September 26, 2005
Banned In Oz,
Posted On VDARE.COM: Fraser’s “Rethinking the
White Australia Policy” (With Comment By Peter
Brimelow)
[Peter
Brimelow writes:
It’s a measure of the
parlous state of public debate in the
Anglosphere
that academic articles with footnotes can be
banned and even
considered actionable under thought-crime laws. We are
proud to post Drew Fraser’s article, pulled from the
Deakin University Law Review, with VDARE.COM.s trademark
hyperlinks etc. Hooray for the internet—and the U.S.
First Amendment.]
By
Andrew Fraser
[Previously either by or
about Andrew Fraser:
Another Oz Outrage: Andrew Fraser Furor Continues;
Diversity vs. Freedom, Chapter CLXXXVII: The Case Of
Andrew Fraser and
An Australian Law Professor Suggests That Huntington
Book Is Still Part of the Problem]
[Not even scholars challenging the orthodox view
that the White Australia Policy was a "racist"
blot on the nation's honor support suggestions that its
abolition was a catastrophic mistake. An unshakeable
consensus among managerial, professional, political and
academic elites in favor of racial egalitarianism has
prevented a long overdue re-assessment of the policies
permitting mass Third World immigration into Australia.
Recent advances in genetics, paleo-anthropology,
psychology and medical science have demonstrated the
existence of significant racial differences in cognitive
and athletic ability, temperament and behavior. That
newly-emergent racial realism confirms the wisdom of the
nation's founders. They understood that the comparative
ethnic homogeneity of the Anglo-Australian people was a
source of strength and unity. The later shift toward a
multiracial society has been the product of an ongoing,
transnational, managerial revolution from above which
can and should be resisted by all patriotic
Australians.]
Introduction
Over the past thirty years, Australia, along with
just about
every other Western society, has been transformed by
a revolution engineered from the top down by the leading
echelons of the corporate welfare state [1].
New Class cadres of managers, professionals, politicians
and academics have dismantled the foundations of
Australian nationhood laid down at the time of
Federation [2].
The arbitration system, the protective tariff and the
White Australia Policy: all have gone in order to
facilitate the free flow of
capital, technology and labor in a
globalist economy.
The most revolutionary, by far, of these radical
changes has been the decision to open Australia to mass
Third World immigration. In taking this step, the
managerial regime has, in effect, followed the wry
advice tendered by
Bertolt Brecht to the East German government on the
occasion of the
worker's revolt in 1956: Rather than relying on
crude repressive measures, Brecht suggested, the
Communist regime should
simply dissolve the people and elect a new one [3].
Indeed, since the end of the Second World War a strange
alliance of Communists, Christian churches, ethnic
lobbies and other pressure groups working through the
corporate sector and within the centralized apparatus of
state power set out deliberately to flood the
Anglo-Australian homeland with a polyglot mass of
Third World immigrants.
Chief among the ideological weapons deployed in that
campaign have been the interwoven myths of
equality and universal human rights [4].
The official ideology of the globalist regime has been
enshrined in the
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Racial Discrimination [5].
According to that document, "any doctrine of
superiority based on racial differentiation is
scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially
unjust and dangerous." There can therefore be "no
justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in
practice, anywhere." Those who subscribed to the
doctrine of racial egalitarianism were bound to oppose a
color bar on immigration to Australia as being both
immoral and pointless: it was axiomatic that "racial
differences are not significant differences that need
divide mankind." [6]
Racial egalitarianism rather obviously flies in the
face of the more realistic premises of the White
Australia Policy. The founding fathers of the Australian
nation regarded racial differences as a fact of life and
racial conflict as the inevitable consequence of a
multiracial society. In their view, ethnic
homogeneity was one of the great strengths of the
Australian nation, one that ought to be preserved and
not squandered or thrown away in pursuit of utopian
visions of universal harmony in which lions could be
re-educated to
lie down with lambs [7].
Forty years after Australian governments began to
distance themselves from the White Australia Policy,
advances in genetics, paleo-anthropology, psychology and
medical science are placing the universalist doctrines
of racial egalitarianism under serious pressure. A vast
range of
studies in a number of disciplines have revealed
real and important differences between the races in
cognitive and
athletic ability, behavior and temperament [8].
Faced with such intellectual challenges,
defenders of the ruling orthodoxy are resorting to
social ostracism,
legal repression and even the sort of
physical coercion deployed against members of the
One Nation Party some years back [9].
The time is clearly ripe for a courageous and
well-informed reappraisal of the White Australia Policy
and the decision to dismantle it. Unfortunately,
racial realists, concerned to bring common sense to
contemporary Australian debates over race and
immigration, will be disappointed with two recent books
on the White Australia Policy. Both promise much but
deliver little because of their authors' determined
refusal to take race seriously.
Was the White Australia Policy "Racist"?
The first of these books to appear was written by
Keith Windschuttle, a former Marxist academic turned
independent neo-conservative writer. [10]Hot
on the heels of his
controversial revision of the "black armband"
view of
Aboriginal history, Windschuttle has upset yet
another academic applecart. In The White Australia
Policy, [11]
he sets out to refute the orthodox leftist charge that
the immigration legislation enacted shortly after
Federation was "racist". On the formal level that
is easily done since the
Immigration Restriction Act, 1901 (Cth) did not
explicitly prohibit non-white immigration. Instead,
prospective immigrants were required to pass a dictation
test by writing out
50 words in any European language selected by
immigration officials.
But, because both the intent and the practical effect
of the dictation test were to sharply limit coloured
immigration, Australia was open to attack from
progressives around the world and, especially during the
Cold War, from newly assertive post-colonial regimes in
Asia and Africa. Over the last 40 years, a home-grown
generation of New Left historians routinely portrayed
Australia as a racist pariah nation on a par with
South Africa. Ever since the Sixties generation
began its
long march through the institutions, Australians
have been taught to approach their
past in a self-hating mood of enthusiastic shame. To
his credit, Windschuttle has been one of the few
historians to resist this form of intellectual
self-flagellation.
