The New Criterion discovers immigration

Fifteen years ago Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, the editors of the neoconservative journal of cultural criticism, The New Criterion, couldn’t care less about mass non-Western immigration and its effect on Western society. Now The New Criterion publishes an article by Roger Scruton on immigration in Britain and the silencing of Enoch Powell after his 1968 speech, and the disastrous effects of the latter in shutting down any debate on the former. He closes thus:

The fact is that the people of Europe are losing their homelands, and therefore losing their place in the world. I don’t envisage the Tiber one day foaming with much blood, nor do I see it blushing as the voice of the muezzin sounds from the former cathedral of St. Peter. But the city through which the Tiber flows will one day cease to be Italian, and all the expectations of its former residents, whether political, social, cultural, or personal, will suffer a violent upheaval, with results every bit as interesting as those that Powell prophesied.

It’s so important that Scruton is saying this. But why so late, why so late? Ironically, the main thread of the piece is that the destruction of Enoch Powell’s political career and the total silencing of any criticism of immigration in England has meant that only now, 40 years too late, are Englishmen starting to say anything about immigration. Yet the magazine in which Scruton says this has itself been stone-cold silent on immigration until this moment, and that magazine is not published in England. So, what prevented The New Criterion from discussing immigration, since it did not face the strictures that exist in England? What prevented The New Criterion from saying that continued mass non-white immigration means that Italy is going to stop being Italian, and that Britain is going to stop being British, and that America is going to stop being American? I assure you, the editors have been told about the problem, I sent them both copies of The Path to National Suicide way back in 1991, they just didn’t care, the issue didn’t touch their exalted horizon, and it still doesn’t. I’ll bet that if Scruton had written a similar article about the disastrous effects of immigration in America, The New Criterion would have turned it down, even today. U.S. neoconservatives love to go on about dreadful social problems in Europe, they love to point to Europe going downhill while adding that America is doing just great. Look at the endless series of Theodore Dalrymple’s doom-ridden pieces about Europe that appear in City Journal, while nothing of a similar nature has been published in that magazine about America, with the exception of a couple of Heather Mac Donald’s pieces on illegal immigrants.

Yet another problem with Scruton’s rather lengthy piece is that it is very literary and mostly talks around its ostensible topic of immigration. More matter, and less art, I say.

In fact, most of Scruton’s article, rather than bringing back and advancing Powell’s anti-immigration arguments or introducing its own anti-immigration arguments, consists of a rather abstruse meditation on the question whether Powell himself believed in the nation he was defending. It seems highly unlikely to me that Powell did not believe in the English nation—that sounds more to me like Scruton’s ambivalence speaking.

Thus the West parses itself into non-existence, while the the Muslims full-heartedly affirm their superiority.

So, Mr. Kimball and Mr. Kramer: While this article is welcome, it is way too little, way too late. Our civilization is going down. Must America reach the current state of Europe, or worse, before you will publish an article about immigration in America?

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A reader writes:

Good points. Thanks for alerting us to this. Maybe you can take credit for this, for lambasting Mark Steyn’s New Criterion article, “It’s the demography, stupid,” in which he wailed about the demographic shortage in Europe without saying one thing about curtailing immigration.

LA writes:

Also, here is something confusing. According to this article at vdare by Peter Brimelow, Powell’s 1968 speech did not destroy his career but made it. In the subsequent six years he was constantly in the headlines, and only got shunted aside because in 1974 he declined to run for re-election to Parliament. Had he retained his seat he would have had a serious chance of becoming Conservative party leader after the ‘74 elections. Brimelow says that Powell’s real record has been re-written or erased by the media, much like Patrick Buchanan’s record in 1992 and 1996. How then did Scruton get it so wrong?

John D. writes:

Multiculturalism has been so deeply engrained into Western life that its effects have had little examination by anyone to this extent, with the exception of you and very few others. Until recent, events have not dictated the overwhelming need for the immigration issue to be brought to the front burner and its potential consequences carefully considered. Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, contained little mention of immigration and its effects on Western civilization. Granted, the book was written more than a half century ago, but the ill effects of immigration have been prevalent in the Brittish thinkers homeland since its writing. Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism touches on the subject only to make a few irrelivant points regarding unregulated free market economies. Another Brit removing blinders.

With the sum of mass immigration virtually exploding in the U.S.since the Clinton and Bush administrations collectively, it is finally being considered in detrimental terms. The subject has been taboo (labeling one as racist) for decades.

It’s a good sign that the Scrutons of the world are beginning to take notice of the issue, and I think it critical to the subject’s future potential of discussion, that thinkers like yourself encourage the discourse, no matter how deep (or shallow in this case) it penetrates the subject. You have the wheel turning. Keep your oil can handy.

David B. writes:

While browsing at the magazine section at a Borders store, I picked up the September issue of The American Spectator. I had stopped reading it several years ago, but glanced through this issue, Ben Stein’s monthly piece in particular.

At the end, Stein lists what is wrong with America. One item is as follows:

“A Hispanic immigration flood that overwhelms schools, hospitals, law enforcement, ans neighborhoods, and which gives us super brave fighting men, but also takes away social cohesion.” Stein concludes by saying, “And no one is doing anything about this. I love Mr. Bush and enjoy his courage, but the situation is a lot worse than he thinks.”

Well, Stein has been virtually silent on the issue until this piece. I recall him writing several years ago of visiting an LA park and finding virtually everyone there a Hispanic. Stein wrote something like, “I’ll bet people used to complain about Jews the same way they are complaining about Hispanics today.” Stein seems to have thought that he would be all right in his West Los Angeles enclave.

The New Criterion, then Ben Stein, who is next?

LA writes:

Stein’s reveresal is a perfect example of thinking that is detached from any logical thought process or principle. At one point Stein in knee-jerk fashion dismissed immigration critics as prejudiced. Now he criticizes immigration himself, without acknowledging the role that he previously played in seeking to silence any criticism of immigration. What accounts for the change? Immigration started to bother him. It’s all about personal emotions and personal convenience. No principle.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 20, 2006 02:00 AM | Send