The big issue in Europe is the ongoing invasion from Africa and the Middle East. If G-20 protestors were going to take to the streets and throw Molotov cocktails last weekend, THAT should have been their target. THAT’S the existential threat, the threat to Europe’s future–the future these millennials will have to live in. But that’s not what the G-20 protestors were protesting. Their target: CAPITALISM? We’re coming up to the hundredth anniversary of Lenin overthrowing capitalism in Russia. How’d THAT work out?

Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense.

Of all of Africa’s 54 nations, only one is a member of the G-20. That would be South Africa (although Guinea and Senegal were guest participants at this year’s summit).

South Africa’s an interesting study. For race realists, it’s also a disconcerting one.

When the blacks took over 23 years ago, we all assumed the country would quickly collapse into economic destitution and tribal warfare, with the white people of South Africa counted as one of the tribes.

The joke going around at the time was: Q—What’s the difference between South Africa and Zimbabwe? A—About five years.

That was 23 years ago. South Africa’s still up and running, under black-run government all this time. Some humility is called for here among race realists. Some.

Sure, South Africa has its problems, as all countries have. They have 27 percent unemployment, with widespread serious poverty, including a big poverty-stricken white underclass. [Tough times for white South African squatters, by Finbarr O’Reilly, Reuters, March 26, 2010]Levels of corruption are, well, African.

The crime rate is tremendous. South Africa’s homicide rate is in the low-to-middle thirties per hundred thousand. That puts South Africa in the world’s top ten, up there with Jamaica, Honduras, and Guatemala—although not in quite the same league as America’ own St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, all of which have broken fifty per hundred thousand.

A lot of the problems are First World-ish, though. South Africa actually has the ultimate status symbol among First World national vexations: an immigration problem.

The country is doing so well–by African standards, that is–that it’s plagued by illegal aliens from other African countries. There are frequent black-on-black anti-immigration riots. There was a nasty one earlier this year:

The latest anti-immigrant sentiments were set off in a neighborhood south of Johannesburg called Rosettenville, where residents burned down a dozen houses that they said were being used by Nigerians as drug dens and brothels. [South Africa Anti-Immigrant Protests Turn Violent, By Norimitsu Onishi, NYT, February 24, 2017]

Reading South African news outlets, it’s surprising how many immigration stories there are. Random headline from this week: Crackdown Halves Number Of Foreigners With Temporary Residence Permits. [By Farren Collins, Timeslive.co.za, July 10, 2017].

For a further claim to First World status, South Africa also has declining fertility, now just above replacement level.

The country’s politics are quite sane by African standards. Given the current levels of hysteria in Washington, D.C., it’s even tempting to say, “by American standards”…but let’s not over-egg the pudding here.

True, it’s a de facto one-party state, with the ANC, the African National Congress, holding power all 23 of these years. The ANC has quite distinct right and left wings, though, economically speaking: a pro-business wing and a pro-labor wing, who bicker constantly. There are significant opposition parties that did well in last year’s municipal elections. One of them won control of Pretoria, one of South Africa’s three capital cities.

(South Africa has three capital cities, one for each constitutional branch: legislature, executive, judiciary. Pretoria’s the executive capital. This seems to me a very good idea, that could be usefully adopted by the U.S.A. Why do we have all three branches located in Washington, D.C.?)

So, hey, we could just as well be talking about Denmark here!

Well, not quite. South Africa adopted the crony-capitalist economic model. Well-paid do-nothing government jobs are dominated by blacks, while the white and Asian–mostly Indian–business classes are left alone to make money. It’s not a bad model–Malaysia’s made it work for coming up to fifty years.

South Africa has its own particular issues, though–the issues spelled out in Ilana Mercer’s 2011 book Into the Cannibal’s Pot.

Fertility may be down towards replacement level, but as any demography buff will tell you, that leaves a huge “bulge” from the previous higher rates to work its way through the age cohorts. Millions of young black South African adults are jobless. They are rallying to Julius Malema’s new Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, which is Castro-ist in economics and fiercely anti-white.

