, but it was arguably more civilized (consider the difference in public works).
When one considers the abundant natural wealth present in the New World when it was discovered by the Europeans, and the pitiful state of the native inhabitants, many of whom were still trapped in the Stone-Age, Sowell's argument starts to unravel very quickly. Granted there were some relatively advanced societies in the New World, for example the Aztecs and the Incas, but that merely undermines the argument further - why would some prosper and others falter in the same region?"
Rather, GT backs the importance of peoples rather than their environs. Consider the Jews:
"From what we know of modern Jews of European origin, they possess a remarkably high average IQ, and it is reasonable to suppose that their ancestors did too, given the high degree of endogamy that Jews have maintained until recently. Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the late 15th century and their subsequent migration to other parts of Europe, notably Holland, simultaneously impoverished Spain and enriched Holland. The Jews may have played a crucial role in the emergence of Holland as a financial and trading centre in the years that followed, while Spain lapsed into a long period of decline once it had exhausted the plunder of the New World. Similarly the expulsion of the Protestant Huguenots by Catholic France probably enriched many parts of the world with higher-IQ migrants, who brought with them not only their skills but also their native abilities. Within countries, migration of sub-groups may have been just as important in aggregating ability and ensuring its useful application. While the genotypes of whole populations change very slowly, migration can rapidly alter its distribution. One is tempted to speculate that migration may explain the long decline in post-18th century of Scotland - blessed in the18th century with intellectual giants like David Hume, Adam Smith and many others.
….Behavioural genetics has supplied striking evidence of the extent to which individuals are masters of their environment, rather than passive victims. We now know the critical influence that individually inherited ability has on life success. It is high time that historians and sociologists broadened their horizons to move beyond techniques and explanations known to be ineffective."
Nor would anyone have thought England or Japan propitious vehicles for civilization -- at least until coal-mining became a possibility in the former.
* Conquests and Cultures: an International History, New York, Basic Books, 1998.
Despite Bill Clinton being cleared of all the charges against him in the highest court of his country, US Republican supporters are continuing to pursue their tirade against their President's sex life. Here's what is Item No. 1 for 'Capitol Hill Blue' (http://www.capitolhillblue.com/Feb1999/022099/clintonrape022099.htm):
A 1969 charge by a {sic} Eileen Wellstone, 19-year-old English woman who said Clinton assaulted her after she met him at a pub near the Oxford University campus where the future President was a student. A retired State Department employee, who asked not to be identified, confirmed this week that he spoke with the family of the girl and filed a report with his superiors. Clinton admitted having sex with the girl, but claimed it was consensual. The victim's family declined to pursue the case.
Come off, it, kids! This is fiddling while Rome burns. Quite apart from Oxford University having no such existence [campus!?], I was a young don in central Oxford at the time and heard of no such case -- which would certainly have engaged the attention of all reasonably prurient Senior Common Rooms if the slightest fuss had been made. Nor was there a credible Oxford pub venue for anything approaching rape -- so perhaps the pair had, let's admit it, retired together to the college room (i.e. home) of one of them? Anyway, who would assault a "woman" when Oxford has all those nice girls in subfusc and matching knickers? And what is a retired diplomat doing using the status of his former employment while not giving his own name? This case as stated is pathetic -- as well as being well beyond the time that would be allowed under any reasonable Statute of Limitations. It's time for you'se all at 'Capitol Hill Blue' to start reading The g Factor at last and working up your neoliberalism!
{In the USA, the President's latest female accuser, Mrs Juanita Broaddrick, sobbed throughout her TV interview but she did not shed a single tear. McDNL's correspondent was struck by the interview seeming quite phoney.}
Western neosocialist religiosity may be perfectly tyrannical and
hysterical -- everything that could be wished by the readers of
tabloid newspapers. Yet it is not very brave.
According to PC's own lights, the worst
socio-political arrangements in the history of the world were
not those of Imperial Japan (30 million dead in Manchuria alone)
or the multi-ethnic kleptocracies of post-independence Africa
and India (30 millions starved and butchered since 1965, 30 million
dead of AIDS by 2005) but those of the Holocaust* and of White
Western Slavery [of Black Africans, not by Arabs]. Yet despite
its belief in bottomless White guilt for virtually anything, the
West has been reluctant even to think about the gulags
of Communist Russia (30 million dead) or to intervene in modern
rape-torture-and-death-camping of Yugoslavia or in the slavery
of nearby Mauritania and the Sudan.
