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Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow 
VDARE.com: 12/11/08 - Help VDARE.COM Defend Christmas! Max Blumenthal Kicks Off Our 2008 War Against Christmas Competition!
WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS COMPETITION 2008: [blog] [I] [II] [III] [IV] [V] [VI][VII][VIII][IX][X][XI][XII][XIII][XII][XIII] - See also: War Against Christmas 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
Help VDARE.COM Defend Christmas! Max Blumenthal Kicks Off
Our 2008 War Against Christmas Competition!
Peter Brimelow
writes:
We've had our
differences with
Max Blumenthal, son
of Clinton consigliere
Sidney "The Scumbag" [©
Taki] Blumenthal,
but I was amused by his classic statement of War Against
Christmas Denial just posted in The Daily Beast webzine
(Who
Started the War on Christmas?
"The War on
Christmas" started in a white nationalist cabal and
spread to conservative media,
by Max Blumenthal,
Putting aside the ethnic paranoia and adjusting for abuse ("white
nationalist", sigh) and various minor
inaccuracies—apparently Barry Diller can't afford fact
checkers—it's a relatively good account of VDARE.COM's
role in exposing the War Against Christmas, the backlash
against which has been one of the most
significant cultural
developments for many years.
James Fulford and I
have lovingly annotated it; we will give an inscribed
copy of Steve Sailer's new book
Don't forget to go in through a VDARE.COM
Amazon link (like
this) when you buy
Christmas gifts—we get a commission at no cost to you.
Don't forget to buy gifts at our
VDARE.COM store. Ho
Ho!
And PLEASE don't forget
to
donate. Blumenthal
says we're "the
internet's leading
anti-immigration web journal".
(He doesn't approve) This can only continue if you help NOW.
by Max Blumenthal. (Originally
posted The Daily Beast,
What would Christmas be without warnings of the secular
crusade to destroy it? Thanks to the fulminations of
cable news cranks and evangelical moralists, the War on
Christmas has become an annual outrage. The story
typically goes as follows: secular elements have
intimidated stores into replacing the phrase
"Merry Christmas"
with "Happy
Holidays;" nativity scenes have been removed from
public spaces under threat of ACLU lawsuits; a decadent
culture is moving ever closer to eradicating Christian
morality; and America slouches towards Gomorrah.
[VDARE.COM:
All
correct. Especially
the part about the
ACLU lawsuits, but
the
Gomorrah part is
pretty accurate,
too.]
Judging from the panicked tone of movement
conservatives, this year's War on Christmas campaign
threatens the country's moral fiber more than ever.
According to The
Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger, the secular
Grinch has claimed the economy as its latest casualty.
"A nation whose
people can't say 'Merry Christmas' is a nation capable
of ruining its own economy," he
fumed
on November 20. [Mad Max and
the Meltdown] Having laid off 20 percent of its
staff the day after Election Day, Christian right
mega-ministry Focus on the Family declared
"Merry
Tossmas", imploring its supporters to toss out holiday season product
catalogs that wish shoppers
"Happy Holidays."
(The 201 freshly unemployed staffers might have more
practical reasons to trash their catalogs.)
[VDARE.COM:
Actually, there aren't "201
freshly unemployed staffers"—they laid off 149, and
decided not to hire another 53. Blumenthal was misled by
the fact that the story said that they'd eliminate 202
"positions. (Focus
on the Family to cut 202 jobs at headquarters,
Denver Post,
On December 2, Utah Republican state senator Chris
Buttars sponsored an
urgent resolution
demanding that stores
greet shoppers with the phrase,
"Merry
Christmas."
"I'm sick of the Christmas wars," Buttars
proclaimed.
"We're a Christian nation and ought to use the word."
[Buttars
takes aim at stores waging 'war on Christmas',
By Cathy Mckitrick,
The Salt Lake
Tribune,
The Christmas kulturkampf is a growth industry in
a shrinking economy, providing an effective boost for
conservative fundraising and a ratings bonanza for
right-wing media. So who was the genius that created it?
To find the answer, a visit with the ghost of
conservatism's past is in order.
[VDARE.COM:
Of course, it wasn't conservatives who
created the War on
Christmas; conservatives are the ones fighting back.
Tom Piatak, quoting
Adam Cohen of the
New York Times,
noted
that there have long been complaints about the public celebration
of Christmas,
and
William F. Buckley
(!!!)
editorialized against the
Back during the culture wars of the 1990s, Peter
Brimelow, then a Fortune
[VDARE.COM note: actually,
Forbes] magazine editor, grew incensed with the increasing use of the
phrase "Happy
Holidays" by retailers like Amazon.com.
"I just got real
interested in the issue," Brimelow told The Daily
Beast, "because I
noticed over the years there was this social shift
taking place where people no longer said 'Merry
Christmas.'"