Our President went to Poland and made a stirring speech. Remember the old radical chant, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ. has got to go!”? Our President took the opposite line, counter-attacking: “Ho ho, hey hey, Western Civ. is here to stay!”

I sure hope he’s right.

The speech of course was grandiloquent. A speech of that kind can hardly be otherwise.

And there are parts of it I’d disagree with. We need to get out of NATO and let Europeans organize their own collective defense, if they have the will. So I’m not as thrilled as the President is about the money pouring into NATO’s coffers.

Nor do I agree with him that the jihadis of Afghanistan and Iraq are significant enemies of our civilization—so long as we make an effort to keep them out of our countries, which we currently don’t.

There was also some polite papering-over of the history of our past solidarity with the Poles, too. Here I can’t resist quoting the story that opens Chapter 13 of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times:

On 10 January 1946, the Tory MP and diarist “Chips” Channon attended a society wedding in London and remarked to another guest, Lady (“Emerald”) Cunard, “how quickly normal life had been resumed. ‘After all,’ I said, pointing to the crowded room, ‘this is what we have been fighting for.’ ‘What,’ said Emerald, ‘are they all Poles?’”

And with the best will in the world towards our President—and I do have the best will in the world towards him—it was hard not to wince, knowing the President’s own personal history then hearing him say that

If we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.

These are trivial blemishes, though, by comparison with the nuggets of pure gold in the speech. Nuggets like this:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

Those really are the fundamental questions of our time. They are the questions on the mind of every thoughtful patriot in the West, of everyone who cherishes our civilization.

(They are, incidentally, the questions posed by Douglas Murray in his book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which I took delivery of mid-week. I’ll be posting a full review in due course. Here I just note, at a hundred pages into the book, that it’s one everybody who cares about those big civilizational issues should read).

I’ll allow some modest difference of opinion with our President over exactly who those people are who “would subvert and destroy” our civilization.

Sure: the Muslim fanatics of the Middle East, Africa, and West Asia are in there. They would destroy us if they could.

Much more important in the ranks of our enemies, though, are those of our own people who would open our countries to mass settlement from those regions. Also, those of our own people who hate Western Civ., people to whom Western Civ. is only a catalog of oppression, slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, and cruelty.

These people infest our government bureaucracies, our schools and universities, our media outlets, our churches, our corporations. Do we have the will to face them down, to drain the swamps, clean out the stables, chase the money-lenders from the temples?

Well, that just circles us back to the President’s question. Thank you, Mr. President; thank you, thank you for stating that question out loud for the world to hear.

And you could hardly find a better place then Poland to say it. Protect our borders? The Poles can tell you things about that. They remember very vividly—how could they ever forget? —what happened to their borders 78 years ago, when Stalin and Hitler simultaneously invaded.

Concerning which, by the way—as an old Cold Warrior, but also as a person who just likes to hear the plain truth spoken—I’d like to thank our President all over again for not eliding the monstrous crimes of Soviet Russia.

Leftist historians and media types have been playing that game for decades—very successfully, stuffing Stalin’s crimes down the memory hole. Our politicians have mostly gone along with them. Any ordinary, not-very-attentive citizen of the West knows that Hitler invaded Poland in 1939; nothing like as many know that it was a co-invasion, Hitler and Stalin acting together.

From time to time, our President displays a lack of self-restraint, allowing his inner nitwit to escape from its cage, as in his feuds with Mika Brzezinski and CNN. At least, that how it seems to me in my geezer-like way—I know younger Dissident Righters think it’s hilarious. Still, I can always console myself by reflecting on what a huge, lethal bullet the U.S.A. dodged last November.

By way of illustration, here’s something I picked up from the Twitter thread of anonymous tweeter “tcjfs“—that’s his Twitter handle—who is one of the most prolific and insightful tweeters on the Dissident Right.

