DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY A Speech by Jared Taylor

Originally published in the June 2005 issue of Sovereignty

The following was presented by Jared Taylor, Editor of American Renaissance,
at the Right Now ! Conference at Mark Masons' Hall,
St. James's Street, London,
on Saturday 28th May 2005 at 4.30pm.

I have been asked to speak on the subject, "Demography is Destiny."

The phrase is attributed to the 19th century French mathematician and philosopher, August Comte (1798-1857), who is known as the "father of sociology."

By it he meant that as a rise or fall in birth rates works itself out over the decades, it affects everything in a society.

He would therefore have understood immediately the significance of something now happening in many nations of the West: The average number of children each woman has is closer to 1, than to the 2.2 necessary to maintain the population. When a society reaches a birth rate of 1 child per woman, each generation is half the size of the previous, and that society is headed for extinction.

It is, indeed, worrying that birth rates are so low in the most advanced, Western countries, as well as in certain successful Asian ones. No one has a definitive explanation of why the world's richest women have the fewest children, but the self-absorption that seems to accompany material wealth seems to be a big part of it.

If Westerners really do think about their motives for refusing to reproduce -- if the problem is not pure narcissism -- the thinking probably runs like this: "The world is overpopulated anyway, so a shortfall in my country will be made up for by people in Africa or Latin America."

In other words, millions more Guatemalans and Nigerians will make up for fewer Italians or Germans.
The assumption, of course, is that all human populations are essentially interchangeable.
We shall come back to this assumption later, for it is a crucial part of how demography becomes destiny.
There is one aspect of the demography question August Comte did not anticipate, and that is immigration.
Immigration of the kind we have today -- millions of aliens moving into already-settled territory, taking up residence or even citizenship -- is a recent thing.

It is not that people did not move about in the past. But up until just a few decades ago, if your people wanted to move into territory occupied by another people, they would fight you. People did not willingly step aside and let large numbers of aliens settle on their land! The spread of Arabs across North Africa and into Europe, the peopling of whole continents by Europeans, the Japanese penetration of Asia -- this was not immigration. It was conquest. The unopposed arrival of large numbers of unarmed aliens into already-occupied territory is something unprecedented. There is a clear pattern to this unprecedented movement of peoples. It is a mass movement from the Third World to the developed world.

Put in racial terms, it's non-whites moving into lands that were previously all, or overwhelmingly, white.

There are two reasons for this.

One is that Westerners have created the most successful, agreeable societies in the history of mankind.

In material terms, for an African to move to Europe or for a Honduran to move to the United States represents an instant, astonishing advance. It is hardly surprising that millions of people are desperate to leave their failed countries for even the crumbs of the wealthiest societies ever known.

The second reason for this pattern is that only Western -- white -- societies permit immigration.

There are countless Indonesians and Filipinos who would love to live in Japan, and enjoy the wealth the Japanese people have created, but they cannot. The Japanese forbid it. The Japanese understand that demography is destiny, and they have the quaint preference that their destiny remain Japanese!

The same is true for the people of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and even Malaysia. They understand the importance of demography, and they want to keep their destinies in their own hands.

In the West it is obligatory to believe - indeed it is immoral not to believe - that all populations are essentially replaceable. If Caribbean blacks or Bangladeshi Muslims come to Britain, they will turn into good little Welshmen, or Englishmen or Scots. And to the extent they do not, whatever differences remain will improve the poor, colourless local stock.

This view -- that it is desirable to supplement or even replace one's own people with aliens -- is the greatest threat the West faces.
We have faced great threats before -- the Mongol invasions, the Arab advance, Turks at the gates of Vienna -- but these were physical, armed threats that we met with physical force.
Never before have we been psychologically unmanned. Never before did we believe that welcoming the Arabs or opening our borders to the Turks would lead to "enrichment" or bring the benefits of "diversity."

Jared Taylor (left) is the Editor of 16-page monthly American Renaissance, published since 1991. It develops politically the concepts of race, immigration and the identity and interests of European-derived people, worldwide. Overseas subs are $40.00 to PO Box 527, Oakton, VA 22124, USA. http://www.amren.com/ Right Now! is a 28-page bimonthly journal of traditional conservative thought. A 6-issue subcription per annum is £15 to Right Now! at Box 361, 78 Marylebone High St, London, W1U 5AP. http://www.right-now.org/

This delusion, if it persists, will be our death knell.