The Sudan poses a fascinating
problem for the Western conscience. On the one hand, there is
much evidence of the northern Muslims, who control Khartoum, virtually
enslaving large numbers of southern Christians in apartheid-style
encampments. The Christians report many disparus resulting
from operations by Khartoum's People's Defence Forces; and some
southerners definitely end up in bleak camps in western Sudan
around El Da'ein. Says William Finnegan, in a ten-page report
for New Yorkers, the PDF "have helped re-introduce that old
staple of north-south relations in the Sudan, slavery. ….the
Sudanese Arab belief that blacks belong to a lower order of being
is very deep and very widespread." Khartoum's southern enemies
were jubilant when US cruise missiles zapped Al Shifa, just north
of Khartoum. On the other hand, the cultural practices of the
southern 'Christian' Dinka tribe, now labouring in near-starvation
conditions, leave much to be desired by PC standards. "We've
lost our cattle for bridewealth," complained one tribesman
to the New Yorker's correspondent, little appreciating
how this problem might be viewed by literati in the Big
Apple. Fortunately, traditional African good cheer re-asserted
itself: "…when everyone is so hungry," said the
tribesman, "they don't feel like getting married."
The Sudan was run uncontroversially
from 1895 to 1955 by Britain (officially in co-operation with
Egypt). Only as independence was claimed (as in India of 1947)
did civil war break out between the Muslim north and Christian,
animist south. Since then millions have died despite occasional
attempts to allow autonomy for Sudan's ethnically diverse regions.
* An essay on the HitlerZeit and its implications for the 21st century is in preparation.
{More Muslim slavery came to light in London recently, where a Kuwaiti family was found in the High Court to have enslaved a female compatriot who finally escaped from a London hotel via a drainpipe. Aristotle, too, believed in slavery; and its Ancient-Greek version was probably a lesser evil than many forms of modern single-parent life in tower blocks. However, one does wish the Muslims would be more frank about their ambitions and make a full contribution to ridding the West of neosocialism and restoring contract-based patriarchy and kindred delights.}
In Leipzig, a postman has been discovered to have passed himself of as a psychologist. Gerhardt Postel had no university degree, but he had two girlfriends who were lady doctors and soon learned enough jargon to work in hospitals and law courts as a clinical psychologist. Cutting through years of humm-ing and hah-ing, Postel reduced psychodiagnostics to one of two choices. Quiet, subdued, dim-witted or sleepy patients were described as having 'a lightly autistic psychosis'; whereas noisier or querulous patients were said to have 'an active psychosis of a schizophrenic nature.' Postel worked in Colditz Hospital [famous to British schoolboys as Colditz Castle from which so many British PoWs made heroic escapes] as Chief Neurologist and Psychiatrist and was tipped for a university chair. Unfortunately for him, he one day lost his wallet and, when it was found by police, evidence of his use of multiple identities was revealed.
Eulogistic books about Prozac have urged its marvels for
cases of 'personality disorder' and some US doctor have even suggested
that 95% of the population should take it. Now, however, the secret
is out: media-psychiatrist Antony Storr has admitted in the Literary
Review (ii '99) that the drug has "dire effects on the
sex lives of a large proportion of patients who take it."
Once it was bromide that kept
British sailors from wanting too much shore leave; then it was
chlorpromazine that maintained British lunatics in zombie-like
states requiring no locked doors; now at last Prozac provides
the ultimate drug for the White race as it moves towards self-extinction.
For twelve years, it has been known that Black people do perfectly well on quite a few mental tests -- so long as these test memory and not the g factor. In general, the White superiority correlates around .60 with tests' g loadings (shown famously by Jensen, 1985, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 8). What is less appreciated is that the special problem which Black testees have with g cannot be attributed to anything to do with social class or experience. Arthur Jensen's 1998 book, The g Factor: the Science of Mental Abilities, goes through evidence on this point (pp. 384-7). When 172 Black and White fourth- and fifth-graders were matched for parental SES, the degree of W-B difference between them on tests correlated .85 with sub-tests' g loadings. Again, even among 66 healthy, middle-class three-year-olds, the W-B difference correlated with tests' g loadings at .71.
Hearing of the breast-beating in London over the Macpherson Report into the Lawrence Affair, a McDNL correspondent writes:
So, when does the UK open up its re-education camps to instil correct thinking? I'm not sure if this is true but I once heard that the term politically correct came from China during the Cultural Revolution. Apparently, someone would compliment you by saying: "Your thinking is very correct, Comrade" or some such thing.
Answers on the usual postcard please to McDNL HQ.
From the south-London comedy circuit:
Q: How do
you stop a darkie from drowning?
A: Take your foo' off 'is 'ead.
From the Fleet Street white-guilt
circuit
(Andrew Marr, Sunday Times
28 ii '99):
Q: What is
the difference between working-class and middle-class racism?
A: Middle-class racism is more effective.
MARCH 9
THIS WEEK:
U.K. POLICE SWOOP ON 'HATE CRIME' IN EDINBURGH, PRESTON AND WILTSHIRE. BRITISH ARMY PURGE BEGINS.
EDINBURGH LUNIVERSITY'S PSYCHOLOGISTS SHELTER BENEATH SKIRTS OF DAME STEWART
BLACK AFRICA'S GENOCIDE GENIUSES TURN ON GORILLA-LOVING WESTERNERS
ARTHUR KOESTLER: 'brilliant, imaginative, inspirational, humane and epically courageous'
MACLUNY REPORT
CRITICIZED
BY A CONSERVATIVE!