Reminder that before Trump, prominent Harvard progs were planning to treat conservatives like "Nazis after 1945": https://t.co/rdy7o5Urie

— tcjfs (@tcjfs) June 26, 2017

There’s a link to a blog post at the blog of Jack Balkin (below left—email him) who is a Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.

This particular post on Prof. Balkin’s blog is not by him, but by a different constitutional scholar, Prof. Mark Tushnet(below left) who teaches at Harvard Law School.

So we have a Harvard law professor writing on the blog of a Yale law professor. Dodged a bullet? What we dodged here was a heavy artillery barrage.

The blog post is dated May 6th last year, six months before the election, when all reasonable people—and who could be more reasonable than a couple of Ivy League Law School professors?—assumed that Mrs. Clinton would be the country’s next president.

Looking forward to that blessed prospect, Prof. Tushnet (right—email him) contributed this post at Prof. Balkin’s blog: “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” Opening four sentences:

Several generations of law students and their teachers grew up with federal courts dominated by conservatives. Not surprisingly, they found themselves wandering in the wilderness, looking for any sign of hope. The result: Defensive-crouch constitutionalism, with every liberal position asserted nervously, its proponents looking over their shoulders for retaliation by conservatives (in its elevated forms, fear of a backlash against aggressively liberal positions).

It’s time to stop.

Prof. Tushnet then lays out a program for Leftists, once they have swept to power in last November’s election, seizing all the commanding heights of constitutional jurisprudence.

The whole thing is too long to quote, and written in law-school-professor-speranto, so I’ll just pick out some highlights.

With a solid liberal majority on the Supreme Court, justices should, Prof. Tushnet tells us:

• Overrule key cases. Prof. Tushnet offers a list. Head of the list is the 1978 Bakke ruling, that imposed some slight, cautious restraints on Affirmative Action in college admissions, ruling out blatant racial quotas, for example. According to Prof. Tushnet, the ruling amounted to “rejecting all the rationales for Affirmative Action that really matter.”
• Deal sternly with what Prof. Tushnet calls “the losers in the culture war.” Quote: “The war’s over, and we won.” Further quote: “Taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.” This is what tjcfs means by treating us like “Nazis after 1945.” Just to remind you, this is a professor of constitutional law at America’s most prestigious law school.
• “Exploit the ambiguities and loopholes in unfavorable precedents that aren’t worth overruling.“ The assumption here is that with Mrs. Clinton in the White House, liberal justices would be able to overrule anything at all; but where it’s too much trouble, a precedent should be interpreted with maximum progressive spin.
• Be more ideological! Conservatives are too dimwitted consciously to practice ideological jurisprudence, although the results of their rulings are anti-progressive none the less. Progressives should have their ideology always in mind.
• Be bold and triumphalist, like Justices Brennan and Marshall (Tushnet clerked for Thurgood Marshall in the early 70s)…not timid and accommodating like that squeaky little mouse Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose “work as a judge has been shaped more than it should be by defensive crouch constitutionalism.”
• Stop pandering to Justice Kennedy, whose vote won’t be crucial any more.

Alex Pareene And The Phone Booth Principle. The white-advocacy group American Renaissance, to whose annual conference I shall be speaking in July, had the idea to invite journalists from the other side as guests to the conference — writers for CultMarx outfits like Slate.com.

One of the names they wanted to invite (Alex Pareene [Tweet him] right, now political editor at Fusion.com) had made some particularly coarse and stupid remarks about a talk I gave at CPAC in 2012, to which remarks I had responded appropriately. With the fine courtesy that is characteristic of AmRen, the organizers sent me an email to ask whether, as a listed speaker, I would have any objection to that person’s presence.

I didn’t mind his presence; I told them so; they invited the guy; he declined the invitation. (Very politely, I was told. Perhaps good manners really are infectious, just as our mothers told us.)

I didn’t just not mind; I heartily approve of this kind of initiative. There’s a lot to be said for getting together with people whose opinions you strongly dislike, and experiencing them as people.

