August 17, 2007
Happy Birthday, Virginia Dare! And Many More…We
Hope!
Virginia Dare was the first
English child to be born in the New World, on August
18, 1587—four hundred and twenty years ago today.
She was part of the famous
Lost Colony, which vanished without a trace.
When starting this
webzine named after her,
Peter Brimelow wrote:
“It says something about
the mettle of those settlers that any pregnant woman
would cross the Atlantic, the equivalent of a lunar
expedition at that time—and Virginia’s mother Elenor was
no less than the daughter of
John White, the colony’s governor.
“Perhaps you have to have
a daughter yourself to appreciate what White must have
felt three years later, when he finally returned from a
supply trip to England, much delayed by the
Spanish Armada. The smoke he took at first to be
proof of occupation turned out to be brushfires. The
settlement stood abandoned. Over a hundred settlers, his
daughter and granddaughter among them, had vanished. He
would never see them again.”
That's from the link at the top of this page that says
Why VDARE.com / The White Doe? On the Wikipedia
page on
Virginia Dare, you'll find us on a list of
"Things Named After Virginia Dare," along with the
Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge—and the
first commercial wine sold after the repeal of
Prohibition in 1933!
Very symbolic!—because
Political Correctness, when you think about it, is a
form of Prohibition.
The reason we say the first English child is that there
was, in fact, as Spanish child named
Martín de Argüelles,
born in St. Augustine, Florida, 20 years before Virginia
Dare. Time Magazine referred to him in 1941 as
the
First Native White. And of course, there
was
Snorri Porfinnsson, born in Vinland, about the year
1000. He returned to Iceland with his parents and is
buried
there.
However, what we call the "historic American nation",
with its Founding Fathers, Mayflower, Valley Forge, and
Constitutional Convention, did not originate in St.
Augustine, Florida. Florida wasn't even part of the
United States until
Andrew Jackson conquered in 1818. America
originated with English settlers.
The first permanent English settlement, Jamestown,
Virginia, was
400 years old this year. It survived Indian attacks
in spite of some
proto-multiculturalists who thought that if the
settlers would trust the Indians, and not treat them
like savages (by building fortifications, and being
armed) they wouldn't be savages. Guess what? They
were.
It's amazing the emotions that Virginia Dare inspires in
modern commentators—like
Tamar Jacoby, for example. She once
wrote, after explaining who Virginia Dare was, that
“…Virginia Dare is thought to have eventually married
into a local Indian tribe, or to have been killed by it—almost
equally unfortunate possibilities [Emphasis
added]
in the minds of VDARE's writers, who make no secret of
their concern about the way America's
original Anglo-Saxon stock is being transformed by
immigration.”
I
suggested recently that she must be confusing us
with Ethan Edwards, in the John Wayne movie
The Searchers, who thought his kidnapped niece,
after
years as a Comanche slave, might be better off dead.
Spoiler alert—he changes his mind. But yes, it would
be unpleasant to be kidnapped from a massacred colony,
and forced to marry into an Indian tribe.
In
reality, nobody knows what happened to the Lost Colony.
And that brings us to the White Doe, which you can see
in our logo—there's a local Indian legend that Virginia
Dare survived, was transformed into a white doe, and
killed with a silver arrowhead.
Other commentators just don’t get it about Virginia
Dare’s Englishness. Nick Gillespie of Reason
referred to her as "the ‘first’ European born in
Britain's American colonies,”
missing the point. And Mark Potok of the
Southern Poverty Law Center was
quoted as saying that VDARE.COM is named after the "first
white child supposedly born in colonial America."
Supposedly?
In
contrast, you can read all about it online in
Sallie Southall Cotten's 1901 book
White doe : the fate of Virginia Dare : an Indian
legend,—which
tells you something about the civilizational confidence
of America in 1901, as well as about the legend of 1587:
“…the foundation-stones of the great structure known and
respected among nations as the United States of America…
were laid by Sir Walter Raleigh at Roanoak Island, on
the coast of North Carolina, which was then called
Virginia. The intervening years have brought great
results, those early struggles have ripened into success
and greatness beyond Raleigh's most sanguine dreams. A
new race has arisen, yet bearing the characteristics of
the race from which it sprung. Our English ancestors,
our heritage of English law and custom, of religion and
home life, of language and ideals, all tempered by the
development of new characteristics, bind us through
him to England.”
They talked like that in 1901. But that was then and
this is now—when children are taught to dress up as
Indians on
Thanksgiving, and say things like
“Wednesday
Addams: Wait, we can not break bread with you. You
have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from
now my people will be forced to live in
mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear
cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our
bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf, and
eat hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain
and degradation. Your people will have
stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They
said do not trust the pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller.
[A child in the same Grade Six class.] And for
all of these reasons I have decided to scalp you and
burn your village to the ground.
All right, that's
Christina Ricci in the movie Addams Family
Values, 1993. But the reality is not that different.
Last year, there was a
teacher in Long Beach, California, who dressed up as
Pilgrim and went around the classroom taking pencils and
backpacks and saying he'd "discovered" them. This
was supposed to make students realize how evil the
Pilgrims were for discovering America. [Teachers
emphasize the Indians' side,
By Ana Beatriz Cholo, Associated
Press, Nov 21, 2006]
I wrote about
this idiot
last year, at Thanksgiving. It just occurred to me
that, as he's in California, it would be more
appropriate for him to dress as a
Conquistador, with a mock-Spanish accent.
See how far
you get doing that in the classroom.
But it's a
whole change in attitude throughout society, this loss
of civilizational confidence, motivated by white guilt.
As Peter Brimelow went on:
“Today, Virginia Dare
seems to be vanishing from
American education too. But she was a fixture for
earlier generations. Even
Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to
give a speech commemorating the
350th anniversary of her birth. At one point, I
planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the
heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in
Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white
family in
Los Angeles. It seemed . . . symmetrical.
“I was dissuaded.”
What we've been covering in VDARE.COM since 2000 is
displacement of Americans from their jobs, homes,
cities, and to a certain extent, whole
states. There are now 300 million people in America,
Hispanics have replaced African-Americans as the largest
minority, there are well over a 1300 mosques in America,
and things don't look good.
What I'm talking about here, and what VDARE.com is
about, is that the American nation, begun so
precariously four hundred and twenty years ago, is
capable of being ended by mass immigration. The
mountains will still be there, and the rivers, and many
of the buildings, (including the
Statue of Liberty). But it won't be America.
Here's what Peter Brimelow wrote in Alien Nation
in 1995.
“For the purposes of
immigration policy, however, the point to grasp is this:
