March 21, 2007

Derbyshire On The Senile Decay Of National Review

By Patrick Cleburne

I remarked some time ago that Kevin MacDonald’s work is amongst the most important material we publish on VDARE.com. It certainly has got us in the most trouble.

Belatedly, I have come across an extraordinary exchange about MacDonald between Joey Kurtzman of the Jewcy web site and our old friend John Derbyshire, whose primary outlet is of course National Review. (VDARE.com has had the pleasure of carrying a number of Derbyshire articles, of which my favorite remains his first: Importing Sino-Fascism?)

This series of long essays is imperative reading for any serious student of MacDonald - of whom there are many. Some will be surprised by Kurtzman’s generous conclusion:

“MacDonald has presented us with a fascinating and genuinely novel examination of the history and internal workings of the Jewish world. His trilogy is a hell of a read. To any Jewcy readers tired of pious, ‘hooray-for-us!’ Jewish historiography, or just interested in seeing traditional Jewish history through a kaleidoscope, I happily recommend it.”

But quite separately important for VDARE.com’s friends, is the light Derbyshire throws on the pitiful collection of garbage that passes as Establishment Conservative media:

“If tomorrow I submitted a piece to National Review saying, ‘Kevin MacDonald is really onto something. He’s doing great work and I think everyone should read him,’ the editors would reject the piece, and they would be right to do so. I don’t think I would be canned for submitting such an article, but if it happened, I would not be much surprised.”

Derbyshire goes on to say

“Anyone running a mainstream conservative magazine has to constantly demonstrate ideological purity in matters of race. They have to show repeatedly… they are ideologically pure in this zone. Otherwise, they won’t be taken seriously by the cultural establishment.”

He further offers:

“National Review wants to get certain ideas out to the U.S. public—ideas about economics, politics, law, religion, science, history, the arts, and more. To do that, the magazine needs standing in our broad cultural milieu. It needs status...”

(What, exactly, are these “ideas”? That conservatives should capitulate on gays in the military?—just the most recent example of what another friend, Tom Piatak, has described, in a reference to National Review’s famous, now-abandoned credo, as the magazine’s recent role of “Standing athwart history shouting ‘Uncle’”.)

This truckling is presumably what Derbyshire has assimilated after years of NR editorial meetings. The objective of the magazine is to ingratiate itself (and its writers) with the “cultural establishment”.  Giving voice to – or leading - the mass of conservatively-inclined opinion in the country at large is not important, and beneath them.

No wonder National Review is so useless. (To publish an essay of his own on MacDonald, Derbyshire had to migrate to The American Conservative.)

Derbyshire has another comment, valuable as the fruit of almost a quarter century’s survival—more or less—as an opinion journalist:

 “I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT—not ever again—be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.”

(Derbyshire has valuably posted on his website an archive of a dramatic incident in 1994 illustrating this point: the immolation of the British journalist William Cash for writing in the U.K. magazine The Spectator that Hollywood was dominated by a Jewish elite.) 

The Land of the Free and the home of the Brave! What this means, of course, is that what MacDonald  pointed out in his first and his latest VDARE.com articles about the conduct of American foreign policy and immigration policy cannot be discussed.  The fact that a strong case can be made that policy in both areas has been distorted and redirected because of the group preferences and loyalties of influential Jews is absolutely taboo.

Ready for Iran?

Derbyshire survived a Daniel-in-the-Lion’s Den kind of existence as an immigration sceptic at National Review during the several years the subject was completely abandoned following the O’Sullivan/Brimelow purge in 1997. He speaks with feeling:

“Generally speaking—and I certainly include myself here—American conservatism is proud of its Jews, and glad to have them on board. Not that there aren’t some frictions, particularly on mass immigration, the mere contemplation of which just seems to make Jews swoon with ecstasy...MacDonald gives over a whole chapter of The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements to the Jewish-American passion for mass immigration.”

From the vantage point of Spring 2007 it seems very likely that the key legacies of the Bush Administration will be an intermidable war to make the Middle East safe for Israel, and—perhaps—a nation-breaking new Amnesty/Immigration Acceleration Act. The “conservative” media merit a large share of the blame for facilitating these disasters.

As Neil Freeman said in his seminal (if discursive – start at the 10^th paragraph “And so we came to 9/11”) American Spectator article on the end of his 38-year membership of the NR Board:

“I thought then and I think today that if NR had opposed the [Iraq] invasion it could have made a decisive difference within the conservative movement and, radiating its influence outward, across the larger political community.”

Freeman appears puzzled still that the facts he offered against the Iraq invasion swayed no one. But there was an agenda that called louder than facts—discussion of which had to be forbidden.

John Derbyshire is generally recognized today as the only NR writer of substance (with the possible exception of the pensioned-off John O’Sullivan, bound and gagged like a captive King Kong). He has tried hard to to conform to the rules. But the fact that he must write almost 7,000 words for this relatively obscure web site indicates he is under suspicion, underemployed and marginalized.

Intellectual integrity and truth have no value in the neoconservative/ GOP publicist world to which National Review has now so eagerly attached itself. America will pay a great price.