Unfortunately, Windschuttle's
rehabilitation of the White Australia Policy is
premised on a familiar, if pernicious, tenet of
neo-conservatism: Like those
who claim that the United States is a
"creedal nation," [12]
Windschuttle maintains that the operating premise of
Australian society is the proposition that all people
are equal in principle and in potential. Supposedly,
Australia's national identity is "based on a civic
patriotism," thereby fostering "loyalty to
Australia's liberal democratic political institutions
rather than to race or ethnicity." He contends that
the White Australia Policy, far from being the
reactionary spawn of an irredeemably racist nation, grew
out of a long-established, progressive program aiming
"to extend both the freedom and the dignity of labor."
[13]
Earlier movements to
end slavery throughout the British Empire and the
transportation of convicts to Australia culminated
in a concerted campaign to prevent the importation of
cheap coolie labor from Asia and the Pacific
islands. He claims, therefore, that opposition to
Asian immigration was not grounded in fears of
"racial contamination." [14]Rather,
politicians were concerned both to protect the standard
of living of Australian workers and to prevent the
emergence of "a racially-based political underclass"
that would undermine Australia's egalitarian democracy.
This argument rests upon a false dichotomy.
Australia's egalitarian democracy was conceived as a new
and better Britannia. [15]
Who could have doubted that antipodean Britons, too,
were white Europeans? By the turn of the twentieth
century, references to the "crimson thread of
kinship" binding Australians to the mother country
had become a staple of political rhetoric [16].
Most Australians hardly needed to be reminded that blood
is thicker than water; nevertheless, Windschuttle
portrays their leaders as proto-Boasian anthropologists
[17],
convinced that
race is a nothing more than a social construct.
Windschuttle maintains that most early twentieth century
Australians were confident that
Chinese and
Indian laborers would become
indistinguishable from white Australians of British
stock, once they were detached from the environments
fostering their historic cultures of servility [18].
Windschuttle concedes that the immigration
restriction movement did attract support from
"unequivocally racist" elements. Indeed, he savors
the irony in the fact that in early twentieth century
Australia, the most sympathetic audience for racial
nationalism was found among the bohemian writers,
artists and intellectuals of the leftist intelligentsia.
That elite minority, then famously associated with
the Bulletin magazine, bears an "uncanny
resemblance" to the "chattering classes" now:
"they agree on almost everything, with the
conspicuous exception of immigration policy, where their
positions are reversed." [19]
Racial Egalitarianism: Revolution from Above?
By contrast, Windschuttle insists, mainstream
Australians have never subscribed to biological theories
of race. Influenced instead by the universalistic
principles of both evangelical Christianity and the
Scottish Enlightenment, they have refused to treat white
Europeans as superior and other races as innately and
permanently inferior. This, then, is the crux of
Windschuttle's argument: Because the White Australia
Policy was never based on racial nationalism, it could
be-and was-readily jettisoned once the original
political, economic and cultural justifications for its
adoption lost their potency. "The proof that
Australia wore the policy lightly was the ease with
which it discarded it." [20]
In other words, if the White Australia Policy really
had been steeped in "racist paranoia," it would
be difficult to explain the fact that dismantling it in
the twenty years from the mid-1950s onward "required
no major cultural upheaval and was accomplished with a
minimum of fuss by liberal politicians with values
similar to those held by the original skeptics and
critics when immigration restrictions were introduced in
1901." [21]
Windschuttle is mainly concerned with the rise of the
immigration restriction movement. His argument with the
academic establishment is pitched as a simple matter of
historical fact: Was the White Australia Policy
"racist" or not? Another recent book,
The Long, Slow Death of White Australia by
Gwenda Tavan, deals with its demise. In her first
chapter, Tavan differs from Windschuttle on the reasons
for the ascendancy of White Australia, insisting that
racism and xenophobia were driving forces in the
campaign to restrict non-white immigration. But, like
Windschuttle, she is struck by the ease with which
opponents of the White Australia Policy were able to
overturn it. Her brief is to rebut the most obvious
explanation for the lack of massive popular resistance
to such a fundamental change: namely, that the White
Australia Policy was dismantled by an elite conspiracy
operating in stealth, leaving the Australian people in
the dark concerning the nature and magnitude of the mass
Third World immigration soon to be inflicted upon them.
[22]
Tavan is not especially convincing in her effort to
demonstrate that the Australian public readily accepted
higher non-European immigration as early as the 1970s.
Her main evidence is the fact that the Whitlam
government was re-elected in 1974, even after its
Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, publicly
proclaimed his determination to bury the White Australia
Policy. Of course Whitlam's Labor government was
soundly rejected by the electorate in 1975. The
incoming Fraser government certainly had no mandate to
promote a massive influx of non-white immigrants.
Nevertheless, it joined with the Australian Labor Party
to forge a bipartisan consensus in favour of Third World
immigration.
For decades, there was no effective political
opposition to the revolution from above in immigration
law and policy. Among the managerial and professional
classes, a complacently "cosmopolitan" consensus
reigned supreme; the political equilibrium was not upset
until the meteoric rise of the One Nation party in the
late 1990s. Then, for a brief, shining moment, the
patriotic instincts of the more "parochial,"
outer suburban, white Australians found
a political voice. [23]
However, much to the relief of the political class, that
too often tongue-tied voice of populist protest was
largely ineffectual and, in any case, was soon silenced.
Concerned to counter suggestions that the new regime
lacked popular support from the beginning, Tavan cites
opinion polls from the mid-1970s favouring the
then-current rate of Asian migration. When weighing such
evidence, one wonders how citizens then would have
responded to pollsters had they been presented with an
accurate picture of how Sydney and Melbourne, in
particular, would look after thirty years of
colonization by Third World immigrants. Tavan
acknowledges that, "debate still continues" over
how many non-whites should be allowed to enter while
insisting that "a majority of Australians since the
1960s have unequivocally rejected any policy that would
completely bar non-Europeans from settling." White
Australia, she maintains, is no longer a "dominant
worldview;" at most, it persists as a "residual
cultural form." Even so, she concedes that "the
battle against White Australia is not completely won."
From
Pauline Hanson to the
Tampa incident,
recent events have revealed that "the (white,
Anglo-Celtic) racial-cultural ideals" of Australian
nationhood have never been completely extinguished.