AMUSES EMPIRE
SOCIOLOGY SOURCE IDENTIFIED
PLUS: Nature vs Nurture, Ethnocentrism vs Ethnofugalism, AND Sir Francis Bacon vs Vice-President Al Gore
Two British Army soldiers were among suspects arrested in nation-wide
raids on alleged neo-Nazis. Police were looking for materials
'intended to or likely to stir up racial hatred'-- thus contravening
Part Three of the Public Order Act 1986. Fourteen homes were raided
and fifteen arrests were made as civilian and military authorities
focused on alleged members of a secret paramilitary society called
Combat 18 -- sometimes believed to have provided military
advice to Northern Ireland's Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force,
to have stirred up trouble at England vs Éireland soccer
matches, and to have sent letter bombs to mixed-race couples such
as Sharron Davies and Derek Redmond. Racist literature, computer
disks, knives and, in one case, ammunition were seized. One security
source said: "We had to get evidence against these people
or there was a risk of things going off at half-cock. We conducted
an extremely painstaking long-term joint investigation including
surveillance."
The two soldiers were detained
in Bulford, Wiltshire and in Preston, Lancashire and belonged
to elite regiments -- the Parachute Regiment and the King's Regiment.
Army spokesmen told the media that at least twelve further military
personnel in Regular and Territorial Army units were under surveillance
and would be questioned shortly. There would be 'no place for
racists to hide in the British Army,' said a spokesman.
NOTE
(derived from Paul Johnson's A History of the Modern World,
1983, pp. 301-4):
Stalin's purge of the Red Army began in 1937 and ended in the execution of some 30,000 officers (almost half the Army's total). 80% of the colonels and generals were killed. The purge was assisted by the Nazis, whose generals concocted evidence of secret contacts with Soviet army commanders.
Stalin's purges of 1937/8, killing one million Communist Party members, have never been atoned for, properly investigated or punished (except by accident), since the successive generations of party leaders who ruled after Stalin were all involved in their commission. (Yezhov, the principal assassin, was himself murdered by Stalin after the purges were over. His successor as head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, was gunned down by his Politburo colleagues immediately after Stalin's own death. But Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who had both aided or abetted the purge in the Ukraine, went on to lead the USSR.) Stalin gave daily orders for arrests, torture and -- in the event of trial -- sentences. His signature appeared on 44,000 death warrants through this period. Foreign Communists who had sought asylum in Moscow were murdered too, in large numbers.
Arthur Koestler's brilliant novel, Darkness at Noon (1940), gave the impression that Stalin's leading victims, trapped in their own Marxist theology….were induced to collaborate in their own mendacious testimony -- even came to believe it. The truth was far harsher. While leading 'conspirators', whose evidence was needed to build up the basic structure of the fantasy, were brought to confess by a miexture of threats to kill or torture wives or children, promises of leniency, and physical violence, for the overwhelming majority of those who were engulfed, Stalin's methods differed little from Peter the Great's, except of course in scale, which precluded any subtlety. Churches, hotels and even bathhouses and stables were turned into gaols. Victims were often tortured in front of their families. …Large numbers of army officers were killed under torture: in extremis they might sign their own 'confessions' but they would not implicate others. According to Medvedev, NKVD recruits, aged 18, 'were taken to torture chambers, like medical students to laboratories to watch dissections.'
Chris Brand's suggestion that, if London's Metropolitan Police Force is properly described as institutionally racist, then "a Black African London community that accounts for 80% of muggings in London….might thus itself be described as institutionally criminal" (McDNL 23 ii '99) has been condemned by both the Scottish National Party and a Scottish civil rights group. In the Psychology Department of the LUniversity of Edinburgh, however, there is silence: the Record can find no-one amongst two dozen taxpayer-funded academics who has the guts to speak openly about IQ, race, eugenics, feminism, paedophilia, Arthur Koestler, the Macpherson Report or anything else for that matter. Brand has challenged any E.LU. psychologist who disagrees with him to a public discussion (so long as reasonable security is paid for by the Daily Record -- which is currently preparing to fund a trial of the Eltham Five in London).
{The SNP and British 'civil liberties' groups were the very first to applaud the withdrawal of The g Factor by Wiley DePublisher in April, 1996 (see TgF NewsLetters at http://webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/archive). Censorship from New York is preferred by these groups to letting British people read a book and make up their own minds.}
{Brand was interviewed on Friday, but the Daily Record for 8 iii '99 was preoccupied with gleeful recording of the arrest of alleged members of 'Combat 18'.}
Edinburgh LUniversity has found itself unable to issue a single
word in favour of its half-a-million-pound-sterling benefactor,
Arthur Koestler. Others, however, have come forward to the Times
Literary Supplement (22 i '99 and 5 iii '99) and the
Sunday Times (News Review, 28 ii '99; Letters 7 iii '99,
'Koestler Legacy Obscured by Row') and made interesting
points about Koestler as follows below.
