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Memo From Middle America | Titanic Centennial – The Immigration Dimension

Exactly one hundred years ago, April 15th, 1912, RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic. The tragic and fascinating story of Titanic has captivated the public for a century.


The centennial is being commemorated in various ways. My family and I recently visited an excellent Titanic museum located in Branson, Missouri. (See here and here.) It was definitely worth seeing. There are other Titanic museums, including one in Belfast at the old location of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, where the magnificent but ill-fated vessel was constructed.Titanic Story


The Titanic story could be a Shakespearean tragedy—about a magnificent, state-of the-art vessel, the world’s largest at that time, on its maiden voyage, bearing representatives of the British and American upper crust. Tragic flaws, however, brought the ship through a danger area at too high a speed. Her collision with an iceberg brought her down, with over 1500 deaths.


Then there were the lifeboats. The crew had never conducted a lifeboat drill, there were only enough lifeboats for half the people on board, and even the lifeboats they did have were not filled to capacity.


There is just so much in the Titanic story—the technical aspects of the sinking, the overconfidence, the tragedy of so many lives lost, the stories of heroism and sacrifice.


In retrospect, the Titanic sinking took place near the end of an era. Just a couple of years later, the disastrous Great War changed the course of Western Civilization, forever and arguably fatally.


John R. Henderson of Ithaca College has done some good work on the demographics of those on the Titanic (see here). Among passengers the British, at 327, formed the largest group, with Americans second at 306, followed by the Irish (120), Swedes (113), Finns (59), Austro-Hungarians (49) and Syrians (81). There was one Mexican on board Titanic, a first class passenger and politician, Manuel Uruchurtu, who perished after giving up his seat on a lifeboat for an English lady.


Indicative of that era of rampant sexism, 72% of the women survived, but only 19% of the men.


Here at VDARE.COM we’re interested in the immigration/National Question angle on all this. And there certainly is one. After all, the Titanic disaster was in 1912, during the Great Wave of immigration, from the 1880s to the 1920s. This is the classic era of immigration, which established the way many people think about immigration even today.


The Titanic,  like other ocean liners of the time was an immigrant-bearing vessel. In fact, most of the Third Class (= steerage) passengers were immigrants, and many in Second Class as well. And they weren’t exactly traveling in misery. Although steerage accommodations were not as luxurious as First Class, or even Second Class, Third Class on Titanic was very good for its time.


The James Cameron Titanic movieimage portrays the Third Class passengers being locked below. An employee at the Titanic museum explained to me, however, that the ship was segregated by class from the beginning of the voyage. There were passageways for Third Class passengers to get up on deck, but the limited English of many of them impeded their doing so. Once again, the poor handling of the lifeboats, and the failure to have enough, was the major problem.


The inspection of arriving immigrants at Ellis Island is well-known. But the inspection of immigrants actually began on the other side of the pond. In the case of Titanic, it set sail from Southampton, England, stopped at Cherbourg, France and then Queenstown, Ireland, before heading out over the Atlantic. All the immigrants who boarded in those three ports were inspected upon boarding.


According to information provided on the Titanic & Nautical Research Center:



…immigration laws required ship companies to produce detailed lists of all passengers, a process designed to identify and then prevent the admission of aliens “likely to become a public charge” or otherwise

Obama's Zimmerman Problem

God save me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.

That thought must be coursing through the mind of President Obama right now as his White House rigs for silent running in the murder trial of George Zimmerman.

Obama foolishly inserted himself into this volatile case weeks ago, and injected the issue of race. Expressing empathy with the family of Trayvon Martin, Obama flashed a signal of racial solidarity:

Immigration Cartoon Of The Day

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This daily cartoon contributed to VDARE.com by Baloo. His site is HERE

What Is ObamaCare?

Don't Do Business with Progressive Appeasers

Let's stipulate: Activists on the left are free to exercise their rights of speech and assembly to boycott businesses whose politics they oppose. Conversely, activists on the right are free to exercise the power of their pocketbooks and refrain from supporting businesses that shun their values.

So, what are you waiting for, conservatives? There are coordinated shakedowns taking place right now that involve some of America's most prominent companies who've chosen to surrender to progressive bullying and race-card opportunism. Silence is complicity.

The Outing of Deep Throat

National Data | March Jobs: Natives Lose, Immigrants Gain in a Dismal Month

A funny thing happened on the way to recovery. The economy added 120,000 jobs in March, well below the consensus forecast and only half the job creation recorded in February. Not since November has monthly job growth been below the 200,000 level.


Unreported as usual: immigrant displacement of native-born Americans also increased.


Economists were blindsided by the overall numbers. For weeks, the economic tea leaves had apparently

Hutaree Militiamen Cleared In Court

Much to the chagrin of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a federal judge has cleared the members of a Michigan militia who were accused by federal law enforcement agents of conspiracy to commit sedition. Since you didn’t hear much about this ruling from the national press corps, here is one online version of the report:

Marion Barry and the Left's Hatred of Asian Entrepreneurs

Marion Barry's mouth set him up. The disgraced former mayor of Washington, D.C., who was caught on tape in a 1987 crack cocaine sting, made an even bigger disgrace of himself and his city on Tuesday.

Memo From Middle America |Immigration Patriots Thwarted In Mississippi—For Now

Our federal government has failed for years to control our borders properly and detain and deport illegal aliens. And, with Obama’s Administrative Amnesty, it’s getting worse. That’s why states have to fight back with legislation designed to combat the illegal alien invasion as passed in Arizona, Alabama and other states.