Tavan fears that, like the slow, silent combustion of an
underground coal seam, the fiery force of white racial
consciousness may burst, without warning, through the
surface somnolence secured, so far, by the
multiracialist mullahs of the media, the human rights
industry and the educational establishment. [24]
Tavan is clearly ad idem with Windschuttle on
the contemporary political issues relating to the nature
and significance of race. As committed racial
egalitarians, both writers desperately want to drive a
stake through the heart of racial realism, once and for
all. Tavan and Windschuttle still worry that, despite
having been in a state of suspended animation for
several decades, residual forms of racial identity might
someday reawaken in the hearts of white Australians,
perhaps even with renewed vigor and enhanced vitality.
For that reason, Windschuttle happily joins the left in
its attack upon race as "an unscientific category,"
as a thoroughly modern, bad idea "engendered by the
new social sciences and brought to maturity by the
evolutionary biology of the nineteenth century." [25]
In the battle between racial realism and racial
egalitarianism, former Professor Windschuttle joins his
old revolutionary comrades on the barricades, resolutely
denying that differences between "races" have a
biological or genetic foundation.
In his thoroughly orthodox view, nineteenth century
anthropology and biology took a wrong turn when they
denied "Enlightenment and Evangelical ideas about the
unity of humanity." For him, the evident differences
between the various races of mankind are the malleable
product of their cultures and the particular stage each
may have reached in the long ascent from savagery to
civilization. No race is permanently incapable of change
and development. Somewhat imprudently, Windschuttle
suggests that to take
any other view on this question "is to betray
one's ignorance of the subject." [26]
In fact, to anyone familiar with the rapidly expanding
literature on the genetic character of racial
differences, Windschuttle's dogmatism is a clear case of
what American commentator Steve Sailer calls
racial flat-earthism. [27]
Racial Realism Redux?
There is still room for debate on the precise genetic
contribution to any given racial difference in, for
example, intelligence, temperament, criminality and
athletic ability. But, that such racial differences do
exist and that they have a biological basis is not any
longer open to serious scientific question. As
Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele put it, "the case
for race hinges on recognition that genetic variation in
traits that affect performance and ultimately survival
is the fuel on which the evolutionary process runs."
Without that "functional genetic variation, there can
be no adaptive evolution." Variation "is the norm
and not the exception in the case of humans." In
fact, Sarich and Miele suggest that the range of genetic
variation between different races of Homo sapiens
is much greater than for any other species, including
domesticated dogs. They observe that commonly used
genetic tests can determine with great precision not
just an individual's race but also "the percentage of
racial background in people of mixed ancestry." But
until very recently it was impossible to detect the
genetic markers distinguishing a cocker spaniel from a
wolf. [28]
Race exists and it matters across a wide range of
public policy issues. It is of particular relevance to
any analysis of immigration law and policy. Windschuttle,
however, is determined to remain uncontaminated by the
new sciences of racial difference. He does recognize the
seemingly insuperable cultural barriers alienating
mainstream Australians from other racial groups,
particularly the Chinese. Nevertheless he asserts that
it is a fundamental error "to slide from the concept
of culture to that of race." [29]
Cultural differences are not inbred and immutable.
But what if Windschuttle is wrong? What if racial
differences are, in large part, biologically or
genetically grounded? What if even culture is not simply
a social construct but, rather, a phenomenon with a
substantial biological component? Windschuttle does
document the dominance of Enlightenment and Christian
influences in middle Australia, demonstrating that
explicitly racialist ideologies have had little appeal
to opinion leaders in Australia. But that may mean only
that Australians, like other ethnic groups tracing their
ancestry to North-western Europe, are predisposed to
individualism, exogamy and small nuclear families
and, as a consequence, display a relative lack of
ethnocentrism.
Thus what Windschuttle describes as a creedal
commitment to racial egalitarianism may actually be a
defining characteristic of a distinctive European racial
identity not shared by other peoples. Kevin McDonald
explains Western "cultural" traits as an
evolutionary adaptation to the rigors of life in
cold, ecologically adverse climates. Natural
selection worked there to favour the reproductive
success of those individuals capable of sustaining
"non-kinship based forms of reciprocity." [30]
Over time, individualistic social structures
encouraged the emergence in England of the common law of
property and contract and, later still, the emergence of
impersonal corporate forms of business enterprise, all
requiring cooperation between strangers. The distinctive
culture that emerged from the interaction between the
genotype of the English people and their environment can
be understood as what
Richard Dawkins calls an extended phenotype. [31]
Like the spider's web or the beaver's dam, the, extended
phenotypes of Western civilization are part of a
biocultural feedback loop linking our genes with our
environment over countless generations. [32]
The extended phenotype produced by the English people
founds its greatest political expression in the
phenomenon of nationhood. Appearing first of all in
England, the idea of the nation could be understood as
what Richard Dawkins might call a "meme" [33]
that has been only imperfectly or not at all replicated
in the bioculture of other, particularly non-European,
races. Some scholars, however, deny that English
nationhood is the product of a primordial English
ethnicity. It is often remarked that there are very few
nations that seem to be ethnically homogeneous and
England is not one of them. On this view, the English
nation "emerged out of populations deposited by
successive waves of alien conquest." It was
"through the merging or assimilation of peoples who were
originally distinct" that a single English nation
arose. According to Margaret Canovan, English nationhood
"was in no sense a reflection of primordial ties of
blood." On the contrary, the English nation was
remarkably inclusive, taking in, not only the scions of
Danish, Norman, Saxon and some Welsh stock "but
also (and, at the time, more significantly) nobles and
commoners." Canovan's case would appear to be
clinched by the "subsequent expansion of English into
British identity," carrying "the nation even
farther away from anything resembling primordial
ethnicity." [34]
It seems, then, that civic rather than ethnic
nationalism has been the defining feature of not just
Australian and American but British identity as well.
