John Derbyshire’s Home Page
[Previously, at WEJB/NSU:
And Then They Came for John Derbyshire: Racial Socialists Organize High-Tech Lynching Over Trayvon Martin Column, with White “Conservatives” Begging, ‘Please Let Us Join in the Fun!’]
I just found out minutes ago, via Peter Brimelow, that the other shoe had dropped. Although it was inevitable, it was still deeply upsetting.
This may sound strange, because I have never met Derbyshire, and have never so much as communicated with him. Two years ago, he and I were both to ride along with someone who was driving to the American Renaissance conference, had terrorists not succeeded, through death threats against the employees of at least three different hotels, at getting the conference cancelled.
But consider the gentle, civilized, ironic tone of Derbyshire’s writing, which deals with the urgent matters of our time, versus the shallow hackery that is welcome at National Review, and then consider Rich Lowry’s delusions of grandeur:
We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise.
Despicable, too.
I wrote up the following comment, only to find that comments had again been disabled. Oh, there’s a comment link, but as with so many publications these days (here and here), the link led nowhere.
Presumptuous much, Kapo con?
It is National Review that has for years used Derbyshire to get unearned respect, with which it would otherwise never be associated.
Parting Ways
By Rich Lowry
April 7, 2012 6:34 P.M.
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Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.
7 comments:
But is it true?
Is what true?
What would Joe Sobran say? Derbyshire's Taki column was right on the money. Too bad most so-called conservatives are gutless.
What the Derb said about blacks?
Of course it is true.
But you cannot speak the Truth in contemporary America.
I've talked with Derbyshire occasionally via email over the past few years. Most recently to wish him well with the cancer. He often replies, and often it's more than just the bare minimum politeness demands.
I have also talked with quite a few other NRO authors. I sent them all a terse but strongly worded opinion on this matter.
They live by lies.
As to John Derbyshire maybe his cancer made him consider that there is a real world reality, then there is fantasyland. Which of these do you really want to live in? Which of these do you really want to answer to? He may have decided to make the right decision.
Ha! I sent a comment of my own, similarly roundfiled into oblivion.
Mine:
"Good thing you weren't around in the 50s when Buckley and Burnham launched this very magazine, Rich. You'd've had to fire the entire masthead. From the National Review editorial, 8/24/1957, page 148:
The central question that emerges--and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal--is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own.
National Review believes that the South's premises are correct.
What should we do about this? Perhaps we can dig up the remains of this magazine's founders and temporarily haul them to unconsecrated ground, while we figure out a more suitable - and above all photogenic - punishment.
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