In his 1995 book,
Alien Nation,
Brimelow argued that the influx of
"weird aliens
with dubious habits"
[VDARE.COM:
See the
(large PDF) online version,
page 267, for the context:
"In politics as
elsewhere, if you ask a stupid question, you get a
stupid answer—or at any rate a terse answer. And asking
people if they want their communities to be overwhelmed
by weird aliens with dubious habits is a stupid
question. The answer is inevitable." Of course, this
is meant facetiously, the point is that it would never
be asked in that form, but obviously the answer will be
"No!"]
from developing nations was eroding
Brimelow went to his fellow Briton and Tory, John
O'Sullivan, then editor of the conservative movement's
flagship publication,
National Review,
with a big idea.
National Review should host
"an annual
competition for the most egregious attempt to suppress
Christmas." Though O'Sullivan liked Brimelow's idea,
he was replaced as editor on Christmas Eve 1997 by Rich
Lowry.
[VDARE.COM:
In fact, O'Sullivan—who was fired in mid-1997, effective early 1998—did
run the competition for some years, ending at Christmas
1997. We've told this story several times e.g.
VDARE says Merry Christmas and VDARE says the hell with it,
By Peter Brimelow,
With the exception of a 2001 column in which O'Sullivan
blamed "religious
minorities" for the War on Christmas, the issue
disappeared from the pages of
National Review.
At the same time, the magazine jettisoned O'Sullivan's
anti-immigration politics in favor of the Big Tent
conservatism preferred by younger writers like Jonah
Goldberg and Ramesh Ponurru.
[VDARE.COM:
Sic, it's Ponnuru. Blumenthal doesn't link to the John O'Sullivan
column,
Scrooge on the Prowl,
December 19, 2001, but he seems to be hinting that when
O'Sullivan used the phrase
"religious minorities", he meant
"guys named Blumenthal". Not at all—here's the context:
"The sensible response of religious minorities to the
sight of Christians celebrating the birth of Our Lord is
surely to mark their own religious festivals with equal
enthusiasm. And, to a considerable extent, that is now
happening: Hannukah, Eid (the feast at the end of
Ramadan), and even the Afro-American nationalist holiday
invented in 1966, Kwanzaa, are celebrated by their
devotees and increasingly promulgated to the rest of
society."
Of course O'Sullivan
also said
"Attempts to make it a celebration of season or snow or
mere meteorology will fail — but there is a danger that
they will succeed in annoying most Americans to the
point where they will wish others a Merry Christmas not
from merriment and kindness but as an act of irritation,
defiance and aggression.
And that really would be the triumph of Scrooge."
While
Ann Coulter is both nicer (really!) and better
looking than Scrooge, she says that saying
"Merry Christmas"
in
The shift at
National Review forced Brimelow even further into
the political wilderness. Shunned by conservatives there
rankled by his unabashed racial resentment—Goldberg
belittled him in a 2002 column as a
"once respected
conservative voice"—Brimelow
[VDARE.COM:
see his
reply]
founded what would become the internet's leading
anti-immigration web journal, VDare.com, named for the
first British child born in the Americas. Brimelow's new
venture provided a forum to allies like
Jared
Taylor, a white supremacist
[VDARE.COM:
nationalist] publisher, and
Kevin
MacDonald, an evolutionary psychology professor who
has argued that Jews are genetically equipped to
out-compete Gentiles for resources and power. In 2003,
four years after VDare's founding, the Southern Poverty
Law Center classified the journal as a
"hate group".
[VDARE.COM:
We are starting to get tired of hearing that the SPLC did this or
that. The SPLC's
living comes from finding hate among their political
opponents, so they'll find it. They or Media Matters
complaining that a given MSM source
"failed to note"
that we're "white nationalist" or a "hate group" is equivalent to conservatives complaining that the
media quotes a liberal source and fails to mention that
Ann Coulter called
him a
traitor. And she's
a lot more likely to be right than the SPLC. As for
providing a voice for the heterodox, that's our job.
]
VDare became the staging ground for the War on the War
on Christmas. Unlike their more respectable
counterparts, Brimelow's writers dared to name the true
anti-Christian Grinch: Jews. The winner of Brimelow's
2001 War on Christmas competition, a
"paleoconservative" writer named Tom Piatak,
insisted that those behind the assault on Christmas
"evidently
prefer" Hanukkah, which he called the
"Jewish Kwanzaa," a
"faux-holiday."
"Teaching
children about Hanukkah, rather than the beliefs that
actually sustained Jews on their sometimes tragic and
tumultuous historical journey," Piatak fumed,
"inculcates negative lessons about Christianity, not positive ones about
Judaism."
[VDARE.COM:
No VDARE.COM writer has ever blamed
"Jews" for the War Against Christmas.