Roger Scruton lends support to that suggestion when
he remarks that modern citizenship presupposes a society
of strangers: "The good citizen recognizes
obligations towards people who are not, and cannot be,
known to him." Such a society of strangers cannot
survive without "the kind of courage, discipline and
self-sacrifice that stem from civic patriotism." [35]
But neither Canovan nor Scruton embrace the bloodless
vision of civic patriotism promoted by Keith
Windschuttle and the American neo-conservatives. For her
part, Canovan acknowledges that nations "are
political communities that are experienced as if they
were communities of kin." She adds, however, that
"the `as if' is vital." [36]
In doing so, she seeks to mark out a middle position
between ethnic and civic nationalism.
Neither Canovan nor Scruton believe that a nation can
be grounded in an abstract loyalty to a particular
political regime or constitutional order. For Scruton,
it is axiomatic that citizens belong to an inherited
community inhabiting an ancestral homeland. Citizens are
members of a pre-political community that includes the
living, their ancestors and their unborn offspring.
Absent generations are among the strangers to whom the
good citizen is bound in "a common web of rights and
duties." [37]
Canovan, too, affirms both that, within any particular
nation, "many fellow-nationals really will be blood
relations" and that "nations depend upon the
symbolism of kinship for much of their emotional
appeal." But she rejects the claims of ethnic
nationalism, pointing out that "much of that kinship
is imagined kinship, and a good deal of it is always
fictitious." [38]
The problem with Canovan's argument is that she does
not give sufficient weight to the "peculiarities of
the English." [39]
As a consequence, like Windschuttle, in relation to the
White Australia Policy, she sets up a false dichotomy
between ethnic and civic nationalism. In the case of
England and the old white dominions settled by people of
British stock, including the United States, there is
simply no contradiction between the two. That is part of
the reason why, for two hundred years after the
emergence of the English nation, it was the only nation.
[40]
Even those citizens of a modern nation who are blood
relations or co-ethnics are expected to treat each other
publicly "as if" they were strangers bound
together by a willingness to recognize the fundamental
constitutional norms associated with the rule of law,
representative government and individual rights. [41]
Only a people such as the English, characterized by the
"non-kinship based forms of reciprocity"
associated with Protestant Christianity, monogamy and
companionate marriage, nuclear families, a marked
de-emphasis on extended kinship relations, and a strong
tendency towards individualism could possibly succeed in
creating such a "society of strangers." [42]
It is true, of course, that the English nation was
the hybrid product of many pre-existing ethnic groups.
But the fact is that the ingredients in the ethnic stew
that ultimately produced the English people and, later
still, British nation, were not all that genetically
remote from one another. Indeed, the Danes, the Saxons,
and the Normans were closely related Germanic peoples
and the genetic distance between the English, the Scots
and the Irish was not much more significant. Precisely
because all of the Germanic peoples were relatively
individualistic and comparatively less ethnocentric than
other Eurasian and African races, they were able to
overcome their group differences when they encountered
each other in England, merging into a new ethny
possessed of its own distinctive language, religion and
way of life.
The relative inclusiveness of English national
identity was replicated in the settler dominions. In
fact, the English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and even
continental European settlers in colonial America,
English Canada, Australia and New Zealand fused together
to become more British than the British in their new
homelands. The creation of those colonial British
cultures was an important first step on the road to
creating new national identities as Americans,
Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders. [43]
Civic nationalism was, therefore, a meme replicated best
and most easily through the vehicle provided by the
Anglo-Saxon genotype. This exposes a fundamental paradox
built into the free and open societies of the West: The
only racial groups able to fit seamlessly into the
society of strangers constituting a civic nation are
those whose members can easily shed the deeply-ingrained
ethnocentrism and xenophobia characterizing most
non-European peoples. Receptivity to civic nationalism,
in other words, is found only in a relatively few,
mainly North-western European, ethnic or racial groups.
In any case, over the past two centuries the nationhood
meme has undergone a monstrous mutation. Originally, the
English nation created the state as a medium for
political self-expression. Since then, the transnational
corporate welfare state has taken on a life of its own,
asserting its power and right to recreate the nation and
its people in whatever form it chooses.
The Downside of Diversity
Other races have produced their own distinctive
extended phenotypes; these may not mesh easily with the
biocultural interest that Anglo-American societies, in
particular, have in the survival and enhanced vitality
of their historically unique civic cultures. Black
Africans, for example, have been present in large
numbers in America, the pre-eminent civic nation, for
almost four hundred years without ever having been
successfully integrated into the common culture of white
Americans. It remains an open question whether other
races can be absorbed into the American or the
Australian nations more easily than the militantly
hyphenated African-Americans. Experience with the
overseas Chinese diaspora throughout the Pacific Rim
already gives cause for concern. [44]
As the Chinese colonies in Australia grow in size,
wealth and power, even their Australian-born members may
be reluctant to dissolve their ancient collective
identity into an individualistic society of strangers
owing allegiance to nothing beyond a modern paper
constitution, now divorced from its own ancestral roots.
Thousands of years ago, the Chinese took an evolutionary
path favouring the growth of centralized, authoritarian
regimes; not surprisingly, the Chinese today place a
premium on clannish behavior and downplaying the worth
of individual creativity. The result has been a people
marked by higher average intelligence-but more
conformity and hierarchy-than North-western European
societies as well as rampant xenophobia and
ethnocentrism.
