By Nicholas Stix
[New Year’s Eve, 2012: This is your last chance to make a contribution to VDARE or yours truly that you can deduct from your 2012 taxes.
To make a tax-deductible donation directly to VDARE, hit this link.
To make a tax-deductible donation to yours truly, via the fund that Peter Brimelow has kindly set up for me at VDARE, hit this link.
Thanks in advance for your generosity, and thank you, Peter!]
[This is a a lightly corrected and revised re-run from April, 2009.]
We in the Stix household recently watched the classic John Wayne western, True Grit. In Wayne’s unsentimental yet raffishly charming portrayal, protagonist Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn is an occasional coward, occasional thief, occasional perjurer, maybe even an occasional murderer, and a full-time drunk. But Rooster Cogburn has grit.
Cogburn may be a fictional character, but he is a recognizable type to anyone familiar with American history, by which I do not mean the propaganda currently promoted in our schools and universities.
In this country, men with grit and greatness—most of whom were not cowards, thieves, perjurers or murderers, though quite a few were drunks—used to practically sprout out of the soil like corn. America’s first census, in 1790, showed a combined three million freemen and slaves, and yet there was probably more greatness then than there is now, with 100 times as many warm bodies.
Well, I’m not George Washington, and you’re not Thomas Jefferson; we can only try and be the best we can be. But we’ve got to try!
Various powers aim to rob Americans of their patrimony. VDARE.com aims, as one of the leading forces in the patriotic immigration reform movement, to stop them. Will you join in helping us, with a tax-deductible donation?
History for Patriots—or Traitors?
My son recently turned nine. When he started school, in pre-K, I resolved not to fight with his teachers, until he was along a decent piece. No use confusing the child. And the public school he attends is one of the most patriotic in New York. Whereas school administrators on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would have kids sing the “Internationale” or kneel facing Mecca before they’d have them say the Pledge of Allegiance, every day at assembly at my boy’s school, they say the Pledge and sing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”
But the books the children are given to read are often another story, entirely.
During the First Grade my son, then six, had a wonderful young teacher, just a couple of years out of teacher’s college. As I later told her, I was glad that she didn’t have any kids of her own yet (and, though I kept it to myself, glad that she wasn’t a party girl), because once she did, she wouldn’t be able to devote herself completely to her pupils. She smiled and nodded in agreement.
But some of the books my son was bringing home from school were abominations which had to be contradicted. One, that was assigned for class, claimed that (white) Americans, in their terrible wastefulness—in contrast to the Indians—had almost killed off the bald eagle. As if the Congresses that passed conservation laws were full of Indians! And what was the racial background of that great conservationist, Teddy Roosevelt? (I don’t know if my son’s teacher or the head of social studies assigned that book, and I’d just as soon not know.)
At about the same time, my son brought home an oversized, illustrated library book that portrayed the Indians as angels, and the white man as a cut-throat savage.
That did it. I ranted against that book to my son, and purchased the 1956 John Ford masterpiece, The Searchers, which we watched together. In that story, the Comanche massacre a settler family. They scalp the husband, gang-rape, scalp, and murder the mother and their beautiful, teenaged daughter, and kidnap their little daughter, Debby (Natalie Wood). The husband’s brother, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and one-eighth-Indian, adopted son, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), set off to find Debby and bring her back. It takes years, but they rescue her.
The thing about The Searchers is that, unlike the supposedly non-fiction book my son had brought home, it was based on the true story of Cynthia Ann Parker.
(Unfortunately, the Comanche had kidnapped Parker for so long—25 years—and married her off to a Comanche leader, so that when she was found, she no longer knew English, had two children, and did not want to return to her family. PC biographies now speak of her as having been “adopted” by the Comanche.)
In its Golden Age, Hollywood was never known as a reliable source of history, but those old pictures are today often more accurate than the “history” books that are foisted on our children.
I also bought my son A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror, by Larry Schweikart and Michael Patrick Allen, and Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School), both of which look promising so far.
I want my son to grow up loving and honoring his country, but first he’s got to have a country. If this nation’s policies—policies promoted, for different motives, by Right and Left elites alike—continue apace, not only will America soon be a nation unfit to be loved, but it won’t be a nation at all. Giving schoolchildren anti-American propaganda is meant to sap their wills, so that they won’t have the necessary desire to fight for their country that had my late Uncle Irwin Simpkins, later a mild-mannered, college librarian in civilian life, enlist in the Army for World War II, and re-up for the Korean War. (What about me, you ask? Less than one month after the last chopper took off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, I turned 17 and volunteered for the Regular Army. I may have set a record for the most possible ways that a man can flunk an Army physical.)