Of course, these laws are resisted at every turn, and frequently their effectiveness is reduced by legislating liberal judges. (Breaking news! Obamacare has convinced liberals it’s OK to impeach federal judges—just like VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow has always said!)


But the laws are having an effect and hopefully, with more pressure, more states will adopt them. If nothing else, they are a way of educating the public.


The latest scene of such a battle: the state of Mississippi. Mississippi has a growing problem with illegal immigration. Mississippi’s auditor’s office estimates the illegal population in the state to be 90,000. That’s relatively low compared to some other states. But if not stopped, it’s likely to keep growing. And it’s altering the state’s demographics. It’s now the South, not the Southwest, which has the country’s fastest-growing Hispanic population.


Some Mississippi lawmakers decided to take action. As reported CNN:



Mississippi's Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted 70-47 Thursday to pass the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act."…., H.B. 488. The Mississippi bill includes measures like requiring police to check the immigration status of people who are arrested. It would also prohibit any "business transactions," including renewing a driver's license and getting a business license.


Mississippi lawmakers pass controversial immigration bill, by Joe Sutton, CNN, March 16, 2012


This sounds great to me. A big advantage: the state’s governor, Republican Phil Bryant, a former deputy sheriff, totally supported HB 488 and in fact had run for governor on a get-tough-with-illegal- immigration platform.


The National Council of La Raza, needless to say, announced its opposition to HB 488, and in a propagandistic cheap shot, tried to link it with Mississippi’s segregated past:



“…like Alabama, Mississippi’s attempt to pass anti-Latino

John Harvey’s Race And Equality: The “Standard Social Science Model” is W-R-O-N-G

 [Peter Brimelow writes: As an intellectual episode, the repression of race realism over the last sixty or seventy years can only be compared to Copernicus and Galileo. But Copernicus and Galileo did not have the internet or the modern publishing technology that has allowed Professor Richard Lynn, now 81, to establish the Ulster Institute and ensure that this debate continues. We post tonight Lynn’s thoughts on the Ulster Institute’s latest publication: Race and Equality, by John Harvey].

[Previously by Richard Lynn: Race Differences, Immigration, And The Twilight of the European Peoples]

Throughout the social sciences, the early and middle decades of the twentieth century saw the repudiation of genetics as the determinant of individual and race differences in intelligence and achievement, and its replacement by “culture”. In anthropology, Franz Boas argued in his influential book The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) that there was no such thing as a superior culture. In psychology, John B. Watson asserted

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors”.

This position became known as “the standard social science model”.

There were a few dissenters. Henry Garrett, head of psychology at Columbia and one-time president of the American Psychological Association, called it “the equalitarian dogma”. And Arthur Jensen, one of the leading researchers in the field of intelligence, argued that the black-white differences in intelligence in the United States do probably have some genetic basis. [PDF]

But the “standard social science model” has remained dominant. It even

The Democrats' Election Forgery Racket

A few weeks ago, Obama senior adviser and seasoned Chicago operative David Axelrod joked on MSNBC about election corruption. Asked whether "vote early and often" scams had come to an end in his shady hometown, Axelrod snarked: "Well, certainly on the air." Yuk, yuk, yuk.

A Nation Arms Itself—For What?

With the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer who was legally carrying a 9-millimeter handgun, the familiar wail has arisen from our cultural and media elite:

America has too many guns!

“Open carry” and “concealed carry” laws should be repealed.

Herbivore Concessions Enable Rubio’s New DREAM Act—Same Old Nightmare For America’s Unemployed

VDARE.com often makes constructive criticisms of what Editor Peter Brimelow sometimes calls the herbivorous patriotic immigration reform movement inside the Beltway—namely the Center for Immigration Studies, Numbers USA, and Federation for American Immigration Reform. I tend to see each group as doing their own part to move the debate in the right direction. 

However, when the DREAM Act was being pushed during the lame duck 2010 Congress, I was concerned that many of our herbivore allies seemed to

The Fulford File | The Multicultural Military Success Story—Its (Deliberately) Forgotten Failures

Soldier Called Well-adjusted Before Killings.

That’s not a recent headline, it’s from the Associated Press, via the Miami News, June 8, 1981. The killer was Spec 4 Archie Bell III of Long Branch, N. J. He killed four fellow American soldiers on the Ingman Rifle Range in Korea.

Spec 4 Bell was a Black Muslim—the other soldiers

Why Western Music Is Superior to Eastern

Anyone trained in Western music, or familiar with its history, understands its profound superiority of development in all aspects of the art.  No other music in the world remotely compares with it. 

VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow has asked me to give an account of this phenomenon. So, on the presumed authority of three degrees in music, together with two in religion and literature respectively—and as an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation and therefore an impartial observer!—I offer the following basic narrative.

Human culture is traditionally divided geographically—as “eastern” and “western.”  This cultural divide is apparent in music, perhaps more than any other human endeavor. 

“East” here means culture east of Israel, and “west,” culture west of Israel.  There are obviously subdivisions of these global regions, both geographically and historically. 

We address here cultural, traditional music—not the popular music of the electronic, recording age since the 1950’s.  “Popular” music is wholly Western, with primitive rhythm obviously maintained even when performed by Chinese pop stars—in Chinese

Black Africa is not a factor, having no influence in the historical development