[TLS carried no letters
of criticism -- and thus not a shred of evidence for the charge
of "serial rapism" against any of the scores of girls
provided for the volatile but charming Hungarian by London's literary
lion of the 1950's, Cyril Connolly. Nor has Koestler's biographer,
David Cesarani [Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Southampton],
made any further contribution -- except to apologize profusely
for having mixed up two of Koestler's women (Celia and Cynthia)
no less than five times in his book and to emphasize his high
regard for Koestler as "inspirational" and "brave."]
Points from Lord Kennet and Elizabeth Young; 100, Bayswater Road; London WC2.
David Astor {once editor, Observer}, 24, St Ann's Terrace, London NW8
Peter Kavanagh; 503-4 The Chambers; Chelsea Harbour; London SW10
Frederick Raphael (author and literary critic)
The parallels between the lives of Koestler and William McDougall are thus intriguing. In both cases, great independence of mind and courage yielded a life dedicated to resisting coarse materialism while declining the comforts of theology. Unappreciated by their own generation, both McDougall and Koestler turned to parapsychology to see if it could deliver relevant evidence -- though both remained no more than sceptically optimistic about its findings of their day. Both were lucky enough to enjoy wonderful wives -- in Koestler's case, several of them.
George Orwell's comment on Shakespeare (in 'Benefit of clergy: some notes on Salvador Dali') should have been a reminder to Edinburgh LUniversity to stand by what should have been stood by in its benefactor:
"What if Shakespeare returned from the grave and it were found that his favourite occupation was raping little girls in railway carriages? ….One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draftsman and a disgusting human being."
The recent death of London-born White soul
music superstar Dusty Springfield OBE (1939-1999) provides
another reminder of this point. Born into an unhappy family of
a Catholic tax consultant where her older brother was the mother's
'blue-eyed boy', the shy and myopic convent girl from Ealing found
fame with her croakily erotic voice that led on to a life of booze,
cocaine and lesbianism. Retreating from the media, she became
the icon of gays in Los Angeles and said her brain had been well
and truly "scrambled" by the time she lost her battle
with breast cancer. Hardly very admirable! -- Nor were the beehive
hairdo and the panda eyes -- though they were original when she
first thought of them. Yet none who heard them will ever forget
I ONLY WANT TO BE WITH YOU
YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME and
SON OF A PREACHER MAN.
Even little g itself does not yield genius on its own.
There has to be specialization that takes a person into uncharted
territory -- personal kinks and quirks like whatever were those
of Shakespeare when he dedicated his Venus and Adonis to
the Earl of Southampton in 1593-4 along with a public declaration
of his unending "love" (Katharine Duncan-Jones, Times
Literary Supplement 5 ii '99 -- celebrating the lovely, generous
and tear-jerking new film, 'Shakespeare in Love' [McDNL 26 i '99]).
Whence could Shakespeare's articulation of human individuality,
personal agony and the triumphs, tragedies and delightful comedies
of love have sprung except from a personality that mixed realism
and idealism in full and equal measures and sometimes impulses?
From his student beginnings, Arthur Koestler rejected any full-blown materialistic determinism with the same outrage as had William McDougall. Despite the attractions to him of communism and Zionism, Koestler knew that individuality counted; and British prisoners are to this day the beneficiaries of his principle that no life of a citizen should be snuffed out by the state without seeing what education and artistic encouragement could do. It is a scandal that men in British prison cells without toilets should feel more appreciation for Koestler than does the American who enjoys all the perquisites of the Koestler Chair at Edinburgh. -- Funnily enough, Koestler's own first act of youthful rebellion, in Vienna, was to leave university without a degree.
{The NewsLetter regrets to announce the death of another great British individualist, the memorable High Court judge, Lord Denning (1899-1999). Denning was famous for unfailingly championing the rights of the individual, 'the small man', against the state, and he became Master of the Rolls under Mrs Thatcher. He was also a realist: in 1982 he 'provoked controversy' by observing that some Black people were not suitable to be jurors.}
{The Scottish individualist, Robert Sinclair, is on the loose again (Times 4 iii '99). Bailed to appear for sentence after twenty years as a rural hermit and survivalist (McDNL 16 ii '99, 'Western Criminal Justice'), Sinclair made a single appearance with the friends to whom he had been consigned by a judge, told them "That's me awa' the noo", and vanished into the Stirlingshire outback with police in puffing pursuit.}
{'Ferret down every rabbit hole' was perhaps not the most judicious of analogies while Koestler stands accused of 'serial rapism' -- but it was well meant….}
The news that the British police are likely to be negrified by
the Reverend Tony Blair in line with ethnic quotas was greeted
with scant appreciation by Black Africans. Hutu tribesmen
of northern Rwanda (already guilty of massive and repeated genocide,
at the rate of killing 37,500 per day of their noble Tutsi neighbours)
carefully selected sixteen US and UK searchers for gorillas-in-the-mist
in Uganda and hacked eight of them to death with machetes after
raping one of the women campers at Bwindi Park [i.e. Impenetrable
Forest]. The procedure was the same as that of the infamous Nazi
'death marches.' It was the captives who 'fell behind' on the
march who elicited the wrath of their persecutors; those who kept
up with the officer-class captors and kept smiling were finally
released -- only to find the bodies of their fellow campers as
they made their way back through the jungle.