VDARE.com does not promote itself as a history site, but its writers must often treat of historical issues, because so much of anti-American propaganda involves lying about the past, in order to conquer and enslave the American people now and in the future. And since the movement to destroy America has long employed the means of race war, it manufactures a steady stream of racist, anti-white propaganda.
And so, VDARE has run articles on the Battle of San Jacinto, Brown v. Board of Education, the life and works of Martin Luther King Jr., and even on the short, almost certainly tragic life of Virginia Dare, the inspiration for VDARE, who was likely massacred by Indians, along with the rest of the over 100 English settlers of “The Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island.
Let’s return to True Grit for a moment. The area where it was shot, in Ouray County, Colorado, already had some period buildings, such as the Ouray County Courthouse, built in 1888, and the movie crew either constructed or converted some Western buildings in the style of the period, in the towns of Ouray and Ridgway. Ridgway preserved quite a few of them. In her short documentary, True Grit: Then and Now, “JeepsterGal” will show a building or a rock in a movie scene, and then show the same landmark now, in most cases looking exactly the same, 40 years later. And the countryside in the San Juan Mountains that dominate Ouray County (542 square miles, present population, 3,800), and where most of the outdoor scenes were shot, is as spectacular now as it was then.
But imagine what the area might look like in a generation, in an America with between 500 million and one billion people. Instead of being virtually unsettled, it could have hundreds of thousands of people living in semi-attached and attached homes and apartment buildings, with the only reminders of places like Owl Creek Pass and Deb’s Meadow the street signs, strip malls, and highways named after them.
You might think that environmental groups like the Sierra Club—which until 1996 pledged its support for population stabilization—would fight to protect America’s natural treasures, but as Brenda Walker’s VDARE exposés revealed, the Sierra Club was bought off for $100 million by hedge fund entrepreneur and Open Borders fanatic, David Gelbaum.
The fox is guarding the henhouse.
No Americans Welcome!
Someone might counter, “Well, at least we’ve still got our national parks!”
Not really. As Brenda Walker has also detailed in reports over the years, America’s most beautiful national parks have for over ten years increasingly been stolen and plundered by illegal Mexican immigrant drug gangs, the franchisees in El Norte of Mexico’s narcoterrorists, who have taken over large swathes of the parks for the cultivation of marijuana, and turned them into no-go zones for the Americans who pay for their upkeep, and who are their owners. But in addition to stealing our parks, the harm spreads to ten times the area actually cultivated:
These Mexican marijuana messes are an ecological disaster. They are not innocent little plots that leave a minimal footprint. They are industrial grow sites, toxic stews where the gangsters use dangerous and illegal chemical herbicides, pesticides and growth hormones that result in long-lasting environmental damage.
When Americans, the owners of those national parks, visit them, they increasingly take their lives in their hands. As Brenda just reported today, two campers in Santa Barbara’s Aliso Park area, west of New Cuyama, barely escaped an April 17 encounter with alleged narcoterrorists with their lives. (Aren’t we always hearing that drug offenders are non-violent?!) The campers stumbled onto a marijuana patch being tended by two “immigrants.” When the “immigrants,” who spoke only Spanish, gestured to the campers to wait for “Boss,” the campers fled in their vehicle. They barely escaped a chase by two men in a truck equipped with five high-powered rifles. Police went back to the crime scene, and arrested the men in the truck.
Local parks are also being stolen and destroyed. In 2007, VDARE’s Steve Sailer observed Los Angeles’ “public” Hansen Dam Park, which had been seized from the American taxpayers, and privatized by illegal aliens from Mexico, who made no tax contribution to its support, and who wrecked it. They buried the grass in garbage and excrement, set fires that caused massive damage, brought in horses that were illegal, unhealthy, and extremely dangerous, in an area jammed with families and many small children, for an illegal trade selling rides for kids.
Where were the police, you ask? In his pioneering, postmodern/New Age/PC management style mixing sanctuary policy and de-policing, LAPD Chief William Bratton had long ago ordered the police to surrender most public space to the criminal invaders. Bratton, a Boston-born and raised carpetbagger himself, had earlier announced that if any native Los Angelenos didn’t like illegal immigration, they should leave the state. And millions of native Californians, including VDARE’s own Joe Guzzardi, have called Bratton’s bluff!
Meanwhile, that man presently occupying the White House just announced that he will seek to pass an illegal immigrant amnesty in his first year in office, just as I predicted he would in February.