Even when faced with competition from such highly
cohesive ethnic groups, a great many individualistic
Australians remain utterly oblivious to their own
genetic interest in a racially homogeneous society. That
interest is threatened, to varying degrees, by the
arrival of immigrants genetically distant from the host
population. Like any other ethno-nation, white
Australians constitute a large, partly inbred, extended
family. [45]
Since an ethny is "analogous to a population of
cousins," even distant kin "carry genetic
interests for each other." But, because-at any given
level of technology-the Australian landmass has a finite
carrying capacity, mass immigration must replace future
Australian children with those of other, more or less
unrelated, ethnic extended families. If immigrants are
genetically remote from the European gene pool, the
damage to Australia's genetic interests will be
especially pronounced. Frank Salter has calculated that
if England, for example, received 12.5 million
closely-related Danish immigrants, the genetic loss to
the remaining English would be relatively low, amounting
to the equivalent of 209,000 children (still a large
family to lose.) But the same number of immigrants from
India would cause a corresponding loss of 2.6 million
children. Since black, sub-Saharan Africans are even
more genetically distant from the English, an influx of
12.5 million Bantus would displace the equivalent of 13
million English children. The genetic losses to the
English would be greater still if Indians or Bantus had
fertility rates higher than the host population. [46]
Apart from the objective genetic interests at stake,
a multiracial society forces white Australians to bear
other, more subjectively painful social, economic and
political costs. At the high end of Australia's
immigrant intake, a growing cognitive elite of East
Asians threatens to become similar to
"market-dominant minorities"
such as the overseas Chinese in Southeast
Asia,
Jews in Russia or Indians in East Africa. [47]
Faced with competition from a growing East Asian
population, white Australians will find themselves
outgunned: Western-style "old boy" preference
networks are only weakly ethnic in character, and, thus,
permeable, making them no match for the
institutionally-directed, in-group solidarity or "ethnic
nepotism" practiced by other groups. Endowed
with an edge in IQ and a temperament conducive to
rigorous regimes of coaching, rote learning and stricter
parental discipline, young East Asians already dominate
the competition for places in universities and
professional schools. Within two to three decades, it is
not unreasonable to expect that Australia will have a
heavily Asian managerial-professional, ruling class that
will not hesitate to promote the interests of co-ethnics
at the expense of white Australians. [48]
At the low end of the market for Third World
immigrants, tensions are already appearing between white
Australians and the growing numbers of black,
sub-Saharan Africans settled here by the transnational
refugee industry. [49] One can safely predict that, no
matter how large this particular Third World colony
becomes, black Africans will never become a
"market-dominant minority" in Australia. On the
contrary, experience "practically everywhere in the
world tells us that an expanding black population is a
sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a
wide range of other social problems." [50]
Unfortunately, experience also demonstrates that any
such suggestion will produce nothing short of a
hysterical reaction among Australian journalists and
academics. [51]
For Australian intellectual and cultural elites, it
does not seem to matter that support for such
observations can be found in countless academic and
official sources. After all, it is hardly news that
violent criminals of any race are likely to be people
with low IQs who display poor impulse control. [52]
Nor is it difficult to establish that, on average, black
sub-Saharan Africans score around 70-75 on IQ tests
while white Europeans have a mean score of 100 and East
Asians about 105. [53]
It is equally well-known that young black men have
higher levels of serum testosterone-often associated
with impulsive behavior and poor judgment-than whites or
East Asians. Now, this does not mean that black Africans
carry a "crime gene." Nor can one say that
"blacks are genetically more crime-prone than whites."
But, as Michael Levin points out, "it does make sense
to say that blacks are more prone to behavior that is in
fact criminalized in virtually all societies." [54]
Australians will ignore these racial realities at
their peril. Windschuttle, confident that immigrant
groups will lose their distinctive racial identities as
they become assimilated into the individualistic norms
of Western culture, sees no cause for concern in the
ethnic replacement of white, Christian Europeans by
Chinese or Muslim newcomers. He has "accepted this
with equanimity," perhaps even "with a sense of
self-congratulation." [55]
Like his former academic colleagues, Windschuttle looks
upon both "racial prejudice" and "religious
intolerance" not as essential ingredients in
collective identity but as embarrassing social diseases.
[56]
Managerial Multiculturalism
Like the managerial class generally, Windschuttle
does not experience his membership of the Australian
nation "as if" he belongs to a community of kin.
Unlike the bourgeois pioneers of Anglo-American
capitalism, managerial-professional elites are no longer
rooted in particular communities; they are "at best
indifferent and actually hostile to ...specific
identities ...derived from class, ethnicity and race,
religion, region and gender." Because the power of
the managerial class is heightened by the eradication of
such identities, its preferred brand of civic
nationalism is based upon a "color-blind"
universalism and egalitarianism that is "open to the
world." [57]
Openness to the world requires the repudiation not just
of ethnic nationalism but also of any civic nationalism
grounded in "pre-political loyalties of a territorial
kind—loyalties rooted in a sense of the common home and
of the transgenerational society that resides there."
[58]
The flip side of the universalism and egalitarianism
sponsored by the managerial regime is, therefore, the
multicultural politics of identity. Doctrines of racial
egalitarianism and official multiculturalism may appear
to contradict one another but the social and political
function of both is to undermine the white, Christian,
masculine and bourgeois values and institutions "that
remain the principal constraints on managerial reach and
power." [59]
Under the aegis of the globalist regime, the shared
civic culture that is the greatest achievement of
Anglo-American constitutionalism is being displaced by a
neo-feudal system of group representation. Promoting
this program, James Tully attacks modern Western
constitutionalism because it threatens "the
extinction or assimilation of different cultures."
Not only did modern constitutionalism authorize
"imperial rule of
former colonies over Indigenous peoples," it
still underwrites "cultural imperialism over the
diverse citizens of contemporary societies." [60]
Tully's vision of "intercultural"
constitutionalism aims to replace the individualistic
society of strangers with the politics of cultural
recognition. Unfortunately there is one culture that
cannot be accommodated within what Tully calls the
convention of mutual recognition. To embrace Tully's
concept of the constitution as an endless process of
intercultural negotiation is to reject the common civic
culture of Anglo-American constitutionalism.
Faced with the reality of cultural diversity, the
Anglo-American civic culture has been expansive in
nature. In other words, it has been "geared toward
the assimilation of difference." Tully's
multicultural constitutionalism, by contrast, is
separatist or exclusive in that it is "geared toward
the magnification and encouragement of difference."
These two very different constitutional cultures cannot
co-exist; a choice between them must be made.
Anglo-American civic cultures developed "a strong
momentum towards political connectedness" in order
to "overcome the separatist pull of diversity and
disagreement." Building on long experience with
non-kinship based forms of reciprocity, the civic
cultures of British-derived societies stimulated the
"development of imaginative empathy" among citizens.
Everyone was required to imagine himself "in the
position of a person whose starting point is radically
different" from his own.