Whether there was a primarily
'racist' motive for the killing of Black Stephen Lawrence in London
remains in some doubt {see NL below}; but the Hutu thugs,
drawn from the 'Interahamwe' forces fighting in the Congo, left
straightforwardly anti-Americanglish labels on the bodies of their
victims.
Uganda, which has been enjoying
10,000 Western tourists annually, gave hot pursuit and claimed
to have killed 15 of the 150-strong Hutu raiding party as it fled.
NOTES:
The war in the Congo pits Angola,
Namibia and Zimbabwe on the side of the embattled government of
president Laurent Kabila [see McDNL 18 viii '99:
Kabila calls for slaughter of Tutsis] against a rebel group supported
by Rwanda [now back in Tutsi hands] and Uganda.
The Democratic Republic of the
Congo (formerly Zaire) is a mess ooops mass of more than 2
million square kilometres. Mineral resources -- copper, cobalt,
diamonds and gold -- make it arguably Africa's richest nation
in terms of natural resources.
The Hutu have little serious leadership
against what they call 'the Nilotic cockroaches', i.e. the Tutsi.
Prior to the 1994 genocide, the traditionally French-backed Hutu
killed virtually all of their own moderates, bludgeoning teachers,
doctors and nurses to death in Kigali with the same enthusiasm
that they applied to despatching Tutsi. Of the latter, they killed
12.6% in just 3 months -- far exceeding the Nazi rate of genocide
in the 1940's. Rates of killing of 50 per minute were sustained
by the Hutu for long periods. Hutu consider Tutsis 'evil', 'clever',
'well-off' and 'foreign.' For the year 2000, the Hutus are planning
'Operation Insecticide.'
"Egg Donor Needed," ran recent advertisements
in student newspapers at top US universities. They added "Large
Financial Incentive." The advertisements called for a
5'10" and athletic woman who had scored at least 1400 on
her Scholastic Achievement Test and who had no major family medical
problems. In return for providing eggs, she would receive $US50,000.
Already, more than 200 women have responded to what is believed
to be the largest amount of money ever offered for a woman's eggs.
A lady 'geneticist' from the University of Minnesota appeared
on TV to imply that the breeding experiment would have insufficient
chance of success.
Egg donation is popular with
career women who have left having a family till late in life then
run into unexpected problems. The Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention report that egg donation was used more than 5,000
times in 1996, jumping more than 50 percent in a single year.
The number of clinics offering the technique has grown from one
in 1986 to 227 a decade later. So powerful is maternal drive that
women can quite ignore the fact that a baby via egg donation and
in vitro fertilization is not genetically their own --
though it will be their husband's. One woman who had used another
woman's eggs said: "I kept thinking, it can't be my genes,
but at least I can control other things," she said, listing
the issues she worried about with adoption, including prenatal
exposure to alcohol. "Genes were a big deal," she said.
But now, when she looks at 20-month-old Charlie, a chubby-cheeked,
happy, strawberry blond boy, all she can think is, "he's
really cute." Clinics have been careful not to portray the
donation as a sale, and the fee has been described as compensation
for time lost to travel and medical appointments. Now, that compensation
has skyrocketed in isolated cases up to $US50,000.
A top US lady correspondent of McDNL writes:
I just learned that Monica's mother had an affair with Pavorotti, and then tried to sell her story!! These people are the scum of the earth, and that little tramp Monica was planning the whole thing in advance with her mother. Jeez!!
In London's Harrods store, Monica was suddenly taken poorly during her signing and had to be ushered off in tears by minders. However, she returned to her fans after 20 minutes. Apparently Monica has taken to bungee-jumping off bridges in California -- so she's added 'bouncing back' to her more familiar gifts.
RANCHO CUCAMONGA, California (CNN) -- A Black man, Rodney
King, whose videotaped beating by Los Angeles police drew
international outrage in 1991, has been charged with misdemeanours
of domestic abuse and vandalism. Since 1991, King has had various
run-ins with the law. He served a 90-day sentence for misdemeanour
domestic violence in 1997.
EDINBURGH -- Responding promptly to recent demands in Yukay for
anti-racist policing, Edinburgh's Lothian Police Force
presented itself at McDNL HQ. Yes, the police had received
complaints. About the NewsLetter? No: Brand had sometimes put
his thumb to his nose and waggled his fingers at psychologists
in the street. Who had complained of being put in fear by such
antics? Why, two of the elderly American postgrads in Psychology
who had been keen to give 'evidence' of Brand's insensitivity
to feminazies at the 1997 E.LU. Tribunal.
