03:59 The triple tsunami. (EU, UK, USA.)
08:59 Why don’t politicians act? (Lawfare.)
15:31 The wrongs of rights. (Ambiguities and anfractuosities.)
21:24 Preventable evils. (The supreme function of statesmanship.)
30:37 A grave loss to scholarship. (Kendi’s scam hits the wall.)
37:18 Bye-bye Billy. (Death of illegal alien mass murderer.)
38:22 Rupert retires. (Something for Trump.)
39:30 A baby Carrington. (But stay alert!)
41:12 Signoff. (With Schumann.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners, from your vivaciously genial host John Derbyshire with a skeptical look at the week's news stories.
Mrs Derbyshire has one of those newfangled smartphones. Doing her chores around the house she has it with her and uses it to listen to readings of famous books in Chinese translation, mostly classics of European literature.
This can be embarrassing when she wants to exchange opinions on some book I haven't read. Hey, there's an awful lot of European literature. How many of Victor Hugo's novels have you read? Me, just the one, the Hunchback of course.
With the vague idea of leveling the playing field, I've signed up for an account at Audible and started downloading books. I don't have a smartphone but I do have a gadget called a Clip Jam to which I can download readings from Audible.
I'm sure I'll get round to Victor Hugo and Turgenev eventually, but the books that have so far caught my eye are new nonfiction books. My first download was A.N. Wilson's autobiography, which just came out a few months ago. Wilson's a British writer of my own generation; I've read several of his books over the years. This autobiography is extremely Brit-centric, though; of zero interest, I should think, to American readers.
My second download from Audible, which I'm just halfway through, is Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave, which just came out this month. The subtitle is: "Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma." It's about the, yes, coming wave of technology — most particularly Artificial Intelligence and bio-tech — that will transform the world we live in.
Suleyman, that Turkish-sounding name notwithstanding, is another Brit (although he now lives in Silicon Valley), and one well qualified to pronounce on his subject. He was a co-founder of DeepMind back in 2010, and has been a leader in AI research ever since. He has interesting and important things to say … but I'll cover that in my September Diary.
The reason I'm telling you about it here is that the title of Suleyman's book, The Coming Wave, landed on my consciousness just as I was reading news stories about illegal immigration. Coming Wave? This one is actually coming, happening, right now — present continuous tense. And it isn't just one wave, it's at least three.
02 — The triple tsunami. Yes, there are three waves of illegal immigration roaring up the beach, three simultaneous tsunamis.
For all of these waves there are literally beaches in play. There is the great wave coming north and west from Africa and the Middle East, across the Mediterranean to the EU, the European Union. Then there is the much smaller, but still dramatic wave of illegals coming across the English Channel from the EU into the UK (which is no longer in the EU — remember Brexit?)
The third of the three waves is of course the one roaring up through Central America to our southern border and across it. To the limited extent that beaches are involved here, they are really river banks, mainly those of the Rio Grande.
The three waves involve different governments with different approaches. That first wave, the one crashing on the EU, is of course the concern of the EU government. The EU government, however, is a flimsy and ineffectual thing, always being buffeted here and there by the politics of the member states; so this is politically the most complicated of the three waves.
Responsibility for dealing with the second, smaller wave — the one heading north across the English Channel — falls on the UK government.
And the third wave, the one right now drowning our southern border, is all ours to deal with.
So how are these governmental authorities — the EU and its member states, the UK, and the USA — how are they dealing with these three great waves of people from latrine-pit countries seeking security and prosperity for themselves in our advanced liberal democracies? How are our governments doing?
I don't see how anyone can say they're doing well. They're doing badly — really badly.
Why? Is there a common factor? Is there some one thing in the public life of Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and the USA that's preventing them from coping with the great waves?
I think there is. In fact I think I can name at least two, maybe three common factors.
Permit me a couple of segments to ponder more on this. First, the issue of rights.
03 — Why don't politicians act ? Rights dogma — civil rights, human rights — is certainly a big player.
Consider for example the first of my three great waves, the one rolling north and west from Africa and the Middle East, across the Mediterranean to the EU, the European Union. I've been reading Douglas Murray's excellent piece in the September 23rd issue of the Spectator. Title: "Politicians can't win on illegal migration."
Murray explains a point that's been puzzling a lot of us. He states the point as a question. Quote:
Europeans will vote for politicians who want to stop the migration. Those politicians may even come into office but the situation will not change. How can this be?
End quote.
The prime example here is Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She was elected just a year ago on a strongly conservative platform, in particular promising to curtail illegal immigration. She has proven unable to do so. As we've been reporting here, the Italian island of Lampedusa has in the last couple of weeks had so many illegals coming in from North Africa they now outnumber the island's Italian population by more than three to one.