Multicultural constitutionalism, by contrast, is
already causing our shared civic culture to fragment;
the momentum towards separatism is growing. [61]
Managerial elites have an obvious interest in dividing
subject populations, the better to dominate them. In
line with that strategy, multicultural constitutionalism
"encourages the citizenry to divide itself into
groups in order to win politically controlled benefits."
Not surprisingly, once interest groups succeed in
"winning special benefits, the separatist pull grows
stronger." Group representation spawns new elites
with a vested interest in thickening the boundaries
between citizens. One corollary of the perennial process
of intercultural negotiation is that there can be no
possibility of general agreement on public goods.
Multicultural constitutionalism assumes "that
diversity can be acknowledged and empowered only through
constant political battle pitting the races and genders
against each other in a never-ending contest for
recognition and public benefits." [62]
Tully maintains the pious hope that every group will
be able to stand on an equal footing in the contest over
recognition and the political rewards that flow from it.
However, it has long been an axiom of corporatist
interest intermediation that not all groups possess
equal procedural status. Groups lacking functional
relevance to the globalist system (or which are actually
dysfunctional) will be shunted aside unless they possess
some other resource that enables them to generate
destabilizing conflict. [63]
The basic premise that interest groups are not all
created equal is particularly true of racial and ethnic
groups. Tully is careful to cite William McNeill to make
the point that polyethnicity has been the rule rather
than the exception in the life of all advanced
civilizations. He does not dwell on McNeill's companion
observation that ethnic intermingling has produced a
"complex ethnic hierarchy" whenever it has occurred.
[64]
Any constitutional order that sets out deliberately
to grant special privileges to particular ethnic groups
inevitably will produce a still more complex ethnic
hierarchy. The relative standing of any given group
probably will depend to a significant degree on its
performance within the global system of needs. There can
be no automatic right to consent or cultural continuity
or even recognition of group rights within the context
of that dynamic system. A group that is functionally
relevant or possesses a significant conflict potential
today may find itself in the dustbin of history
tomorrow. While it may be difficult to predict permanent
winners in the incessant competition for increasingly
scarce resources in a multiracial Australia, we can be
sure that the civic culture created and nurtured by
generations of white Anglo-Australians will be the sure
loser. As continued Third World immigration provides
further impetus to the multiracialist politics of
identity, the individualistic society of strangers will
be extraordinarily vulnerable to competition from other,
tightly-knit, racial groups. In retreat from "the
rising tide of color," [65]
white Australians may be forced to reinvent themselves
as a people comme les autres, shedding their customary
civic universalism in favour of a less natural but more
powerfully particularistic racial consciousness.
Windschuttle would be among the first to deplore any
such development, even as his deracinated model of civic
patriotism becomes an ever-more maladaptive threat to
the survival of the historic Australian nation.
Racial realists who read Windschuttle's book will
discover ample evidence that, if his tender-minded
attitudes prevail, white Australians are destined to be
displaced by immigrant groups much less sensitive to
charges of racism and xenophobia. One example:
Windschuttle informs us that the most violent race riots
in Australian history were led, not by murderous white
racists, but by Japanese pearl divers determined to
eliminate competition from Timorese rivals. There were
three such riots in Broome, Western Australia, in 1907,
1914, and 1920. The last continued for a week and
involved more than half the town's population of 5,000.
Seven people were killed and more than 60 seriously
injured, dwarfing the casualty figures for the worst of
the anti-Chinese goldfield riots of the mid-nineteenth
century. [66]
Almost every immigrant group encountered in
Windschuttle's narrative, not to mention the Aboriginal
population, displays a strong sense of racial solidarity
and an aggressive determination to advance its
particular ethnic genetic interests. Much the same can
be said for the post-war governments in Japan and the
Third World leading the diplomatic offensive against the
White Australia Policy. Tavan is, of course, sympathetic
to their relentless attacks upon Australia's immigration
policies; she remains strangely uninterested in the
simultaneous determination of those governments to
retain tight control over their own borders.
Unfortunately this is par for the academic course;
"educated" white Australians, leftist "idealists"
and right-wing "ratbags" alike, remain, at best,
resolutely indifferent and, at worst, actively hostile
to the survival of their own ethno-nation. Should
"the long, slow death of white Australia" finally
come to pass, it will have been due, in no small
measure, to the brazen "treason of the intellectuals"
marching under the banner of managerial
multiculturalism. [67]
Conclusion
Given the relentless and revolutionary assault on
their historic national identity, white Australians now
face a life-or-death struggle to preserve their
homeland. Whether effective resistance to their
displacement and dispossession can be mounted is another
question. Unlike other racial, ethnic or religious
groups well-equipped to practice the politics of
identity, white Australians lack a strong, cohesive
sense of ethnic solidarity. As a consequence, ordinary
Australians favouring a moratorium on non-white
immigration cannot count on effective leadership or
support from their co-ethnics among political,
intellectual and corporate elites. On the contrary, our
still predominantly Anglo-Australian rulers are
indifferent; some profit from, and others actually take
pride in their active collaboration with the Third World
colonization of Australia. None of the major parties,
indeed, not one member of the Commonwealth Parliament,
offers citizens the option of voting to defend and
nurture Australia's Anglo-European identity. The
problem, in short, is clear: The Australian nation is
bereft of a responsible ruling class. The solution is,
in principle, no less obvious: namely, the restoration
of a ruling class rooted in the reinvigorated folkways
of an authentically Anglo-American civic patriotism, a
ruling class re-attached to the history and destiny of
its own people. Only time will tell whether and how any
such constitutional reformation could take place. [68]
But the problem of an irresponsible ruling class
wedded to open borders is not confined to Australia; it
threatens the survival of European civilization as a
whole. The growing Islamic presence throughout the West
is perhaps the most visible sign of our spiritual
decline. [69]
As the secular crisis of European modernity deepens, the
soul of our society cries out, unheeded, for salvation.
Like the Soviet empire before it, the managerial regime
in the West rests upon a shaky foundation of deception
and fraud. Charles Murray puts the point bluntly.