Yes, Britain is now a state where the police -- or at least Lothian's
marginal Sergeant Mundorolla and a constabulary colleague -- have
been called off investigating muggings and set to ensure that
PC acolytes never have their dignities dented. {At
least there may be some respite for paedophiles. -- Ed.}
EDINBURGH -- A blaze in the LUniversity's Medical School,
Teviot Row, required eight fire engines and sixty firemen before
it was extinguished. The fire resulted from the late-evening use
of a Bunsen burner by a Spanish technician working with highly
flammable material. Damage to the listed building will cost £UK500,000
to repair.
LONDON (BBCR4UK 7 iii '99, 08:00) -- A fifteen year old
youth of mixed race has been charged by police with defacing the
engraved stone that has served as a memorial to murdered Black
teenager Stephen Lawrence. White paint had been splattered
on the stone in the aftermath of the release in February of the
Macpherson Report which blamed White
youths for the 1993 killing. It had been widely assumed that vandalism
had been the work of White racists.
TRENTON, NJ (AP) -- Two weeks ago, Governor Christie Whitman
stood firmly behind New Jersey's top cop when a black ministers'
group demanded the policeman's resignation, citing a racial
profiling controversy. However, State Police Superintendent
Col. Carl A. Williams Jr. was quoted in the Star-Ledger of
Newark as saying that minorities were more likely to be involved
in drug crimes; so Whitman swiftly fired him. "His views
are dastardly, his thoughts are ill and sick, and he's unfit to
hold such a critical, important office that protects,'' said New
Jersey Assemblyman LeRoy D. Jones. "He's a racist of the
worst kind because he doesn't even know it.'' Williams, 58,
who rose through the ranks in a 35-year State Police career, did
not comment publicly on his dismissal. He had been under fire
for weeks over charges that state troopers had unfairly targeted
black drivers on state highways.
LONDON -- In Chingford, east London, arson at a three-storey
family home killed seven members of a four-generation family,
including three children, two of them twins. A jerry can of petrol
had been emptied through a letter box into the small end-of-the-block
council home and only a grandfather escaped the blaze, down a
neighbour's ladder. For three days, the media gave no hint of
possible motivation. The family's names (surname Day) sound White;
and any idea that they were police informants in the Lawrence
affair needs balancing by appreciation that arson is a common
way of exacting revenge among Britoids. A neighbour said (Sunday
Times 7 iii '99): "You never get to find out who or what
caused it." {No one in Britain can afford to go to law unless
they are (i) criminal (ii) pretty poor or (iii) very rich.}
YALE UNIVERSITY -- Under a new plan, departments will receive
extra resources exclusively for the purpose of hiring female
professors. President Richard Levin's plan to diversify Yale's
faculty is a triumph for student activists. As usual in modern
academia, no department is thought likely to spurn the new funding.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- The Canadian high commissioner was
recently battered by a robber. South Africa is also sending
some of its criminals overseas: Ramesh Vassen the consul-general
to India was found guilty of misappropriating trust money while
attorney and had to resign his posting.
HUMANSDORP, South Africa, March 3 (AFP)
-- A woman said to be as old as 114 years died after she was
raped by 29-year-old man in South Africa's Eastern Cape province.
A police spokesperson said it appeared Dina Busaka knew her assailant
and had been alone with him in her home. The two were apparently
sitting in the lounge when the man raped and throttled the woman.
.…The
country's Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki, said at a church service
at the weekend that the country was facing a moral crisis. He
said: "Grandchildren rape their grandmothers. Children take
their pensioned parents' money and drink themselves to death."
NEW ORLEANS -- The protest over a Westminster,
California, store owner's display of the Vietnamese flag and picture
of Ho Chi Minh has spread to other cities. About 100 Vietnamese
Americans marched to New Orleans' city hall and burned a communist
flag
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (Reuters) -- Jury selection began
in the trial of two men federal prosecutors allege waged a deadly
campaign of murder and mayhem in their bid to create a "racially
pure,'' polygamous white nation in the Pacific Northwest.
LIVERPOOL -- A 28-year-old bus driver, Darren Vickers, is being
accused of murdering an 8-year-old boy, Jamie Lavis. After
Vickers had befriended the boy over a period of months, became
a friend of the boy's family, and led the hunt for him when he
disappeared -- giving up his job to do so -- the boy's dismembered
remains were discovered by police.
