A million years ago, e.g. the Viet Nam War era when I was in college, opposition to anti-American tirades being injected into teaching was denounced as “chilling debate.”

But now the whip is in the other hand. Colorado State University/Pueblo professor Dan Forsyth looks about to be crucified for daring to raise the issue of illegal immigration in his classes. [“Temper behavior, CSU-Pueblo prof is told : Student says rebuke over tirade not enough,”

By John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News, March 30 2005]

Particularly risible is the complainants’ profanity argument:

“Watson [a part-Mexican student] claims Forsyth said ‘screw you’ as she left the room.”

Even in my bygone era that would not have raised eyebrows – but now?

The sad thing is intimidation works:

“Watson has continued to take Forsyth’s class. She said there has been a marked change in his teaching style. “Before, he would go off subject. . . . Now he stays on track, which is what he should have done in the first place.”

Considering the contemptible response of the CSU administration, what non-suicidal academic would not get the message?

Fine comment on this disgusting situation here.

In Mexico City, during a US- Mexico Soccer game, Mexican fans booed the U.S. national anthem, chanted “Osama, Osama”, and a group of them who couldn’t manage to set a US Flag on fire, had to settle for trampling on it.(I think the manufacturers of American flags are quietly fireproofing them.) [ U.S. still can't solve Azteca in qualifying loss, by Will Weissert, Associated Press]

A few points:
bullet The Associated Press described the Mexican fans as “rabidly nationalistic.” How come it takes a sports guy to use that kind of language about Mexican nationalism? Why can’t the rest of the press figure that out?
bullet The Mexicans aren’t chanting “Osama, Osama”, because they support radical Islam. They don’t. It’s just their way of saying “Death to America.” See “rabidly nationalistic, “above.
bullet The US team never beats the Mexicans at soccer. That’s because America’s great athletes are playing real sports.
bullet Do you think those “rabidly nationalistic” guys when they emigrate, (illegally) will become patriots like the late Balint Vazsonyi, or Humberto Fontova? I doubt it. I think you’d be lucky if you got someone as patriotic as Norman Mineta.
bullet Speaking of which, what do you think the chances are of those flag-tramplers heading north and taking the Oath of Allegiance someday? Pretty good, I’d’ say. How about them keeping the Oath of Allegiance? Not so good..

I suppose many readers are familiar with the writings of Theodore Dalrymple. For one thing, I frequently link to Reader, She Married Him–Alas, when we discuss forced marriage, or The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, when discussing the horrifying effects of immigration on France. He’s just published a new book, Our Culture, What’s Left of It : The Mandarins and the Masses, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet, but it provides an excuse for pointing out that you can read the whole of his previous book, Life At The Bottom, The Worldview that Makes the Underclass, on the internet for free.

This is because the book, widely praised when it came out, was a collection his articles in City Journal, and City Journal has all their archives posted on the internet, at no charge. I’ve arranged them as they’re arranged in the table of contents in the actual book. I was originally reluctant to post this, on the theory that it might cost the author money, but I’m told by those who should know that this kind of thing can drive sales up, including, I hope, sales of Dalrymple’s new book. So here it is, in all its depressing glory. Enjoy.
Life at the Bottom

Update: Oddly enough, the publisher, who doesn’t seem to quite get this Interweb thing, (which is good for sales, sales of Dalrymple on Amazon went up) complained, and so we’ve removed the linked Table of Contents.

The articles still exist on City Journal, you’ll just have to find them yourself.

