Though I do not like to consider myself a sentimentalist, it seems worthy to commemorate the two-year anniversary of National Review’s decision to “sever ties” with John Derbyshire on April 7th, 2012.
Though I do not like to consider myself a sentimentalist, it seems worthy to commemorate the two-year anniversary of National Review’s decision to “sever ties” with John Derbyshire on April 7th, 2012. The details of what happened and why have been gone over a million times, so if you are unaware, I will direct you to Mr. Derbyshire’s webpage on the matter. Moving right along, it should be noted that it is astounding how much Derbyshire got away with before he was fired. In his own small way, he may have even pushed some unsuspecting readers of NR towards our neck of the woods.
Some talking head at Salon actually got it right, when writing shortly after Derbyshire got fired, that Derbyshire has been writing racist screeds for years. “So why did no one notice until last week?” Even before then, Andrew Sullivan had taken note of Derbyshire dissident attitudes and made a point of trying to embarrass him by posting them on The Dish.
Just take a look at some of Derbyshire best pre-04/12 writing:
He gave explicit support to all ethno-nationalists, so long as their ethnicity is civilized:
Where ethnies are anciently and intricately mixed, as in Northern Ireland, there isn’t much do be done but stagger on under the horrible affliction of diversity, putting up with the occasional massacre. Where a coherent nation can be separated off, though, it should be.
The Uighurs should certainly have their own nation. So should the Kurds, the Catalans, the Scots, the Jews, the South Tyroleans, the Chechens, and any other people sufficiently civilized to run a statelet and sufficiently coherent to think themselves a single ethny. – Give ‘Em a Country, 08/11
He gave a glowing review of a Paul Gottfried book in National Review, with a title that referenced the late Sam Francis, and mentioned that the Paleos may rise again:
It may be that the Old Right will come into its inheritance at last 20 or 30 years from now, in one of the little fragment nations that will emerge when corruption, fiscal incompetence, demographic idiocy, educational romanticism, willful scientific ignorance, ethnic warfare, and missionary imperialism have finally destroyed the United States of America. – Beautiful Losers, 08/09
He spoke well, even poetically, about Jared Taylor:
We don’t shoot our dissidents, nor even exile them or send them to camps. But in other respects their careers parallel those of their spiritual kin living under sterner regimes: ignored by power-seekers, denounced by those who toady to power, swatted down contemptuously by power-holders, disliked by the taboo-upholding generality, and doomed to failure and oblivion unless, by very occasional blind luck, history in its onward march finds itself in step with them.
I still like and admire dissidents. I honor their cussedness, integrity, and courage. I can never stir myself to join them, though. Cowardice? By all means, you can think so. I view it as “insufficiently masochistic.” – The Futility of Dissidence, 02/11
As good as all of his past writing was, the case can be made that it has gotten much better, more radical, since his purge — particularly for those of us who are more Identitarian than Race Realist. Consider how Derbyshire’s pro-Asian writing has slowed to a trickle over the last two years. In 2007, he first proposed his “Arctic Alliance” between Whites and East Asians, and he wrote about it again in 2011. Immediately after his firing, he made a brief mention of it, but has since seemed to have dropped the topic almost entirely.
Instead, he has been focusing much more on Whites and his own sense of Whiteness has gotten stronger. There is of course his involvement with American Renaissance, but even his Takimag pieces have taken a “Whiter” tone. See for example his popular White People Are Pussies article, which ended with:
And we white Americans? Are we the most pussified of all—the pussies of the world?
That’s a thought I don’t want to have. That way lies hard, irreversible ethnomasochism.
It’s a thought that keeps bobbing up to the surface, though, prompted by some news item or image; or out of the blue, as on the radio that time, too publicly for me to disown it.
I must discipline my mind.
It is not quite there yet, but it is getting there. The same goes for his follow up piece, Losing Our Turbulence, where “Our” means “Whites:”
We should expect no turbulence among white people in the near future. Window-breaking there may be, but outside of a few remaining pockets of vitality such as Belfast, it won’t be whites lobbing the stones. Fattened by prosperity, soothed by the welfare state, and cowed by the missionaries of guilt, whites will limit their protests to voting for Tweedledum rather than Tweedledee, to genteel gatherings in rented halls, to comment threads on the dwindling number of news websites that still allow them.
His interest in the welfare of whites is steadily growing, and his ramblings about “NAM”s (Non-Asian Minorities) have become steadily replaced with more existential questions about the fate of Whites everywhere, like the post above, or the more lighthearted, Why Isn’t Racism Cool?
Like many Vdare contributors, he still yearns (and may even believe it can happen) for a day just around the corner when Republicans will become race-realist nationalists, and then save America. This is an unfortunate waste of time on Derbyshire’s part, and quite frankly a waste of his talent. But give it another two years, and he just might get right with the lord.
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