James Fulford writes: John Derbyshire made his now-annual visit to the American Renaissance conference in Burns, TN, held under the protection of the Tennessee Park Police and State Police, which left four antifa arrested.

JUST IN: 4 protesters arrested outside conference in Burns, Tenn. are charged w/ disorderly conduct - Corey Lemley, Andrew Kelley, Robert Fidler & Sarah Abdel-Wahab-Obrien. Obrien was also charged with aggravated assault: https://t.co/fKP6t1ouag pic.twitter.com/xiLNZfg0oM
— FoxNashville (@FOXNashville) May 19, 2019

The conference has been held annually since 1994, but recent years have shown that while never a hate group, the attendees are very much a hated group. It would be difficult to hold these conferences without police protection.

There will be a forthcoming conference report from Amren.com, and video of John Derbyshire giving it. This is the presentation as written.

Greetings, fellow heretics! Permit me to introduce myself.

My name is John Derbyshire. I was born and raised in England, but have spent most of my life—at this point, actually 51 percent—in the U.S.A.

I am a freelance writer. When I tell someone that, a frequent response is: “That’s nice; but what do you do for a living?” Well, that’s my living, and has been for eighteen years. I haven’t gotten rich, but I haven’t gone hungry, either.

Not that the writing business has worked out as I intended. I started with the aim to be a novelist, using persons and situations from out of my own imagination and experience to make penetrating observations about human nature and the human condition.

As it turned out, far and away my best-selling book has been a nonfiction work about mathematics.

Sixteen years after its publication, I still get a nice royalty check from it twice a year. That’s not bad in the book business. Still, like the slapstick comedian who yearns to play Hamlet, I would rather have been a novelist.

These are the vicissitudes of fate.

— My 2007 Column “An Arctic Alliance” —

Across the years I have also produced a vast mass of fugitive journalism for various outlets—book reviews and opinion pieces. The great majority of that mass has sunk without trace, no doubt deservedly, although I have tried to be diligent about archiving it at my personal website www.johnderbyshire.com.

There have, however, been a handful of pieces that caught the attention of many readers in such a way that I still get asked about them years later. One of those was an column I wrote in October 2007 for New English Review, a web magazine that is the brainchild of a charming and energetic lady here in Tennessee. The title of the piece was “An Arctic Alliance?”

ArcticAlliance-3

This was a throw-away opinion piece that I wrote to meet a deadline. It is not closely argued and contains no very deep analysis. It does, however, offer an idea that I believe is worth airing, and which I have not seen discussed elsewhere. That idea is contained in the title, which I shall now unpack.

First, the word “Arctic.” I divide the human race into Arctics and non-Arctics on paleoanthropological grounds. So Arctics are those present-day races whose remote ancestors inhabited the forests and tundra of northern Eurasia—the whites and the yellows, to a first approximation. In my book We Are Doomed I used the synonym “Ice People.”

In the world today, the Arctics exhibit two characteristics that separate them quite clearly from non-Arctics, or “Sun People.”.

High intelligence. The world average IQ is somewhere in the 80s—82 is the latest estimate I have seen.

Among Arctics the average is much higher, probably over 100, with the mean for East Asians slightly higher than the one for whites.
Low fertility. For stable population size you need a mean TFR of 2.1 children per woman. Hardly any Arctic nations have TFR that high.

ArcticAlliance-5

Some are sensationally low (Taiwan 1.13). Practically all nations with higher TFR are non-Arctic. Many are sensationally high (Niger 6.35).

It thus seems that Arctics face a demographic threat, and humanity at large a longer-term dysgenic threat.

My 2007 article suggested that we Arctics—whites and yellows—put our clever heads together and come up with a common strategy against those threats. Hence the word “Alliance” in my title.

— Common Objections —

ArcticAlliance-6 Across the years I have met with many objections to the idea of an Arctic Alliance. In the rest of this talk I shall cover the commonest of those objections.

Objection #1: “Arctics” is absurd. Singapore is majority East Asian [i.e. what I call “Arctic”] but it’s only one degree north of the equator!