When uninsured immigrants are hurt, who pays?- Alan Bavley. The Kansas City Star, March 24, 2005, is as rich a serving of facts on America’s illegal immigration/health care disaster as I have seen in a long time:
bullet A specific financial atrocity – in this case, a badly injured uninsured illegal of 2 years standing who has already cost North Kansas City Hospital $250,000

bullet Further damning details: “In Dodge City, 30 percent to 40 percent of patients arriving at the emergency room of the Western Plains Medical Complex are undocumented immigrants, said Brian Roland, the hospital’s business office director. ‘Most of them are uninsured,’ he said. ‘We do have some folks who do what they can to pay, but a large majority does not.’”

bullet An irresponsible legal system preventing the hospital’s frantic attempt to ship their deadbeat patient back to Guatemala (featuring his pro-bono lawyer Chuck Chionuma [e-mail him], an immigrant from Nigeria.)

bullet An arrogant Hispanic activist: “Christina Vasquez Case, [email her] director of Alianzas, a University of Missouri-Kansas City initiative that works with the Hispanic community, said she understood how unpaid medical bills could frustrate communities, but said the American labor market had a role in creating the situation.”

bullet A pro-immigrant bureaucrat demonstrating one again the need to fix the 14th Amendment problem: ” ‘Several of the patients are young adults with families — young children they’re responsible for who are U.S. citizens. How do you say no to them?’ “- Suzanne Meyer, director of social work, Truman Medical Center.

Not for the first time, political correctness does not yet seem to have paralyzed America’s local media.

If you missed it the first time around in October 2004, CNN will repeat its special “Immigrant Nation, Divided Country” on Saturday April 30th. The documentary featuresVDARE.COM editor D.A. King.

Immigration reformers reacted strongly to this highly biased piece the first time around. [Transcript]

Use this opportunity to again express your anger at illegal alien employer and millionaire John Dillard [audio] of Georgia’s famous Dillard House

And e-mail pro-open borders CNN correspondent Maria Hinojosa, who hosts the program, maria.hinojosa@turner.com to voice your outrage at her lack of journalistic integrity.

A review I wrote about “Immigrant Nation, Divided Country” is here: CNN’s Maria Hinojosa—Mexican Mouthpiece

When Peter Brimelow posted on the mythical “No Irish Need Apply” signs, I had a moment of nostalgia.

I was a VDARE.COM reader before I was a VDARE.COM writer, and I got my job here as result of repeatedly emailing Peter Brimelow. In September of 2000, I read John Derbyshire’s article, Importing Sino-Fascism? JD wrote

“As Steven W. Mosher has documented in his new book Hegemon: The Chinese Plan to Dominate Asia and the World, the Communists have been at pains to replace the discredited Marxist-Leninist rationale for their rule with nationalism of the grossest and coarsest type. Chinese school history textbooks make no mention of the 1959-61 famine—in terms of the number dead, a greater human calamity than WW2—but dwell bitterly on the tale about a sign saying NO DOGS OR CHINESE at the entrance to a Shanghai park in the 1920s. (Does anybody know if this story is true?)”

I took that as a challenge, and since I happened to be physically in the stacks of large university library when I read it, I was able to pull a round dozen books about 1930’s Shanghai off the shelf, including (this is important) books written in the 20’s and 30’s.

And, as I wrote Derbyshire at the time, it’s not true. The closest thing to a contemporary confirmation is a note in Foreign Affairs magazine from 1927, saying that “old residents say” that the sign had formerly said “No dogs or Chinese.” But, apparently no photograph of such a sign has ever been found.

Huangpu Park was a park in a section of Shanghai which was set aside for foreigners, known as the Bund. The park built, paid for, and reserved for the use of Europeans. The sign did not say “No dogs or Chinese” but was a list of ten regulations, one of which was that you couldn’t bring your dog, one of which was that park was reserved for Europeans, and the other eight are of no importance, as far as I know.

The conflict arose because there was something of a Chinese population explosion in the Bund; thousands of Chinese moved there. Why?

Because of extraterritoriality. The Chinese had guaranteed to the international community in Shanghai that they would be free from the vicious and cruel Chinese laws. And freedom from cruel and vicious laws appealed not only to Europeans, but to Chinese. Result: overcrowding. Sound familiar?

By the way, after going to the trouble of looking at actual physical books, I found that the myth had actually been debunked by William McGurn in National Review [!] in 1994, under the headline of Mad dogs and Chinamen, an article pointing out that modern Chinese are now exhibiting racist, exclusionary behavior to Filipina maids.