Part of the idea that Europeans can be successfully and happily replaced by non-whites is the trendy view that race is not a biological category but a sociological or optical illusion.
Never mind that people of different races differ greatly in appearance and behaviour; or that they can be distinguished unerringly by DNA comparison at just 100 randomly-selected sites; or that they may react differently to medical treatment.

Anyone who is incapable of detecting important differences between, say, an Australian Aborigine and a Dane, or an African Pygmy and a Korean must be well must be very intelligent!
Because only very intelligent people could possibly persuade themselves of something so obviously wrong!

Craig Ventner of the Human Genome Project in America once famously claimed that all humans are essentially "identical twins".
Every institution in the West has fallen into line with this view that racial or ethnic differences are so trivial that only demons or morons could notice or care about them.

In fact, when different peoples mix, for whatever reason, two things happen. The first -- without fail -- is conflict.

When the Arabs of Northern Sudan and the blacks of Southern Sudan meet each other, they do not say to themselves, "Here is my biological equivalent, my identical twin," and then fall into each others' arms.

Instead, they say: "These people are different from us, and I find these differences repulsive." They then go on to kill each other with no compunction!

The same consciousness of differences is at the root of every wholesale conflict anywhere in the world. Whether it is Hutus hacking Tutsis to pieces in Rwanda, or Sinhalese and Tamils blowing each other up in Sri Lanka, whether it is ex-Yugoslavia or Palestine it is always the same.

Wherever people are most diligently killing each other it is because people who differ in some significant way are trying to share territory.

The very diversity that we in the United States and you in Britain are constantly being exhorted to "celebrate" is the cause of the most intensely murderous conflicts anywhere.

Today, it is not war of the conventional kind that creates mountains of corpses; it is the frictions of "diversity." The UN did a study of the period between 1989 and 1992, and found there were 82 conflicts that created more than a thousand deaths. Of this number, 79 -- no fewer than 79 out of 82 -- were the result of religious or ethnic hatred within borders. These were fights inside countries, not between them. This is how the world "celebrates diversity", with guns and knives and anything else people can lay their hands on.

The United States has its share of conflict, too. So far, we have not piled up corpses by the thousand, probably because the majority white population has submitted supinely to ridicule, demonization, and dispossession. However, the United States now has plenty of violence that does not even involve whites, and the seeds have been planted for much worse to come.

Blacks and Hispanics each now make up about 13 percent of the US population. Hispanics are increasing much more rapidly than blacks, and are pushing them out of many poor parts of the western United States. It is between these two groups that friction is worst.

California high schools have become a juvenile version of Sudan or Sri Lanka. Blacks and Hispanics somehow do not think of each other as interchangeable groups of "identical twins". The constant threat of violence hangs over schools with large numbers of blacks and Hispanics, and newspapers duly report lunch-time riots and after-school brawls, in which a black and Hispanic begin to fight and hundreds of students then square off on racial lines.

Just last May, a rumour ran through the schools of Los Angeles that the Hispanics had chosen May 5th -- the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo -- to launch an all-out attack on black students. This was such a believable rumour that 51,000 students stayed home from school that day. This was about one in five middle and high school students or nearly twice the usual rates of absence.

We find similar racial violence in prisons in the United States. Many are in a constant state of lockdown, which is to say that the men are cooped up in their cells and not allowed to mix. If they mingle in the chow line or in the exercise yards, blacks and Hispanics and sometimes whites -- who are now the least aggressive prison group -- will be at each others' throats. The conflict is so predictable, and the consequences so disagreeable that the one constant demand from prisoners is for segregated housing.

Segregation would make life easier for guards, too, since levels of violence would drop sharply, and prison authorities would be spared the embarrassment of the dead and wounded. Segregation would make prisons safer and cheaper to run. It would be an obvious improvement.

It is so obvious, in fact, that up until this year, California practiced racial segregation for new arrivals. The system kept them in segregated, two-man, evaluation cells while guards decided whether to put them in minimum, medium, or maximum security.

In February, the US Supreme Court told the lower court to apply a stricter legal standard to this policy. Segregation will probably have to be scrapped, and death and injury rates will go up.

This is a perfect example of the contemptible hypocrisy that goes into racial policy-making in the United States. Supreme Court Justices insulate themselves almost completely from the effects of "diversity." They do not live integrated lives, nor do they make their children mix with lower-class blacks or Hispanics.