And what about Native Americans, whose deep ancestry is Siberian?

ArcticAlliance-7

So weren’t the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas all “Arctics”? And therefore likewise their present-day descendants, the Indios and mestizos of Latin America?

My reply: The underlying question here is: Why did some Arctic peoples of the remote past evolve into modern races with high mean IQ and low mean fertility, even while (much) later spreading into the Tropical zone, while others evolved differently?

ArcticAlliance-8 Answer: I don’t know. I have, however, read enough about human origins, history, and population genetics to be unsurprised at this outcome. It is not absurd: genetic change of the required magnitude in isolated populations is certainly a possibility across ten thousand years. So is stasis.

But I concede that my usage of “Arctics” is short for “Arctics who have remained stubbornly ‘Arctic’.”

Objection #2: Alliance or union? Are you suggesting that we subsume our nationhood in some kind of EU-style union with Russians and East Asians?

ArcticAlliance-9

My reply: I am a strong nationalist. The sovereign nation-state, with a settled, ethnically-stable population, minding its own affairs under its own historically-evolved folkways, is my preferred form of highest-level political organization.

ArcticAlliance-10 I hope only for common awareness among Ice People nations of the impending threat, and some common strategy in dealing with it without compromising our national sovereignties in any supranational union.

Objection #3: Projection. Some unkind people have scoffed that I was merely projecting my own domestic circumstances onto the world at large. (I am married to a Chinese lady.)

My reply: Possibly I was, but the Arctic Alliance may none the less be worth considering.

Stopped clocks occasionally show the right time. George Orwell remarked that some things are true even though the Party says they are true. Similarly, some ideas are worth considering even though the person who offers them for consideration is working from personal motives.

Tell me why there are no such threats as I have described, and why the Arctic Alliance is not worth considering on its own merits.

Objection #4: The long 20^th century. My column noted that all the great existential military conflicts of the industrial age, from Napoleon's wars to the Cold War, were fought between Arctic nations.

ArcticAlliance-12

I seemed to assume that that era is over; that a new age has dawned in which an Arctic Alliance is possible.

ArcticAlliance-13 Yet in fact the national passions and rivalries that generated those wars are very much alive. Ask a Chinese person for an opinion of Japan. Ask a Russian for an opinion of America (or an American neocon about Russia). Ask a North Korean … anything.

The age of intra-Arctic conflict has not ended. We are still, as it were, in the 20^th century, just as people in the years 1900-1914 were still in the 19^th century—as historians say, “the long 19^th century.”

My reply: (See my reply to the next item.)

Closely related to that point are a group of criticisms I put under the heading:

Objection #5: The narcissism of minor differences. [15] Similarity on genetic or paleoanthropological grounds is no guarantee of harmony, nor even of the ability to work together for common goals.

ArcticAlliance-15 If you had lived in Belfast in 1972 you would have noticed that the white Irish Protestants and white Irish Catholics of that city had much stronger group feelings directed against each other than either had towards blacks or Muslims.

Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, Chapter IV:

[I]t is the most closely-allied forms,—varieties of the same species, and species of the same genus or of related genera,—which, from having nearly the same structure, constitution, and habits, generally come into the severest competition with each other; consequently, each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them.

ArcticAlliance-16 Sigmund Freud remarked on a similar phenomenon in Civilization and Its Discontents. He called it “the narcissism of minor differences.”

I have enlisted this principle in my own writings about America’s current ideological conflict, calling that conflict “the Cold Civil War”—two big groups of white people who can’t stand the sight of each other, with other races sometimes pulled in as auxiliaries to feed the horses and dig field latrines.

If you engage in today’s ideological conflict you quickly notice that American whites care passionately what other whites think and say; but no white person cares what blacks, Indios, or Asians think. They are hors de combat.

So why should not intra-Arctic tensions and animosities prove stronger than common interests in defending against Sun People?

My reply: They might. History suggests that uniting against a common peril does not come easily to human beings. It is most likely to come when the peril is obvious, urgent, and existential.

