The Economist acknowledges racial reality

Three readers have sent me in the last hour a letter to the Economist that was quoted by John Derbyshire at the Corner. Since it’s a letter, not an article, I didn’t immediately feel it was that important, as it is stating basic truths that our side is saying all the time. Then it occurred to me that perhaps the Economist does not normally publish a letter like this, especially with the part about race being one of the things that distinguishes different nations and cultures from each other, and thus one of the things that people have a right to care about. In which case the letter represents a breakthrough of traditionalist ideas into the liberal mainstream:

Sir—A nation has a history, a culture, an identity. Britain is not France, Spain is not Germany, and none of these are Bangladesh or Morocco. Nor do their citizens want them to become so. People do not want to be overrun by foreigners of a strange religion, a different race, or exotic (and sometimes repulsive) customs, even if it means a 1% rise in economic growth. No amount of lecturing will change these attitudes.

Someone should ask John Zmirak whether he regards the above reference to race as acceptable or as Nazi-like, since, while he acknowledges race as a legitimate “locus of loyalty… out of many which ought to compete in the human soul,” he also seems to condemn any explicit concerns about race as tantamount to Auschwitz.

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James P. writes:

You wrote: “it occurred to me that perhaps the Economist does not normally publish a letter like this,”

It is interesting to look at all the letters they printed:

I found the first letter amusing, in which two academics said that enforcing the immigration laws would actually increase the stock of illegal immigrants (sheesh, only in academia could one hear such twaddle). One other respondent made the irrelevant and incorrect observation that recent immigrants “uphold traditional American customs and conventions quite well” (guess he hasn’t seen those pictures of the freaks in NYC celebrating Ashura). And the last letter said that where you are born is merely a “geographical accident of birth” and it should not be socially acceptable to discriminate on that basis.

In the more recent issue, someone sent the obligatory letter reminding us that America is a “nation of immigrants”—and that unfettered immigration gives us all an enormous benefit: “the opportunity to grow through interactions with others of different backgrounds.” Yaaay, multiculturalism!

LA replies:

Thanks for this. Great sampling. I guess Western man gets the Darwin Award.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 04, 2008 03:19 PM | Send