Why couldn't Meloni do anything to prevent this? Why is she now shunting all these illegals to Sicily and mainland Italy instead of deporting them to Africa?
By way of an answer, Douglas Murray reminds us of Matteo Salvini, who was Italy's Minister of the Interior — roughly equivalent to our Attorney General — 2018-19 and is today a Deputy Prime Minister.
Salvini was strong on illegal immigration. When NGOs — Non-Governmental Organizations, which is to say do-gooder outfits funded by the likes of George Soros — when these NGOs rescued illegal aliens at sea in the Mediterranean and brought them to Italy, Salvini wouldn't let them land.
That got Salvini prosecuted in the Italian courts — twice! — in February 2020 and again in July that year. The charges were of kidnapping the illegals. These charges came to nothing, but other lawsuits followed; and of course in political lawsuits the process is the punishment.
So probably, Douglas Murray surmises, Giorgia Meloni nurses a very reasonable fear that if she takes decisive action against the invaders she'll quickly find herself giving over all her time and money to legal proceedings launched against her by plaintiffs bleating about "human rights."
And it's not just Italy. Murray tells us about Inger Stojberg, a Danish politician. She was immigration minister of Denmark during the crisis of 2015, when Germany's Angela Merkel was waving in millions of illegals from the Middle East. Ms Stojberg got laws passed in Denmark's parliament to discourage the illegals from going to her country.
The laws worked and Denmark is still today inhospitable to illegal aliens. The NGOs fought back against her, none the less. In 2021 she was impeached and convicted by the Danish parliament for having pushed a policy separating children illegals from adults. Her sentence was sixty days in jail, although she ended up wearing an ankle bracelet instead.
So the human rights organizations are a major obstacle to EU governments doing anything to counter illegal entry into their countries.
It's the same for the UK. British politicians haven't shown as much steel as Mr Salvini and Ms Stojberg, but they have made some feeble efforts to defend their shores. A year and a half ago the then Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, enacted a program to send illegal aliens — well, some illegal aliens — to the African country of Rwanda for processing.
The "human rights" NGOs swung into action, the European Court of Human Rights got involved, and it's been lawsuits and appeals ever since. A year and a half on from the enactment, zero illegal aliens have been sent to Rwanda.
Is there some fundamental issue here with human rights? Let's see.
04 — The wrongs of rights. Human rights are, of course, worth defending. They are an essential element in the ethics of a civilized society. I can remember from all the way back in my 1950s childhood hearing ordinary uneducated English working people protesting that, quote, "I know my rights!"
Likewise with Civil Rights in the U.S.A. The indignities suffered by American blacks as recently as sixty years ago needed correcting. We corrected them.
Class-wise and race-wise, Britain and America are fairer places now than they were in my grandparents' time.
That said, it's getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that we over-shot the mark on rights. Christopher Caldwell's terrific 2021 book The Age of Entitlement showed us the sting in the tail of our mid-20th-century Civil Rights reforms.
Steve Sailer had related comments the other day when reviewing Richard Hanania's new book The Origins of Woke. Sample quote from our Steve:
Rather than announce "Mission accomplished" and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.
End quote.
That English bloke of my childhood indignantly telling some authority figure that, "I know my rights!" would have been protesting about having been wrongly accused of something he didn't do, or being excluded from some public place he could lawfully enter, or something of similar magnitude. His equivalent today might be outraged that someone addressed him by the wrong pronoun.
Yes, we should be attentive to human rights, including the rights of people in other countries. That's a properly humane and Christian approach. And practical matters aside, there are some deep matters of philosophy involved. Paul Gottfried and Michael Anton have been arm-wrestling over the nature and origin of rights in the pages of Chronicles magazine recently, if you want some instruction about that from two exceptionally smart people.
Unfortunately our concept of rights is time-, place-, and people-dependent.
So yes: the whole business of rights has ambiguities and anfractuosities to be sorted out. I think it would be useful if we could have a clear list of rights, agreed by majority vote, on each contentious issue that presents itself to us as forcefully as the issue of illegal migration is presenting itself right now.
05 — Preventable evils.. I got into the matter of rights a couple of segments ago after describing the triple tsunami of Third World peoples illegally pouring in to the EU countries via the Mediterranean, to Britain via the English Channel, and to the USA across our southern border. I noticed how hopelessly bad the relevant governments have been at dealing with the crisis.
Then I asked, quote from me:
Is there a common factor? Is there some one thing in the public life of Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and the USA that's preventing them from coping with the great waves?