OK; but if boatloads of black Africans in the Mediterranean and “caravans” of Indios swarming our southern border don’t rouse Arctics to thoughts of common defense, what might?

Well, even bigger numbers—much bigger numbers—might. Those numbers are coming.

Or disease might. Back in January 2018, after President Trump was revealed to have used a low scatological expression when referring privately to certain countries, I did some research on sanitary conditions worldwide, and reported on those researches in my VDARE.com weekly podcast.

At a listener’s suggestion, I then read Rose George’s recent book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.

Suffice it to say that I hope I never have to go to India for any reason.

Compounding the issue is the fact that in Sun People countries that are not desperately poor—India again leads the way here—over-use of strong antibiotics is rampant. This of course accelerates the evolution of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

So a sudden, major, unifying threat from Sun People nations may be not demographic but epidemiological.

Objection #6: The Polar Alliance. I have had emails from, and two or three personal encounters with, persons from the Antipodes saying, “What about us?”

Should not Australia, New Zealand, and the white countries of the southern South American "cone”—Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—be included in the Alliance? They face the same issues as ourselves, notably the threat of mass Sun People immigration.

Headline: Amid Record Numbers of Arrivals, Chile Turns Rightward on Immigration (by Cristián Doña Reveco; Migration Policy Institute, 1/17/18).
Headline: Argentina: A Mirror of Your Future (by Gustavo Semeria; American Renaissance, 1/14/17).
Headline: Diversity Down Under [I.e. in New Zealand] (by John Derbyshire; Taki’s Magazine, 9/22/10).

My reply: Paleoanthropologically speaking, these southern hemisphere peoples are still Arctics, not Antarctics. However, for public relations purposes, I might consider soothing their feelings by renaming my concept to “the Polar Alliance.”

(My first thought was “the Bipolar Alliance.” Then I realized what unpleasantly clinical connotations that has …)

(And the list of our southern-hemisphere brethren should of course include white South Africans, at least for a while longer.)

Objection #7: The white race is too far gone in ethnomasochism. While East Asians (China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia) have remained demographically conservative, white Arctics have sold the demographic pass, recklessly importing great masses of Sun People into their homelands.

This process has gone too far now to be reversible.

Why should East Asians yoke themselves in an alliance with whites, who are clearly a loser race with a collective death wish?

My reply: Why indeed? But this is a counsel of despair. Movements like ours exist in the hope of reversing the ethnomasochistic trend. Dum spiramus, speramus.

(If you need a boost to your speramus, be sure to attend Jared’s talk this afternoon. Title: “Why We are Winning.”)

And while that point is a depressing one, it is not the most depressing response I have received. Here is the real wrist-slitter:

Objection #8: Ethnomasochism is an inevitable development in ANY post-industrial society. [26] There is nothing exclusively white about ethnomasochism. East Asians just aren’t there yet. We Arctics are all headed into multiculturalism.

My reply: Yes, there are periodic news stories [27, 28] about Japan loosening up on immigration. On the other hand, the rules remain strict and selective.

On the other other hand, there are now more than 200 mosques in Japan, up from just two in 1970.

[29] And there is a big colony of black Africans in Guangzhou, South China’s megacity. Their numbers have been declining the past five years, it’s true; but the decline has been driven more by economic and public-health issues than by Chinese ethnocentrism. Most of the Africans are merchants whose fortunes depend on movements in the commodities markets, and recent movements have been all against them. Further, the SARS epidemic of the early 2000s badly spooked the Chinese government, so that when Ebola hit the international headlines in 2014, they clamped down hard on African immigration.

So: Are these things—loosening of Japanese immigration, African settlement in China—minor circumstantial aberrations, or straws in the multicultural wind?

I don’t know. East Asian ethnocentrism looks pretty robust to me; but then, I am old enough to remember when British ethnocentrism looked robust.

Could East Asians succumb to multiculturalism? I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. Will they? I don’t know.

John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.

For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.