“And the infamous sign from atop the Bund? Again, the news is not comforting for those who associate all villainy with the West. In 1973 Richard Hughes returned to Shanghai after many years of absence and devoted his subsequent column in the Far Eastern Economic Review to puncturing the legend. The sign, he said, was not a sign at all but ‘a paragraph in a great list of municipal proscriptions–in Chinese, never in English–which was exhibited outside the park from 1868 until 1925. Following the May 30 demonstrations in that year, the British quietly removed it.’ That may explain the origins. But no one has yet explained how so many people came to believe otherwise.

“Until now, that is. Lynn Pan, author of several books on Shanghai, says the source of the myth was revealed to her during a visit to the basement of the Shanghai Museum. In the course of her research for a just-released photo essay on old Shanghai, she stumbled across not one but an entire cache of ‘No Dogs or Chinese’ signs that had been manufactured by Party authorities to parade before visiting foreign delegations as evidence that Noel Coward really had it right when he linked mad dogs with Englishmen.

‘People swear until they are blue in the face that they saw it on the Gardens,’ says Miss Pan, who fled the city with her family in the 1950s. ‘But it was never there.’ Perhaps it was the noonday sun.

If you want to see what such a sign would have looked like if it actually existed, you can rent Fist Of Fury, in which Bruce Lee kicks the fictional sign to pieces, and then, in the heat of Chinese nationalism, beats the hell out of a whole bunch of stereotyped Japanese villains.

If you want to see some signs from Chinese history which have some actual existence, go here Or here, where you can see ceramic figures of scholars being abused by the Red Guards during Cultural Revolution.

I saw a figure like that in Chinese shop this afternoon, dunce cap, AK-47, “counter-revolutionary scholar sign and all.

The signs the Red Guards hung around the necks of almost anyone they considered a part of the ancien regime were seen by millions and worn by thousands.

They, alas, are not mythical at all.

The Sierra Club election results weren’t a pretty picture, but the massive force the powerful organization brought to bear against grassroots reformers reveals how fearful the Old Guard remains about holding on to power. (SUSPS Spokesman Dick Schneider estimated that reformers were outspent 20 to 1.)

The numbers were plain ugly—the important immigration initiative lost big, with only 16 percent of Sierra voters approving the common-sense proposal. The population-responsible candidates also were clobbered.

The results show how completely the Sierra Club has been corrupted by money and politics. The organization was once a non-partisan advocate for preserving the environment of America and the planet. Now the Sierra Club is aligned with some of the most fanatical elements of the far left, including billionaire George Soros, filmmaker Michael Moore and open-borders extremists like La Raza. And the Old Guard certainly wants more cash from investor David Gelbaum, who scandalously “donated” more than $100 million to the Sierra Club on the condition that excessive immigration not be recognized as a legitimate environmental issue.

The stealth machinations of the leftist MoveOn.org appear to have been very effective in destroying Sierra reform. They evidently sent out millions of emails warning of a “hostile takeover” by “right-wing anti-immigrant groups.” (In 2004, MoveO n’s email list was estimated to have 2.2 million members.)

How else can you explain the discrepancy between the 2005 vote on a common-sense immigration initiative that received only 16 percent of the vote and the 1998 election, free of the meddling MoveOn.org, in which the immigration question got 40 percent? (History of recent Sierra election results.) Apparently fear still works among the easily led Sierra membership, most of whom are neither active nor informed.

Furthermore, the corrupt Old Guard couldn’t even prepare a fair ballot: each of the proposals was followed by the Board’s recommendation in bold type. It was like an election in the Soviet Union, positively Stalinesque.

Brenda Walker is blogging daily on LimitsToGrowth.

Readers of the wonderful Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels know that pirates from the North African coast were a terrible scourge not only to Mediterranean sea commerce, but also to fishermen and coastal communities as far away as the west coast of Ireland, for several hundred years until the 19th Century, on account of their appetite for slaves.