My guiding rule here is what I call the Phone Booth Principle, from a lesson I learned way back in my student days in London.

I was living in a rented room — a bedsitter — with no access to the house’s one telephone. My girlfriend lived in my home town seventy miles away. Once a week I would call her from a public telephone booth — one of the old-style facilities: a regular little kiosk with glass-paneled sides and door, painted red.

So one winter’s evening I hiked a couple of blocks to the nearest phone booth to make the call. There was a middle-aged woman in the booth, talking on the phone. And talking, and talking …

I stood there impatiently in the cold. She could see me, of course, but was too intent on her conversation to make any acknowledgement of the fact. She talked and talked; I stood and stood, impatience rising.

It was getting dark. There was a chilly wind. A fine, light English drizzle started up. She talked on into the phone. I began to seethe. I moved myself right up against the booth to make myself obvious. She flicked a glance my way but made no sign, only went on talking.

My seething got vicious. I began to work up fantasies of what I would say to her when she finally yielded up the phone booth. I would yell at her for her selfishness in uncouth and obscene terms. Perhaps I’d demand that she pay for my call! — this evil, antisocial person, hogging a public facility without regard to the needs of others!

Reader, I began to hate that woman with hot, boiling hatred. She was not, in my imagination, a person, but a representative — of selfishness, of adult indifference to the needs of youth, of all that was wrong with modern society!

At last, when my imagination was turning towards homicide, the woman finished her call. She hung up the phone, opened the door, and stepped out of the booth. Addressing me with full eye contact, she said: “I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting so long on such a miserable night. It was really important. I’m so sorry.”

The wave function collapsed. The woman was no longer an abstraction, a representative of loathsome types or trends. She was a person.

To the person I replied: “That’s perfectly all right. I understand, of course.”

[Afterthought: Perhaps I’m just being hopelessly geezerish here. That story is from fifty years ago, when civilized Western nations still kept barbarism at bay. I doubt The Phone Booth Principle would have much purchase on critters like this.]

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If we tried to use our nukes, would they work? In my June 2nd Radio Derb I wondered whether our nukes would still work, should we need to use them.

Nuclear war uses nuclear weapons. The U.S.A. stopped making nukes after the Cold War ended a quarter-century ago. The last time we tested a nuke — to make sure that, you know, it, like, worked — was in fact just 25 years ago this coming September.

That brought in a very interesting email from a knowledgeable listener. Slightly edited:

There is a surprisingly candid statement about the ability of the National Nuclear Security Administration to certify the reliability and safety of the existing stockpile of nuclear weapons (about 1,550) in the Nuclear Matters Handbook. [PDF]

Nuclear weapons such as the W87, W88, B-61 (various versions) and B-83 were designed to be absolutely state of the art in terms of yield-weight ratio, using the technology of the 1970s and 1980s. The expected service life of those nuclear weapons was about 20 years, after which they’d be retired and replaced with more modern ones.

Well, that isn’t happening and no one really understands how keeping these weapons past their expected service lives is affecting their reliability — the high explosive surrounding the plutonium pits keep absorbing radiation.

It can be removed and replaced but the high explosive is literally glued to the pit and sometimes cracks when it’s taken off.

There’s also the question of exposing personnel to additional radiation as a result of americium-241 ingrowth in the plutonium core.

And, of course, none of this can be tested. The Nuclear Matters Handbook also mentions some known safety upgrades that cannot be installed, because no one knows how they might affect reliability.

As a minor aside, it has been well over twenty-five years, since the U.S. tested a weapon with a yield in excess of 150 kilotons, so the secondary designs of existing weapons may well be from the 1960s …

Here’s me with a 1964 Chevy Nova.

There’s something to report almost daily now in the war between Muslims and infidels being played out on the streets of Western cities. It’s getting to be so that any news outlet needs to just include a regular slot for these events, like the weather report. If things get any worse, some entrepreneur might start an entire cable TV channel—you know, like the Weather Channel. He could call it the Terror Channel.