DUBLIN (Reuters) -- 'Bob-a-Job', the classic fund-raising
mainstay of the scouting movement, has been dropped in Ireland
due to dwindling interest and increasing fears of child abuse,
Irish scout leaders said Monday. Scouting Ireland's Chief Commissioner,
Kiernan Gildea, said the changing nature of local communities
had raised too many concerns about the idea of sending children
door-to-door. {A 'bob' was slang for a shilling, or 5P, which
in the 1950's bought as much chocolate or as many cigarettes as
does one pound sterling today. Éire is notorious for the
high level of religiosity and community spirit of its inhabitants,
and for the latter's belief that any kind of sexual perversion
would be an English invention.}
NEW YORK -- Joe DiMaggio, the legendary baseball player for the
Bronx Bombers who was Marilyn Monroe's first husband in
1954 died aged 83. Sadly, Marilyn aborted his child, ditched him
for 'mental cruelty' (= too much drinking while the pair toured
Japan?) and, ignoring the fan mail of C.R.Brand (of East Barnet,
Hertfordshire), 11, went on to marry playwright Arthur Miller
and meet a sticky end. But Joe was devastated and kept up a wonderful
supply of flowers for years afterwards. Good on yer, Joe! "A
nation turns its eyes to you," as the Beatles sang. {Pictures
of Marilyn adorn McDNL HQ walls, along with photos of Hans
Eysenck, Sir Cyril Burt, Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph, Maria
Corrigan and Louise Brookes.}
LONDON -- Eros and Thanatos -- St George's Hospital is
to treat a rapist by using Viagra. Apparently the rapist is so
depressed that only a little sadism gets him going -- as characters
in the Marquis de Sade's Juliette used to find. The move
has provoked outrage etc.
LONDON -- This week, the censored Aberdeen
food scientist Arpad Pusztai (McDNL 16 ii '99)
will discuss his findings about genetically modified potatoes
with the House of Commons' Select Committee on Scientific Affairs.
Puszta, who has three books to his name, will explain his resentment
at being gagged and bundled into retirement from the Government-funded
Rowett Institute. Apparently colleagues were told not to talk
to him. Contrary to previous impressions, Puszta is in favour
of genetically modified food -- so long as the proper research
is undertaken.
ST ALBANS, Hertfordshire -- The director of the original film
of 'Lolita' (1962), Stanley Kubrick, died in this bijou
town at the weekend. Reclusive and 'obsessional', the Bronx-born
hyper-imaginative and perfectionist top film director ('2001:
A Space Odyssey' (1968), 'A Clockwork Orange'(1971)) who inspired
both love and loathing (said the Daily Mail, referring
to the lack of compassion which some detected in the films) died
as he would have wished, working with McDNL's erotic starlet,
Nicole Kidman (McDNL 6 x '98, "Phwoar!").
EDINBURGH -- After the trial of a male aromatherapist
who was fined merely £UK400 for having 'indecently assaulted'
a female patient, Scottish Office minister Henry McLeish is seizing
the opportunity to restrict future court questioning of rape
accusers by defendants. McLeish has told police he will also
seek a ban on all muzzle-loading guns -- favoured by shooters
since HMG's draconian post-Dunblane gun restrictions of 1997/8.
LONDON -- BBC TV's top programme for news analysis, 'Panorama' will this week expose a big rise in sexual excesses and pregnancies among Britain's 12-15-year-old girls. It remains to be seen whether an option on paedophilia for the youngsters will figure among the proposed solutions.
//////
…..In everything to do with Mr and Mrs Lawrence, too, the all-seeing Sir William finds the unwitting racism he seeks. The evidence of any policeman who annoyed them in any way is always considered unacceptable, "it grated on our ears". A great many things upset the Lawrences. They complained when they were visited and complained when they were not. They said that they had not been spoken to in the hospital by a policeman when they had. They considered that a question about a hat and gloves found at the scene implied that Stephen had been some sort of criminal. They early on received a friendly letter from the officer at one time in charge of the case, but told the inquiry that they had not received it.
……Sir William is very fierce with the police officers
in charge of the family liaison with the Lawrences, so much so
that he sometimes becomes self-contradictory. At one point he
attacks the liaison officers for persisting: "It is all very
well saying that one must not give up trying to achieve success,
but where family liaison is concerned it seems hopeless to continue
if there is plain and obvious mistrust from the start." Yet
elsewhere he says that it is "wholly incumbent on the police
to make sure that family liaison is sympathetic and satisfactory,
whatever the circumstances". It is never indicated how this
could be done in the face of almost complete hostility. But that
hostility is taken as proof in itself of police insensitivity
and institutional racism. A typical sentence (about the hat and
gloves) says: ". . . the fact that Mr and Mrs Lawrence's
perception was that this was so must demonstrate that the matter
was not dealt with properly and as sensitively as it should have
been." Every contradictory statement or change of mind or
complaint by the Lawrences is seen as "wholly understandable".
Surely there is a partial
absence of human understanding here. The Lawrences did indeed
require the most considerate possible treatment, but the problem
the police faced was that the poor parents' grief was unassuageable,
and so they felt the need to blame someone for what had happened.
This is, to use Sir William's words, wholly understandable. But
it makes the police's position absolutely impossible: they were
damned whatever they did. Had he been a merciful judge, Sir William
would have found a way of making this clear.