Anger at the damage done to American shipping caused President Jefferson to launch America’s first overseas war, giving us the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

Now a new book,Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 reports:

North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids which depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research. American historian Robert Davis has calculated that the total number captured - although small compared with the 12 million Africans shipped to the Americas in later years - was far higher than previously recognized.

Villages and towns on the coast of Italy, Spain, Portugal and France were hardest hit but the raiders also seized people in Britain, Ireland and Iceland. Almost all the inhabitants of the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, were captured in 1631, and there were other raids in Devon and Cornwall.

Given the population of Europe in this era, one might have to multiply by 15 to grasp the current significance.

Author Robert C. Davis, is apparently a brave man:

In comments which may stoke controversy, [Davis] said that white slavery had been minimised or ignored because academics preferred to treat Europeans as evil colonialists rather than as victims.

Of course, further documentation that slavery was not particularly a European foible is valuable.

But from a VDARE.COM perspective, the more significant point is why the size of this problem registered so little amongst the political elites of the time.

It was because the burden fell on the blue collar workers in unfashionable occupations and remote locations.

Sounds familiar.

Hat tip, Modern Tribalist.

Standing out from the endless procession of “conservative” media cheerleaders for the Bush Administration is today’s editorial in the Washington Times—“Vigilantes”

“We’ve reached a very strange moment in the immigration debate. On Wednesday President Bush condemned a group of good American citizens worried about the breaking of U.S. immigration law….An hour or two later, Mr. Bush welcomed to his Texas ranch a man who insults the United States for its immigration policy and leads a government that routinely flouts U.S. immigration law…Mexican President Vicente Fox hit a trifecta of contempt for the United States and its laws over the past week….It’s sad to see an American president roll out a royal welcome to a foreign dignitary so openly contemptuous of U.S. law, while simultaneously condemning Americans who are trying to help duly constituted authorities enforce the law.”

The Times preceded this with a news story Mexico accused of abusing its illegals [Jerry Seper, March 24 2005] that was one of sharpest polemical blades handed to immigration reformers in quite a while:

“The State Department says that the Mexican government…consistently violates the rights of illegal immigrants crossing its southern border into Mexico….The State Department’s Human Rights Practices report…cites abuses at all levels of the Mexican government, and charges that Mexican police and immigration officials not only violate the rights of illegal immigrants, but traffic in illegal aliens.”

Meantime, the elephantine Washington Post obviously has vague sensation that something is happening amongst Republicans immigration-wise: “Conservatives Split in Debate on Curbing Illegal Immigration [by Sheilagh Murray. March 25 2005]

“Republican lawmakers are headed for a showdown over illegal immigration, an issue that exposes a deep and bitter rift within the GOP…The immigration debate pits one core GOP constituency (law-and-order conservatives) against another (business interests that rely on immigrant labor).

At VDARE.COM, of course, we believe there are more reasons to reform immigration than just rule-following.

We also think there is absolutely nothing conservative about flooding the country with huge supplies of non-English speaking unskilled labor.

But it is encouraging to see the Post is aware that this is not just a Beltway spat:

“Rancor over illegal immigration has become a staple on conservative blogs and talk radio, with much of the wrath directed at Bush…House Rules Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) got a jolt during his 2004 reelection campaign, when radio hosts in his outer Los Angeles district decided to make him a “political human sacrifice” for his immigration views…He won with 54 percent of the vote, a lower proportion than previous years, and has since taken a prominent role in advocating [reform]”

Our conclusion: Agitation works!

Via Instapundit, I learn that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times finds it “depressing ” that

Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970’s.

“If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we’d do it,” said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. “Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job.” . . .

Wouldn’t this be good time for Kristof to say that he was sorry for what the United States, and the New York Times, did to destroy Rhodesia, and cause the exodus of most of the white population, and the murder of many remaining white farmers?

Joan Baez admitted she was wrong over Vietnam in 1977, Eugene Genovese apologized for his support of Stalinism. Why can’t liberals apologize for what they did to Africa?