Western elites, he charges, "are living a lie, basing
the future of their societies on the assumption that all
groups of people are equal in all respects." [70]
A great many politicians and scholars know or suspect,
privately, that there are real differences between
racial groups; still they support immigration policies
demanding public prevarication about the putative evils
of racial discrimination (even though any immigration
policy-short of completely open or completely closed
borders-inevitably favors some groups over others.) Such
mendacious elites pose a greater threat to Western
civilization than the Islamic militants they choose to
harbor in the heart of the citadel.
Unfortunately, so long as the postmodernist boundary
between fact and fiction remains in the eye of the
beholder, the truth about that threat becomes a mere
matter of opinion. The directorate of the globalist
regime draws its deepest inspiration from Hollywood
dream factories where manufactured images become the new
reality. Organized social and political life in the
Western world is largely driven by the psychic power of
carefully crafted illusions. One fears, therefore, that
it may take a serious and prolonged systemic breakdown
to free us from the self-destructive taboo against
discussion of innate group differences.
The orthodox doctrine that race is only skin deep is
only one of the official fictions underpinning the
transnational system; more fundamental to the regime's
legitimacy is the cornucopian myth of endless economic
growth. Seen through the eyes of the managerial class,
Australia is an economy, not a country. Nevertheless, a
folk memory still survives of a time when Australia was
"the lucky country," the homeland of a particular
people of British stock with their own particular way of
life. Should the globalist economy first falter and
finally fail, regime change may yet become possible for
this and other Western countries. It may well be that
only a miracle can save us now; all the more reason,
then, to recall that God helps only those who help
themselves. The capacity to act remains the key to our
political salvation. [71]
*Associate Professor, Department of Public Law,
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia 2109. Thanks to
Kathe Boehringer, Frank Salter and the anonymous
referees for the Deakin Law Review for their helpful
comments on various drafts of this article.
Footnotes:
1. On the first
stage of the managerial revolution see, James Burnham,
The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the
World (1941). But the use of mass immigration
and multiculturalism as weapons in that revolutionary
movement assumed primary importance from the 1960s
onward see, Paul Edward Gottfried,
After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
(1999) and id.,
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a
Secular Theocracy (2002); see also, Samuel
Francis,
Power Trip 3(2) Occidental Q. 69 (2003) (last
visited on Sept. 7, 2005); and Andrew Fraser,
A Marx for the Managerial Revolution: Habermas on Law
and Democracy, 28 J. L. & Soc. 361 (2001).
2. On the New
Class, see Alvin w Gouldner,
The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New
Class (1979).
3. Bertolt Brecht,
The Solution quoted in Peter Brimelow,
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration
Disaster 58
(1996).
4. See, generally,
Samuel Francis, Equality as a Political Weapon in
Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American
Conservatism (1993).
5. Included as the
Schedule to the
Racial Discrimination Act, 1975 (Cth).
6. Immigration
Reform Group, Immigration Control or Colour Bar? The
Background to `White Australia' and a Proposal for
Change 92-3 (Kenneth Rivett, ed, 1962).
7. Douglas Cole, `The
Crimson Thread of Kinship': Ethnic Ideas in Australia,
1870-1914, 14 Historical Studies 511 (1971).
8. For an
introduction to this literature, see, eg,
Vincent Sarich & Frank Miele,
Race: The Reality of Human Differences (2004);
Michael Levin,
Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean
(1997); and J Phillipe Rushton, Race,
Evolution and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective
(1997). The entire
June, 2005 issue of
Psychology, Public Policy and Law is devoted to
the issue of racial differences in cognitive ability.
See, in particular, the lead article by J Phillipe
Rushton & Arthur Jensen,
Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in
Cognitive Ability 11 Psychol. Pub. Pol'y & L.
235 (2005). See also, Charles Murray, The Inequality
Taboo,
Commentary
(September 2005), a fully annotated version is
available online at:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12002015_1
(last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
9. See, eg, Tim
Dick,
Uni suspends outspoken academic, Sydney Morning
Herald, July 30-31, 2005, at 9; Bernard Lane,
African groups take aim at uni lecturer, The
Weekend Australian, August 6-7, 2005, at 3; Andrew
Fraser, The Trials and Tribulations of Populism in
Australia, Telos 127 (Spring 2004) 119-148.
10. Keith
Windschuttle,
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002).
11. Keith
Windschuttle,
The White Australia Policy
(2005).
12. See, eg,
Walter Berns,
Making Patriots (2001).
13. Windschuttle,
supra note 11, at 5-6. The suggestion that the White
Australia Policy was based upon a civic rather than
ethnic nationalism had already been made earlier in
Robert Birrell,
A Nation of Our Own: Citizenship and Nation-building in
Federation Australia
(1995).
14. Id, at 6, 8.
15. Humphrey
McQueen,
A New Britannia (1970).
16. Cole, supra
note 7.
17.
Franz Boas was a Jewish anthropologist who played a
key role in the anti-Darwinian remaking of American
social science. According to Carl Degler, "Boas'
influence upon American social scientists in matters of
race can hardly be exaggerated." He engaged in "a
life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary
source of the differences to be found in the mental or
social capabilities of human groups." It was "through
his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the
concept of culture" that he effectively expunged race
from American social science. See, Carl Degler,
In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival
of Darwinism in American Social Thought 61, 71
(1991). Boas did not approach his work in the neutral
spirit of objective scientific inquiry. On the contrary,
his pronounced "out-group sensibility" led him to
transform anthropology into a formidable ideological
weapon, thereby promoting Jewish ethnic interests in
what he conceived as a struggle against anti-Semitism.
See, Sarich & Miele, supra note 8, at 86-91; and Kevin
McDonald,
The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of
Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and
Political Movements 21-30 (1998).
18. Windschuttle,
supra note 11, at 174-181.
19. Id, at 5, 82.
20. Id, at 67-74,
326.
21. Id, at 9.
22.Gwenda Tavan,
The Long, Slow Death of White Australia
227-9 (2005). Tavan, supra note 22, at
210, 225.
23. On the
conflict between "cosmopolitans" and "parochials" in
contemporary Australia, see Katharine Betts,
The Great Divide (1999).
24.Tavan, supra
note 22, at 210, 225.
25. Windschuttle,
supra note 11, at 28-35.