I think I have said enough to show that Sir William and his team have not been merciful, or intellectually honest, much less fair. They have decided to take all the complication and pain of a horrible and unsolved murder and lay the whole thing at the door of the men and women who tried unsuccessfully to solve it. That would be bad enough, but Sir William does much worse. He imposes on his victims, the police, a concept of racism that makes them guilty whatever they do. That is a concept new to the English law under which we all want to live in freedom and peace. It is contemptible that someone versed in that law should have done such a thing. By doing so, he disqualifies his report from the respect that such documents should deserve and inflames the racial feelings he professes to deplore.
\\\\\\
High-PC Canada is used to having its freedoms
restricted
for the sake of its own 'Anti-Racist' bureaucracy; but the
Macpherson Report fairly took even Canada's breath away.
//////
How far will we go to fight racism? Here
in Canada, we've imposed strict limits upon freedom of speech
and of the press in the name of racial equality. The Americans
have accepted an all-pervasive system of racial quotas in employment
and education. But it is the British who now seem on the verge
of taking the ultimate step: they are on the verge of making racist
thoughts a legal offense.
Britain's evolution toward
the policing of the contents of people's minds began six years
ago, on April 22, 1993. At 10.30 that evening, Stephen Lawrence,
the eighteen-year-old son of Jamaican immigrant parents, was waiting
with his friend Duwayne Brooks for a bus in a working-class district
of southeast London. They were spotted and attacked, unprovoked,
by a gang of five white hoodlums. Both ran: Brooks escaped; Stephen
Lawrence was fatally stabbed. A public prosecution led nowhere;
a private prosecution by the family in 1996 ended in the acquittal
of three of the suspects.
Who is to blame for this failure
of justice? There was only one witness to the crime, Duwayne Brooks.
He was unable to identify the faces of any of the attackers. His
mood was "very agitated," "highly excitable,"
"virtually uncontrollable" according to a policewomen
who arrived on the scene. His first words to her were, "Who
called you f---ing c---s anyway, pigs . . . I only called the
f---ing ambulance." Three weeks after the assault, Brooks
would be arrested for criminal mischief. The case against Stephen
Lawrence's killers depended on the testimony of a highly unreliable
witness unable to positively identify his attackers.
Stephen Lawrence's family
decided, however, that the blame attached to the police force,
which they immediately and loudly accused of corruption, incompetence
and racism. Their anger is understandable: suffering a terrible
grief, with no hope of seeing their son's murderers brought to
justice, they ignited a political controversy that led the newly
elected Blair government to appoint a special inquiry in July
1997, under the chairmanship of Sir William Macpherson, a retired
High Court judge. Sir William delivered his report on Feb. 25.
The report is often turgid, but its 70 recommendations add up
to a coherent whole: in order to fight racism, much of the British
tradition of personal liberty must be junked.
The report reluctantly concludes
that the accusations flung about by the grieving and angry Lawrence
family were in fact unfounded. There was no corruption. The Lawrences
were treated with respect and courtesy. The slights the Lawrences
complained were in almost every case misperceptions: Mrs. Lawrence,
for instance, charged that when she handed over a piece of paper
with the names of her suspects on it, the police inspector crumpled
it into a ball. In fact, the inspector folded it up neatly.
Nevertheless, says the report,
the handling of the Lawrence case proves that the British government
is gripped by institutional racism. And strong, even "radical,"
means are needed to root that racism out. Sir William's idea of
an appropriately radical measure was inspired by a videotape taken
of four of the Lawrence suspects in 1994, that caught them expressing
hatred for blacks in graphic, violent language. The video does
not prove their guilt in any legal sense, but it seems to have
convinced Sir William Macpherson, and prompted him to propose
that the courts be permitted to resume "prosecution after
acquittal where fresh and viable evidence is presented."
The Macpherson report does
not propose abolishing the ancient ban on double jeopardy in all
criminal cases: only in racial hate crimes. But as bursts of radicalism
go, that's just an appetizer. The truly imaginative ideas are
contained in recommendations 12, 13 and 39. (You can read the
recommendations for yourself in Chapter 47 of the report, which
is reproduced at the Telegraph's website, www.telegraph.co.uk.)
Recommendation 12 would define as a "racial incident"
any incident which is perceived to be racist either by the victim
or by any other person. Recommendation 13 would require
the police to investigate the incident whether the complained-of
behavior was criminal or not. Recommendation 39 would extend the
definition of "behavior" to cover the use of racist
> language -- in private as well as in public. Taken together,
they would make it possible for anyone in Britain to launch an
investigation of anyone else for words uttered in the privacy
of his own home. There's a word for that kind of regime: it's
totalitarian.
But it's also the logical
culmination of the trend of anti-discrimination law since 1970.
We long ago became impatient with the modest goal of equal treatment
for all citizens. We wanted to suppress not merely discrimination,
but racial prejudice. But while discrimination is encoded into
laws and public policies, prejudice is contained in the minds
of individual people. If the law is to root preju