I think there is. In fact I think I can name at least two, maybe three common factors.
End self-quote.
The dogma of human rights was the first factor. The second, which may also embrace the third, was white Europeans' guilt about colonialism and slavery.
If that is indeed a factor, it may very soon become an even bigger one. Why? Because the migrant flow may be becoming blacker.
The great cross-Mediterranean flood of 2015 was mainly white. It was European and swarthy-Middle-Eastern white, but very little black African. On the "Countries of Origin" list the first black-African country was Eritrea at number six. The top five countries were white, or at any rate not black-African: Syria, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Albania, and Iraq.
The thousands flooding into Lampedusa last week were, by contrast, almost entirely black African, from south of the Sahara Desert.
This is not yet true of Mediterranean boat people in general. Those coming to Lampedusa are from Tunisia, where a crashing economy has led to pogroms against black Africans settled there, as I described last week.
More and more stories about the Mediterranean boat people seem to have blacks in the accompanying pictures, though. This is even true in the Eastern Mediterranean: Greece, for example, has illegals coming in from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
The English Channel tsunami is still mainly white, with Eritrea again at number six and Sudan at number seven. Numbers one through five are Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
However, a lot of those crossing the Mediterranean are heading ultimately for the UK, especially those from anglophone black African countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. If the Mediterranean mix really is getting blacker, the English Channel mix will follow suit after a year or two.
Thence to guilt further numbing the ability of politicians to act. There is no stronger ethnic guilt than that which European whites feel towards blacks, not even the generalized ethnic guilt of post-WW2 Germans.
Nothing else can explain the weird stories we see every day in our news. I'll give you a couple of those stories in a following segment in just a minute. Before I do, though, let me follow the implications of the illegal-alien tsunamis getting blacker, if that's what's happening.
The main implication is of course that if politicians don't summon up some courage, Europe itself will get blacker. Given the very different numbers for population and fertility in (a) white Europe and (b) black Africa, the whole continent of Europe might, by the 2060s or 2070s, be the way Lampedusa is right now: three-quarters black, one-quarter white.
Even if things don't go that far, Europe might end up with all the black-white tensions and rancor that the USA suffers from today. I don't suppose we shall ever come to general agreement about the cause of those troubles or the solution for them, but no-one can deny the existence of them, or that we would be a happier, more harmonious country without them.
It follows that in an alternative universe where the USA never had many blacks, this would be a better country to live in.
That's not to imply anything negative about either race. In his humane and sympathetic 1862 address to freemen at the White House Abraham Lincoln said, quote:
You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.
End quote.
That's still true today, 161 years later: check out the statistics on crime, educational attainment, broken families, etc. We are different races. That was a problem in 1862; it's a problem today. Whatever you think about reasons and causes of the trouble, a nation would be wise to avoid that trouble if it can. The nations of Europe can, by not permitting mass settlement of blacks.
This country, the United States, started off with a big sub-population of blacks. We could never persuade any large number of them to leave, although Abraham Lincoln tried. We must therefore cope with the problems that arise as best we can, in a spirit of patriotism and common humanity.
Other countries look at us, though, with pity and horror. The great British statesman Enoch Powell, for example, in his famous 1968 speech against mass Third World immigration, quote:
That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.
End quote.
The opening words of that speech were, just to remind you, quote:
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.
End quote.
The Brits went ahead with mass immigration of blacks regardless. Today blacks are four percent of the population of England and Wales, but 13½ percent of prison inmates.
It's too late now for the Brits, but for other European countries, the race problems that plague the UK and the USA today are preventable evils. Will the Europeans be wise enough to prevent them? We'll find out.
06 — A grave loss to scholarship. Time's pressing and there's only enough for one race issue, so here it is. This is from the USA.
The story concerns Ibram X. Kendi, who you have probably heard of. Forty-one-year-old Kendi, originally Ibram Henry Rogers, is a black New Yorker and a race scholar.
As I said a few minutes ago, there is no general agreement about the cause of the black-white tensions and rancor that the USA suffers from. Quite a lot of Americans, though, of all races, believe that there is one single great cause: systemic racism.
Systemic racism is a pathological state of mind that afflicts only white people. The cure for it is anti-racism, which as best I can understand it is a sort of mental adjustment, a new way of thinking, speaking, and behaving, that black people, and properly clued-in white people, have to teach to the rest of us.
Ibram X. Kendi is the champion of this point of view. He wrote a 2019 book with the title How To Be an Antiracist. It has been a huge best-seller with nearly thirty thousand ratings on Amazon, overall 4.7 approval stars out of five.