26.Id, at 34, 27.
27. Steve Sailer,
Race Flat-Earthers Dangerous to Everyone's Health,
available at:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/medicine_and_race.htm
(last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
28. Sarich & Miele,
supra note 8, at 8, 21, 184-7.
29. Windschuttle,
supra note 11, at 285.
30. Kevin
McDonald,
What Makes Western Culture Unique?, 2(2)
Occidental Q. (2002) (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
31. Richard
Dawkins,
The Extended Phenotype (2d ed. 1999).
32. Louis R
Browning,
Bioculture: A New Paradigm for the Evolution of Western
Populations 4(1) Occidental Q. 31 (2004) (last
visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
33. Dawkins
defines a
meme as follows: "A unit of cultural inheritance,
hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene, and
as naturally selected by virtue of its `phenotypic'
consequences on its own survival and replication in the
cultural environment," Dawkins supra note 31, at
290.
34. Margaret
Canovan,
Nationhood and Political Theory 58, 75-7 (1996).
35. Roger Scruton,
The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist
Threat 52, 56 (2002).
36.Canovan, supra
note 34, at 87-92, 59.
37. Scruton, supra
note 35, at 51-60.
38. Canovan, supra
note 34, at 59.
39. On which, see,
Alan Macfarlane,
The Origins of English Individualism: The Family,
Property and Social Transition (1978). The
phrase itself was coined in 1965 by EP Thompson, see,
The Peculiarities of the English, in
The Poverty of Theory (1978).
40. Canovan, supra
note 34, at 63.
41. Scruton, supra
note 35, at 51.
42. McDonald,
supra note 30.
43. Donald Harman
Akenson, The Historiography of English-speaking Canada
and the Concept of Diaspora: A Skeptical Appreciation,
76 Canadian Historical Rev. 377 (1995).
44. See,
generally, Sterling Seagrave,
Lords of the Rim (1995); Joel Kotkin,
Tribes: How Race, Religion and Ethnicity Determine
Success in the Global Economy (1992); Thomas
Sowell,
Migrations and Cultures: A World View (1996).
45.See, eg, Steve
Sailer,
It's All Relative: Putting Race in its Proper
Perspective, available at:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/presentation.htm (last
visited on Sept. 7, 2005). Note that Sailer's definition
of "race" as an inbred extended family, means that some
such descent groups are closely related, such as
Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland while
others, such as the classic continental races (Africans,
Europeans and East Asians), that evolved separately for
40,000 years or so were relatively remote from each
other, both genetically and geographically. Race is a
fuzzy category precisely because any genetically
distinct descent group could be classified as a race.
Remember, however, that the concept of a species is no
less fuzzy: Are dogs, wolves and coyotes separate or
members of the same species?
46. Frank Salter,
On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in
an Age of Mass Migration 47, 42, 59-75 (2003).
47.On
"market-dominant minorities," see, Amy Chua,
World on Fire: How Exporting Free-Market Democracy
Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003).
An excellent review of Chua's book is available online
at:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/market_dominant.htm
(last visited on Sept. 7, 2005). On Jews as the classic
"market-dominant minority:" see, Kevin McDonald,
A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group
Evolutionary Strategy (1994); and Yuri Slezkine,
The Jewish Century (2004).
48.
Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism: New Findings and
Evolutionary Theory (Frank Salter ed., 2004).
49. Greg Roberts,
Refugees from Africa focus of hate campaign, The
Weekend Australian, July 23-24, 2005, at 6.
50. Andrew Fraser,
Refugees and "Anglo-Australians", Parramatta Sun,
July 6, 2005, at 6.
51.Greg Roberts,
Top academic accused of neo-Nazi links, The
Australian, July 20, 2005, at 6.
52. Levin, supra
note 8, at 291-332.
53. Rushton &
Jensen, supra note 8.
54. Levin, supra
note 8, at 148, 105-6; Rushton, supra note 8, at
169-170, 267-8. Authorities in many Western countries,
including Australia, do not collect or publish
comprehensive and reliable statistics showing the
relationship between ethnicity and crime. Where
statistics on black crime rates, in particular, are
available, clear patterns emerge. See, eg the data sets
available online at: (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
One analysis of US government crime
statistics concluded that blacks were responsible for
90% of the incidents of violent interracial crime
involving blacks and whites. Blacks in the USA "are as
much more violent than whites (four to eight times) as
men are more violent than women." See, New Century
Foundation,
The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Violence in America
(1997) available at:
http://www.amren.com/color.pdf (last visited on
Sept. 7, 2005).
British experience with
black crime can be examined at:<http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/s95race04.pdf
> (last visited on Aug. 14, 2005).
55. Windschuttle,
supra note 11, at 25.
56. Immigration
Reform Group, supra note 6, at 123.
57. Francis, supra
note 1, at 76.
58. Scruton, supra
note 35, at 60.
59. Francis, supra
note 1, at 76-7.
60. James Tully,
Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of
Diversity 70, 96 (1995).
61. Cynthia V
Ward, The Limits of `Liberal Republicanism': Why
Group-Based Remedies and Republican Citizenship Don't
Mix 91 Colum. L. Rev. 581, 585-6 (1991).
62.Id, at 593,
606.
63.Julian Triado,
Corporatism, Democracy and Modernity 9
Thesis Eleven 33 (1994).
64. William H
McNeill,
Polyethnicity and National Identity in World History
76 (1986).
65. See, the
prescient work by Lothrop Stoddard,
The Rising Tide Of Color (1920).
66.Windschuttle,
supra note 11, at 201.
67. Cf. Julien Benda,
La Trahison Des Clercs
(1927).
68. For one
possible strategy, see Andrew Fraser,
Reinventing Aristocracy: The Constitutional Reformation
of Corporate Governance (1998).
69. Oriana Fallaci,
The Rage and the Pride (2002); Scruton, above n
35; Serge Trifkovic,
The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on
the World (2002).
70. Murray, supra
note 8, at 8 [online version].
71. Andrew Fraser,
Monarchs and Miracles: Australia's Need for a Patriot
King, 5(1) The Occidental Quarterly 35 (2005).