They are part of one of America's dirty secrets: that the purpose of a college education is to give people the right attitude towards minorities and the means to live as far away from them as possible!

The proper attitude is, of course, the one that will doom us if we do not throw it off: that all groups are equivalent and interchangeable.

The people who make the rules for the rest of us will never have to live in the horrible intimacy of a United States prison. Our rulers who bray the loudest about "diversity" are least likely to practice it. I'm sure the same thing is true in Britain: In their mating and migratory habits, people who run the Labour Party are indistinguishable from the ones who vote for the BNP.

Somehow, no matter what people pretend in public, they do not live their lives as if populations really were interchangeable. Given a chance, almost all people seek the company of people like themselves.

Race is real; race is durable; it is the most prominent fault line in any society.

And this brings us to the second thing that happens when populations mix: differences remain.

Unless populations are racially similar and intermarry at a high rate -- as European immigrants have done in the United States -- they keep their differences generation after generation.

In Britain and Europe you are discovering how much Muslims resist assimilation. People everywhere -- and whites are the only ones who do not understand this -- are loyal to the traditions of their ancestors.

Let us imagine the shoe on the other foot.

Let us imagine millions of Europeans were emigrating and choosing to live under Third World governments. Can any of you imagine moving to Cambodia or Pakistan and assimilating? Even after several generations, would your descendents be indistinguishable from natives? Would you want them to be?

And yet Cambodians, Pakistanis, Nigerians -- people from everywhere -- are supposed to come to Britain or the United States and assimilate without moving a muscle.

In the United States, it is not yet Muslims who expect to conquer us, but Mexicans. Twenty million of them -- one fifth of the population of Mexico -- already live among us, and hundreds of thousands more pour across the border every year.

Let us imagine what southern Texas would be like if Mexico were able to conquer it militarily and occupy it. Mexicans would drive out Americans. They would speak Spanish rather than English. They would be loyal to Mexico and celebrate Mexican holidays rather than American holidays. There would be the usual Mexican mix of vote-buying, bribe-taking, bad schools, crime, and government corruption.

Of course, what I am describing is exactly what we find already in those parts of the United States that are thronging with Mexicans. In other words, the United States is suffering the consequences of defeat and occupation while doing almost nothing to stop it.

In other words, the United States is suffering the consequences of invasion. The consequences of a kind of aggression which traditionally every people have been prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of young men to prevent.

Healthy societies send their sons into combat to avoid dispossession. A healthy people will bleed itself white before it submits to what the Mexicans are doing to us.

Mexicans understand that demography is destiny.

That is why they call the repossession of the American southwest a reconquista, or reconquest. They aim openly to retake by peaceful means the land they lost in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. Assimilation? They laugh at the idea.

Their spokesmen do not hesitate to tell Americans that our future is Spanish-speaking, that mixture, or mestizaje, will leave us all brown-skinned and dark-haired.

It is only those who are being conquered who are deliberately blind to the process.

Europe's conquerors may not proclaim their goals quite so openly. They come in smaller bands, from different countries, without quite so coherent a plan as the one Mexicans have for us in the USA.

But they, too, know that demography is destiny, that with numbers comes power, and that they will remake the white man's homeland in their own image as soon as they have the power to do so.

Most of the time, those of us in the West are not supposed to notice that we are losing our countries.

If we actually do open our eyes to what is happening, we are supposed either to be indifferent or even think displacement is a good thing.

Here is Charles A. Price, Australia's senior demographer, writing in 2000: "Some people think that a steady replacement of Anglo-Celts by other ethnic groups is highly desirable·Personally, replacement does not worry me so long as Australian values remain: free speech; freedom of religious worship; equality of the sexes; reasonably equality between social classes (i.e. no aristocracy); and so on."

Let's think about this a moment. First of all, there is no guarantee that if Australians are replaced by Asians or someone else, the things Charles Price seems to approve of will persist. What he is describing -- if you add representative government and rule of law -- is the kind of society whites generally build and take for granted. Except for when they suffer the blight of Communism, whites get this sort of thing right -- and non-whites get them wrong.

In the countries that are sending potential replacements for Australian Anglo-Celts you do not find the things Mr. Price wants to preserve.

It is therefore fantastically naïve for Mr. Price to think Australian society will remain unchanged after the people who established that society are pushed out. Even if all he cares about is behaviour and not people -- even if he doesn't care whether it is his descendants or Somali Bantus who are behaving like "Australians," if there is the slightest risk newcomers will behave differently, that is reason enough to keep them out.