Well, here’s this week’s Terror Report.

I logged four incidents this week: Two on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday.

There was terrorism elsewhere, too, of course. Muslim fanatics attacked a tourist resort in Mali last Sunday, killing four or five people, it’s not clear [Mali: Death Toll Rises in Mali Attack, AllAfrica.com, June 19, 2017] But hey, Mali. If you care about Mali, go read about it. I care about the civilized world.

London, Monday, shortly after midnight local time. Darren Osborne, no known religious affiliation, a middle-aged Welshman, drove a van into a crowd of Muslims outside a mosque in north London. One Muslim died in the attack and nine were hospitalized. Witnesses quoted Osborne on the scene saying he wanted to “kill all Muslims.” [London terror attack near mosque: New info on suspect, CBS, June 20, 2017]

Paris, Monday afternoon. A few hours after the London attack, on Monday afternoon, Adam Djaziri, Muslim, of Tunisian origin, deliberately crashed his car into the lead car of a police convoy on the Champs Elysées boulevard. The car was full of guns and explosives. It did in fact explode after the impact, killing Mr. Djaziri but no-one else. [Prosecutor: Champs-Elysees attacker pledged allegiance to IS, By Elaine Ganley, Associated Press,June 22, 2017]

Brussels, Tuesday evening. Oussama Zariouh, Muslim, a Moroccan national resident in Belgium, tried to blow himself and many other people up at the main railroad station. The attempt failed; his bomb only caught fire. Distraught at his failure, Zariouh ran back and forth on the station platform until he encountered a soldier. He shouted “Allahu akbar!” at the soldier, who thereupon shot him dead. Zariouh’s bomb did later explode, but no-one was hurt. [Brussels explosion: Prosecutors say major terror attack at station averted after bomb packed with nails fails, by Lizzie Dearden, Independent, June 21, 2017.]

Flint, Michigan, Wednesday morning. Amor Ftouhi, Muslim, a Canadian citizen born in Tunisia, stabbed a member of the Flint airport police force while shouting “Allahu akbar!” Ftouhi gave his motive as hatred of the U.S.A. He is in custody; the cop is recovering in hospital.

That’s the butcher’s bill for this week. I don’t have anything new to say about the attacks themselves, nor about the weather. The reactions to the attacks have been interesting, though.

That first attack, the one in London where a non-Muslim drove his van into a crowd of Muslims, drew some crowing from out here on the Alt Right. “It’s started!” people were saying. Occidental Dissent ran the story under the headline When the Saxon Began to Hate. [By Marcus Cicero, June 19, 2017]

That’s a misquote from Kipling, who in reference to World War I wrote a poem with the refrain, “When the English began to hate.”

Kipling did not write, “When the Saxons began to hate.” It would have been odd if he did, since Saxons are Germans, natives of Saxony. In World War I, Saxons were the enemy, along of course with Bavarians, Swabians, Prussians, Silesians, and other Germans.

And while I’m picking nits, I note that the guy who drove the van was Welsh. A Welshman will not thank you for calling him English, and he’ll be plain baffled if you call him a Saxon.

All that aside, this talk about the Cold Civil War turning hot is unconvincing. Real civil wars turn on sectionalism—big geographical territories at loggerheads with each other. That’s not the case, either in Britain or the U.S.A. Sure, we have red states and blue states; but the red states are 52 percent red and the blue states are 53 percent blue. We don’t have sections.

If you cut down to the county level you can get sectionalism: Professor Michael Hart has written a book about that. Much as I admire Prof Hart and his work, I think this is a stretch. [VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow does not agree].

Looking at the toll from our last Civil War, I hope to God we don’t have another one. For sure we don’t need one. What we need is sane immigration policies, that’s all.

Comment from the CultMarx multiculturalists in the Main Stream Media gravitated towards moral equivalence on the London van attack. Sample from the New York Times, June 20th: