Peter Quin at America on Jean Raspail’s fears of  the brown woman’s womb:

“On the face of it, Raspail’s notion of a conscience-stricken West being overwhelmed by an army of disheveled immigrants is less discomforting than laughable. The West has shown itself perfectly capable of using sufficient force whenever its vital interests are at stake—or perceived as being so—

(Lila: And its vital interests are always at stake…)

as it did most recently in the Gulf War. Indeed, for all the handw-ringing over immigration and the future of the West, there seems little appreciation that for the last 500 years at least it has been the West that has been threatening and battering the rest of the world, colonizing entire continents and waging war to secure the resources it needs. The current virulent reaction against immigrants in France, Austria and Germany—or, for that matter, the U.S.’s recent treatment of Haitian refugees—is hardly a sign of societies suffering from terminal humanitarianism.

The pessimism evinced by Connelly and Kennedy is mitigated somewhat by their call for international cooperation to deal with the underlying causes of the present population crisis. But as with so many descriptions of the threat posed by the third world, the authors’ underlying sense of the West’s vulnerability before the procreative puissance of the world’s nameless poor is far more vivid and forceful than any formulaic list of possible solutions. The threat is from below, from Raspail’s “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms,” from the teeming races that Rudyard Kipling once described as “lesser breeds without the law.”

(Lila: That is, without Western law. Of course, there were always Hindu, Chinese, and Islamic laws…)
“In the United States, the question of intelligence as a distinguishing characteristic between greater and lesser breeds has come to center stage with The Bell Curve (1994), the best-selling treatise by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Hermstein. Unlike The Camp of the Saints, this sedate and statistics-laden book is not directly concerned with immigration, and its central thesis—that I.Q. is a function of race—is more subtle and complex than the horrific vision evoked by Raspail.

Despite their differences, however, there are similarities. At the heart of The Bell Curve and The Camp of the Saints, as well as of Connelly’s and Kennedy’s article, is a world in which the central divisions are racial and in which, when all is said and done, the white race is endangered. In fairness to Murray and Hermstein, they credit Asians with higher I.Q.’s than white Americans. Yet here again is found the implicit threat of a Caucasian community being challenged by another race, one that has been traditionally credited with being shrewder and craftier—in its own “inscrutable” way, smarter—than Westerners.

(Lila: Notice that when  the IQ in question is lower than that of Caucasians, it is seen as a mark of inferiority and brutishness. But when IQ is higher, then it is a mark of craft, duplicity, and moral inferiority. In other words, at the heart of racist tropes, is a confirmed and unmerited sense of one’s global superiority over others. A sense founded on ignorance of real history from subjection to decades, if not centuries, of imperial propaganda. That is, at the bottom of such racist ideologies and narratives, you  inevitably find the state.

And where the state is the strongest (I use the term state to mean not just government but the entire complex of government organs, including  corporations, media, and academia) – in the West – there too mass indoctrination is at its greatest).

“The fear that white civilization is growing steadily weaker and is at risk of being overwhelmed by barbarians from within and without marks a new life for an old and ugly tradition. The most infamous manifestation of that tradition is the Ku Klux Klan and the host of so-called Aryan resistance groups that continue to spring up on the periphery of American political life. But its most powerful and enduring effect was not limited to cross burnings or rabble-rousing assaults against blacks and immigrants. There was a far more respectable, educated version of this tradition that clothed itself in the language of science and not only won a place in the academy, but helped shape our laws on immigration, interracial marriage and compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded.

The movement derived its authority from the work of an Englishman, Francis Galton—Darwin’s cousin—who in 1883 published his masterwork, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. In it Galton advocated the modification and improvement of human species through selective breeding and coined a name for it as well: eugenics. In Galton’s view, which was shared by many of his Victorian contemporaries and buttressed by a wealth of pseudo-scientific skull measuring and brain weighing, the races were totally distinct. Eugenics, he believed, would give “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was ripe for the gospel of eugenics. The country’s original immigrants—Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish Protestants—were feeling battered and besieged by the waves of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe (i.e., Italians, Slovaks and Ashkenazi Jews) who were judged so immiscible in appearance and conduct that they would undermine the country’s character and identity. According to the eugenicists, the racial “germ plasm” of these groups was riddled with hereditary proclivities to feeble-mindedness, criminality and pauperism. These suspicions were given scientific justification by studies that purported to trace family behavior across several generations and discern a clear pattern of inherited behavior.

By the eve of World War I, eugenics was taught in many colleges. Its research arm was generously funded by some of America’s wealthiest families, including the Harrimans, Rockefellers and Carnegies. Alfred Ploetz, the German apostle of “racial hygiene,” hailed the United States as a “bold leader in the realm of eugenics,” a leadership that consisted of the widespread ban on interracial marriage and the growing emphasis on compulsory sterilization.

In the wake of the First World War, the eugenicists helped direct the campaign to halt the “degeneration” of the country’s racial stock by changing its immigration laws. As framed by Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the Museum of Natural History (at that time a center of eugenic fervor), America would either stop the influx from southern and eastern Europe or it would perish: “Apart from the spiritual, moral and political invasion of alienism the practical question of day by day competition between the original American and the alien element turns upon the struggle for existence between the Americans and aliens whose actions are controlled by entirely different standards of living and morals.”

The eugenicists played an important role in achieving the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, a victory noted and approved by Adolf Hitler in his book of the same year, Mein Kampf. In fact, nine years later, when the Nazis took power in Germany, they would hail U.S. laws on immigration, intermarriage and sterilization as models for their own legislation.”