Once again we find this breath-taking willingness to believe the preposterous: that because "all people are equivalent", any population can be transformed into any other population.

In fact, if all Charles Price really cares about is preserving certain forms of behaviour, why even insist on a population of human beings? Why not have intelligent robots practicing freedom of speech and worship? I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that wouldn't satisfy me. If I were an Australian, I would want Australians doing these things, not robots and not Chinese or Indonesians.

We have yet another example of the suicidal belief that all peoples are interchangeable. In 2000, the former French Security Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement said that because of declining birth rates, Europeans should accept millions of immigrants over the next 50 years, and that governments should actively promote miscegenation as a way to combat racial friction.

This is monstrous. Widespread miscegenation in Europe and elsewhere would mean the end of whites -- but only of whites -- as a distinct people. We are fewer than ten percent of the world's population, and in a few generations we would be gone. The other races, far more numerous than we, would remain.

On aesthetic grounds alone we have reason to be outraged by what Mr. Chevènement says. I like the way our people look. I want my grandchildren to look like my grandparents. I don't want them to look like Anwar Sadat or Foo Man Chu or Whoopi Goldberg. I want them to look the way my people have looked for thousands of years, and for that I have no apology.

Obviously, there is more to it than aesthetics.

A nation is not just a cultural continuity, it is a biological continuity.

The desire to see one's people survive and prosper is natural, healthy, and moral. Nor need it imply the slightest hostility towards other groups.

This is the parallel I would draw: I love my children more than I love the children of strangers. I love them not because they are more intelligent or better looking or more gifted or more musical or more athletic than everyone else. I love them because they are mine, and I make tremendous sacrifices for them I would never make for anyone else. This does not mean I am hostile to the children of others. I can be quite fond of some of them. But my children come first.

We have larger loyalties that are analogous to our feelings for our children. Whether it is our nation, our ethnicity, or our race, there are broader groups for which we feel a familial loyalty.

Our nation or race is, in effect, our extended family in the largest sense, and our feelings for our extended family are a dilute, but broader version of what we feel for our close kin.

We have these feelings because this group is biologically and culturally part of us in a way no other group can be.

Who will sing our songs, pray our prayers, celebrate our heroes, honour our traditions, venerate our ancestors, love the things we love?

Only our family, our extended family. Only our extended family will carry our civilization forward in a meaningful way. Only the biological heirs to the people who created a civilization have ever maintained, cherished, and advanced that civilization.

It is for their extended family that men go to war.

In every war Britain ever fought, whatever the government might say or think, the men who fought and died fought for their nation, their extended family.

And just as we instinctively put our children before the children of others, we should put our race and nation first.

In every other context we do this without the slightest hesitation, because for any group to survive, its members must put its interests first. General Motors cannot survive if its employees think GM's interests are no more important than those of Ford or Chrysler!

And the fundamental interest of any nation or race is survival as a people. We have a right -- an absolute right -- to be us, and only we can be us.

We have a right to be left alone in our homelands, to take part in the unfolding of our national identities free of the unwanted embrace of people unlike ourselves.

Every other race and nationality understands this.

We are the only dupes who pretend to believe that if our country fills up with the children of others rather than our own children, it will still be our country.

In closing, I note that it is fashionable, if only in white countries, to argue that national or racial loyalty is not just outmoded but wrong, that it is the abiding bigotry of our age.

Here is the logical, lethal conclusion to which we're led if we believe all peoples are equivalent.

If we're really no different from Algerians or Zulus, they, too, are part of our extended family and have equal call on the loyalties we feel for those of our own stock. If we're compelled to believe this, the most obvious steps we must take to survive as a people, the most elementary distinctions we must make, all become immoral and indefensible.

It is, instead, this campaign against racial and national loyalty that is the great bigotry of our age.

It is like telling parents that their children should be no more precious to them than anyone else's children, that it is immoral to play favourites.

It is just as monstrous to tell a man to turn his back on the people who share his heritage, his culture, his ancestry, and his destiny as it is to tell him to turn his back on his children.

This twisted imperative is a recent invention of the West, and has currency only in the West.

Let us hope it dies as quickly as it has grown, for unless we are able to rekindle what our ancestors took for granted -- a sense of the larger biological connectedness to nation and culture -- then just as surely as demography is destiny, our destiny will be oblivion.