Letter to the Editor, 20th September

Letter to the Editor, 20th September

SIR

In Westminster and in Bruxelles, the song remains the same. Our “true” values are “tolerance” and “an open door” to anyone who wants to settle here. On Friday 13th September 2019, accordingly, The Daily Telegraph published an editorial, in thematic lockstep with an article the same day in The Guardian, penned by Daniel Trilling, attacking EU and UK restrictions on mass-settlement from Africa and Asia.

“Presenting her EU Commission nominees to reporters, president-elect Ursula von Leyden said: ‘This is the team, as diverse as Europe, as strong as Europe.’ Every single one of them was white,” groaned the so-called “Tory” newspaper. “Was the specific European quality she was looking for ‘dog-whistle racism’?”  After all, it added – complacently, in view of the terrorist threat level and ethnic crime-rate disparity – “the UK is genuinely, comfortably diverse”.

The Telegraph quoted Belgian ex-premier Guy Verhofstadt, who fears a future dominated by China or India and who argues that Europeans should gather together in self-defence. However, such a view, according to The Telegraph, exhibits “paranoia”, lacks “generosity” and reflects the “apocalyptic ‘death of the West’ nonsense published at the beginning of the 20^thcentury”.

But what was actually written, well before two Anglo-German wars contributed to a catastrophic loss of life, cultural confidence and external influence? In 1893, Charles Henry Pearson forecast an eventual deterioration in manners, intelligence and family duty, with science and politics only bringing nearer a time “when the lower races will predominate, when the higher races will lose their noblest elements, when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live” (National Life and Character, p.363).

No less pertinent was the data-rich analysis of population and migration probabilities by Professor William McDougall, in support of the argument that the adoption of universal above national interests would ultimately “result in the practical extinction of the white race in all of the two Americas”, with the Europeans led “along the primrose path of domestic comfort, miscegenation, and race-suicide” (Ethics & Some Modern World Problems, 1924, pp.74-76). His prophecies have been recently echoed by Patrick Buchanan and Douglas Murray.

Nearly a century ago, McDougall considered Frenchmen the major villains in the racial transformation on this side of the Atlantic. But today its most vigorous critics are French, to wit, Renaud Camus, Eric Zemmour, Jean-Yves Le Gallous, Jean Raspail and Marion Marechal. Painted as “far right extremism”, their concerns have nevertheless drifted into “mainstream” discourse, thereby alarming the cosmopolitan establishment (see “Juncker criticises his successor..,” Daily Telegraph, 13 September).

Brexit or no Brexit, dangers remain. Angola plans to join Rwanda and Mozambique (combined population 74 million) in the “Commonwealth”, within a “new network of partners”. Having announced their planet-saving decision to have no more than two children, the tax-funded celebrities known as Mrs and Mr Markle are jetting off to Angola as “fantastic” FO ambassadors to the “extremely young” populations in the “vibrant” continent of Africa (Sunday Telegraph, 15 September).

Extending trade with non-European regions does not make the Afro-Asian migrant or “refugee” or transnational criminal flows ipso facto less likely, nor any more desirable. Oswald Spengler’s magnum opus the Decline of the West (1918/23) did not focus on demography, but his Hour of Decision (1934) envisaged “race war and class war”, ultimately combining to “make an end of the white world”. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

From David Ashton