Here's what the Piatak piece actually said:
"The malice of the multiculturalists is revealed in the
way they present the alternative holidays they so
evidently prefer. Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and all the rest
are presented as faux-Christmases, even
anti-Christmases, in order to compete with, diminish,
and ultimately efface Christmas. If Hanukkah customarily
fell in October, would anyone other than observant Jews
even notice it?"
Piatak
did not
use the words
"faux-holiday",
which Blumenthal must have accidentally edited in, out
of force of habit.
As for the expression
"Jewish Kwanzaa", that's not Piatak's but, as Piatak says in the
article, Frederic Schwarz's. Schwarz is the author of
Merry Chanukah,
American Heritage Magazine,
December 2000, in which he used the expression to make
the commonplace point that
Hanukkah was a minor holiday which expanded to fit in with the Christmas
celebrations of the larger American society.
(Also see Tom Piatak's response
here)]
VDare's 2005 War on Christmas winner,
[VDARE.com:
Wrong—Steve is a VDARE.COM writer, and couldn't be winner of the
competition, he just wrote an article on the subject.]
Steve Sailer, a Eugenics enthusiast and author of the
new biography of
[VDARE.COM:
The early 20th Century liberal eugenics movement had a number
of things wrong with it, most of them involving excess
government power—forced sterilizations of people
believed, on little evidence, to be defective. This has
been condemned by Steve Sailer himself in
Free To Choose? Insemination, Immigration, And Eugenics.
However, all
government programs that affect population and
parenthood, including tax rates, welfare policy, and
immigration policy, are ipso facto
either eugenic or dysgenic, whether we like it or not.]
"American Jews," Sailer
wrote, "those
exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be
de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly
resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans
for celebrating Christmas." Sailer went on to quote
at length from a column by the purportedly Jewish
writer, Bert
[sic]
Prelutsky, called
"The
Jewish Grinch Who Stole Christmas."
[VDARE.COM:
We have no idea why Burt Prelutsky is referred to by Max Blumenthal as
"purportedly
Jewish"—Blumenthal does see cabals and conspiracies
where most people wouldn't. Burt Prelutsky is a
Hollywood writer
and
Townhall.com
columnist
who says he's Jewish.
If you want to know how a previous generation dealt with
this, you can go back in time through
archive.org and
listen to Jewish radio comedian Jack Benny celebrate
Christmas with the gang. Except for the fact that they
usually had Dennis Day, an Irish Catholic tenor, sing
Adeste Fideles,
they had no problem having a Christmas part with a
turkey and such. ]
Brimelow was ambivalent when I asked him about Sailer's
theory on Jewish de-assimilation.
"It's an
argument," was all he would say.
Following the invasion of
By 2005, Fox News personalities Bill O'Reilly and John
Gibson were dedicating entire shows to the War on
Christmas. While their rants were directed at
"secular progressives," they echoed the arguments of Brimelow's
allies. "It's all
part of the secular progressive agenda," O'Reilly
grumbled. "If
you can get religion out, then you can pass secular
progressive programs, like legalization of narcotics,
euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage."
National Review's website jumped back on the bandwagon, beginning
with editor Kathryn Jean Lopez's
promotion of Gibson's bestselling 2005 polemic,
The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the
Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.[Amazon
link]
Of the conservatives who once dismissed his Christmas
crusade, Brimelow remarked with a self-satisfied
chuckle, "They
went over to the dark side."
From its origins in Brimelow's website and fevered
imagination to its popularization by the conservative
media, the War on Christmas has become an institution.
And the rest is holiday cheer.
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing
fellow at The Nation Institute, whose book,
Republican
[VDARE.COM:
The
War on Christmas,
obviously, didn't start with Peter Brimelow, or
VDARE.com, although we're happy to take credit for
raising American consciousness about it. We would like
to thank Max Blumenthal for calling us
"internet's
leading anti-immigration web journal",
which may cause a certain amount of
annoyance in the
much better funded
Center For Immigration Studies, for example.
And we have been slogging away on this issue with our
limited funding since 1999.
Max Blumenthal wishes to
illuminate for the benefit of the
Daily Beast's readers how
much harm we've done. We'd like to think of it as how
much good
we've done.
As for his standard attempt at
guilt by association, we hardly think that a
writing fellow at the leftist
Nation Institute,
associated with the
George Soros
funded/David
Brock run
Media Matters For America,
has any business telling anyone who they should be
associated with.
But if he's right that
we have this much influence—and we do have
a good deal—then we
can only continue with your help. Please give generously
in the spirit of Christmas, Past, Present and Yet To
Come, so VDARE.com doesn't become an empty chair by the
fireside, like Scrooge's vision of
Tiny Tim. ]
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