America is currently well on the way to the worst economic depression in her history, with 6.14 million jobless workers receiving unemployment benefits, millions more having exhausted their benefits (and no longer being counted by official unemployment figures), additional millions underemployed, and millions more soon to lose their jobs, at a current rate of over 600,000 per month. Not only would a chief executive seeking to bring about an economic recovery never dream of pushing for a mass amnesty, but he would be undertaking accelerated mass deportations, so as to rid America of the multibillion-dollar welfare, education, and criminal justice costs that illegals incur, and to put an end to their stealing of jobs from American citizens and legal immigrants alike. Instead, that man wants to amnesty over 22 [24] million illegal aliens?! And just who will pay for these illegals? If he gets his way, you and I will. In perpetuity.
Of course, the amnestisiacs are lowballing the numbers, claiming that only 12 million illegals are in play. Only. They always lowball the numbers and the costs.
The real numbers are closer to 30 million [P.S. 23.5 million-43.5 million, plus the illegal children] illegals, because the over 22 [24] million I cited above have several million illegal children who were born here, and whom a rogue federal judiciary has redefined from illegal aliens (as per the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment), to native-born American citizens.
But for the Usurper-in-Chief, an illegal alien amnesty is only the beginning.
In a 2007 interview, “Obama” told NPR’s Farai Chideya that as far as he is concerned, any immigrant who is a descendant of slaves or who came from anyplace in the world that had ever been under colonial rule has an eternal and unlimited claim against America (though not in exactly those words), which to him means white Americans.
I mean, you know, black people didn't end up in the Caribbean by taking a yacht there. They came on slave ships. Back in Africa, my grandfather was a cook for the British army and suffered under the colonialism there.
Never mind that colonial rule was often the only bright spot in such misbegotten nations’ history. Never mind that in Kenya, “Obama’s” paternal grandfather benefited tremendously from colonialism. “Obama” has instead fabricated a bizarro universe history, in which his grandfather “suffered” under colonialism.
Look for “Obama” to seek to airlift in millions of sub-Saharan African “refugees,” the lower their IQs—the average in black Africa is 67 or 70, depending on whose research you read—and the less suited for modern life, the better.
What is his goal? In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, “Obama” says that his father’s dreams are his dreams. Fortunately for us, his father had clearly detailed his dreams in 1965, in an academic paper entitled, “Problems Facing Our Socialism.”
Barack Obama Sr. expressed his rage at seeing that virtually all private property in Kenya was owned by whites and Asians (Indians). His solution: Use the government to steal every last inch of it from them. The elder Obama also suggested possibly levying a tax rate of 100 percent—a rate of confiscation twice as bad as under American chattel slavery—as a realistic option.
Such a mad plan might make a sort of sense coming from a racist, petulant child lacking the slightest grasp of economics, but Obama Sr. had a master’s degree in economics from Harvard! (How did he ever manage that?)
Obama Sr. does at one point acknowledge that seizing the businesses of experienced, capable white and Asian businessmen, and turning them over to black men lacking both in business experience and aptitude might not be economically fruitful, but emphasizes that he doesn’t care. The elder Obama was motivated purely by the politics of hate, and that is the motive now in charge in the Oval Office.
VDARE.com was founded at Christmastime 1999, by that wandering Englishman, Peter Brimelow. Peter had seen socialism and mass immigration destroy his native land, and bilingualism and biculturalism slowly destroying Canada. Peter fell in love with America, became a naturalized citizen, and didn’t want to see her destroyed, too.
Peter may not be riding a horse with the reins in his teeth, guns ablaze, and he’s not a drunk. But he’s a real man, not a movie character.
Actually, if you’re old enough to recall a kinder, gentler time when academics were scholars, rather than self-styled community organizers, Peter gives the impression, in person, of an absent-minded professor. But impressions aside, I think he has grit. And there’s no man whom I would rather have my back in a barfight.
More to the point, unlike Rooster Cogburn, Peter can’t hold up a federal paymaster or a bank, whenever he needs a “road stake” for VDARE. He needs your help. Please give generously to VDARE.
I realize that times are hard. But they’re going to get harder. I’ve written at least 11 [20?] previous fundraising appeals for VDARE, without ever employing such dramatic language, but if we can’t fight off this next amnesty push… I’ll leave the future to your imagination.
Spoiler alert: The last four minutes of the 11:32 video that follows show the movie’s climactic gunfight and fadeout. If you’ve yet to see True Grit, you might want to pass on seeing those scenes just now.
But whether or not you watch the documentary, you should first mosey on down to VDARE.com’s donation page here, to make a tax-deductible donation to The VDARE Foundation, the 501(c)(3) non-profit that operates VDARE. Thank you for your generous support.
True Grit, Then and Now