How much sense does he make? Not much. Here he was last year in front of — to judge by the backs of their heads — a mostly white audience, defining the word "racism":
[Clip
Audience member: "How do you define 'racism'?"
Kendi: "Sure. So racism I would define as a collection, ah, of racist policies that lead to racial inequities that are substantiated by racist ideas."]
Hoo-kay. So I guess socialism, which I have always supposed has something to do with public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, is in fact a collection of socialist policies that lead to social inequities that are substantiated by socialist ideas. Got it.
It's gibberish, of course. Kendi is a complete mountebank. The answer to the question, "How much sense does he make?" is: "none at all."
If, on the other hand, you ask: "How much money does he make?" the answer is: "a lot," all of it of course from guilt-addled white people. Jack Dorsey, the former boss of Twitter, gave Kendi ten million dollars back in 2020. The following year the MacArthur Foundation gave him their genius award, which comes with a grant of $625,000. And of course many, many virtue-signalling corporations have been similarly generous to Kendi.
(This hurts. With all my faults and weaknesses, I am sure I make more sense than Kendi; yet no-one has ever given me ten million dollars. Should anybody want to I can be reached via VDARE.com.)
That ten million from Dorsey was used to found a Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University: to furnish rooms, hire staff, and — of course! — conduct research.
Now something seems to have gone awry. Last week Kendi laid off more than half the center's staff. Wednesday this week Boston University announced it would conduct an "inquiry" into the Center. There had been complaints, they said about the center's culture and financial management.
Who could ever have imagined it? A black con man who monetized white guilt subsequently caught in hanky-panky with the finances, and perhaps — I haven't seen details — with his employees.
So it looks likely that the Center for Antiracist Research may shut down and no more research will be done. What a loss to scholarship, to human knowledge! How shall we ever make it up? This is worse than when the Great Library of Alexandria burned down …
The best comment on this fiasco was one on Twitter yesterday from Carlo Lancellotti, who is a Professor of Mathematics, which is a real subject. Tweet from him, tweet:
I was never a fan of Ibram Kendi, but the fact that he scammed Soros, Dorsey, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations etc. at the tune of 30 million dollars, and then did absolutely nothing in return, is actually a rather impressive achievement in its genre.
End tweet.
07 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: Illegal alien mass murderer Billy Chemirmir, whose trial we reported on here at VDARE.com back in 2021, was killed on Tuesday by a cellmate in the Texas prison where he was serving time.
The time Chemirmir was serving was two life sentences without parole for murdering two elderly women, aged 81 and 87, apparently in order to steal their jewelry. He was accused, but not convicted, in the deaths of twenty others, all elderly women in retirement communities or their own homes.
The news report I read on this in the September 19th Daily Mail did not mention Chemirmir's immigration status.
Item: Rupert Murdoch has announced he is stepping down as head of his media empire, which includes Fox News. His son Lachlan will take over from him.
Rupert Murdoch is 92 years old. I'd like to think he read my advice, offered in my August Diary, to not emulate Tennyson's Ulysses. More likely, though, he is just weary.
And, Tennyson's Ulysses aside, the fact of Murdoch having managed that business empire into his nineties shows that the cognitive impairments of old age don't affect all of us equally. You can be senile at sixty; you can be mentally alert at ninety. If I were running Donald Trump's campaign I'd look for opportunities to mention this.
Item: Finally, to cycle round to where I started from — I mean, with technology and the catastrophes it might lead us into — there was a mini- — or perhaps micro- — Carrington event last weekend.
A Carrington event, you may know, is when the Sun burps out a huge blob of electrically-charged matter which, in its path across the Solar System, happens to hit the Earth causing a massive geomagnetic storm in our atmosphere. The worst Carrington event in recent history occurred in 1859. It was named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who figured out what had happened.
Even back then when electricity was still new, what happened included dramatic things like telegraph offices bursting into flames. Nowadays that actual Carrington event would be catastrophic, shutting down power generation, fusing computer circuits, and so on.
Fortunately last weekend's event was only a baby Carrington. The Sun has been unusually active recently, though, coming up to its eleven-year peak of restlessness, so … keep your fingers crossed.
08 — Signoff. That's all I have, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention, and I wish you all a relaxing weekend. We here at the Derb estate are gearing up for a birthday celebration: Basil, the Hound of the Derbyshires, will be four years old tomorrow.
Some signoff music. Nothing weird or silly this week, just a lovely bit of piano music from one of the Romantics. Here's Marc-André Hamelin playing the scherzo from Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat major. If you don't know the meaning of molto vivace, you're about to learn it.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Marc-André Hamelin, Scherzo from Schumann's Piano Quintet Op 44.]
