As is (fairly) well known, back in 1957, William F. Buckley wrote the following:
“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
But that was a long time ago. Surely Buckley matured over the years? Well, no. Shikha Dalmia, writing in The Week, notes a bizarre, and deeply unattractive, new enthusiasm for The Camp of the Saints, which Shikha aptly describes as “a sick dystopian book penned by French novelist Jean Raspail in 1973 that predicts the demise of the West by unfettered Third World migration.”
Shikha, an Indian who grew up in New Delhi and who now lives in Michigan, could be expected to display a certain lack of enthusiasm for a novel that depicts La Belle France as being destroyed by a million “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised” Indian immigrants, people who, according to Raspail, spend 99% of their time rolling around in each other’s bodily fluids, rather in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s Yahoos, though it must be said that Raspail (probably) isn’t as misogynistic as Swift.
So what has this to do with Bill? Back in 1994, Bill was worrying about, well, swarthy-skinned folk showing up on Europe’s shores. His piece “No Irish Need Apply”1, unlike Raspail, isn’t hysterically, unashamedly racist, but he still calls The Camp of the Saints “a great novel” as he ponders what to do with “unwelcome people”: “What to do? Starve them? Shoot them? We don’t do that kind of thing–but what do we do when we run out of airplanes in which to send them back home?” Gee, if there were only someone who would, you know, kill them for us, so we wouldn’t have to think about such things.
“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size, …”
Afterwords
Back in 2011, Carl Bogus wrote an excellent book, William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism, catching WFB in the act of being WFB back in 1964. In that year, in Birmingham, Alabama, there were intense struggles between civil rights demonstrators and Bull Connors’ police force. Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, went to Alabama to take part in the demonstrations and was murdered. The story, of course, received very wide coverage, which disgusted Buckley, and he said so: “So the lady drove down a lonely stretch of road in the dead of night, sharing the front seat with a Negro identified with the protesting movement, and got killed. Why, one wonders, was this a story that occupied the front pages from one end of the country to another, if newspapers are concerned with the unusual, the unexpected?”
Of course, Buckley isn’t advocating, or even condoning, racially motivated murders. He’s just saying they’re not important. Another troublemaker dead! Dear me! What’s for breakfast? What’s truly repulsive about Buckley is that he doesn’t realize how repulsive his attitude is. His “colonialist” conviction that “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned” people don’t count is so deeply ingrained that he can only assume that liberals are all fakes, either conscious or unconscious hypocrites, engaging in the suicide of the West, to coin a phrase, out of moral vanity.
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Bill’s headline, “No Irish Need Apply”, baffles me. Buckley himself was Irish, of course, and the head makes explicit reference to the fact that back in the nineteenth century the Irish were considered stupid, vicious, and lecherous by nature. It’s quite possible that Buckley was familiar with the wish expressed by Thomas Macaulay, the famous English historian, that Oliver Cromwell had exterminated the Irish while he had the chance (in the manner, Macaulay explained, that Americans were currently exterminating the “red Indians”), so that the civilized English could take their place. But somehow Buckley left all his irony in his head. ↩︎
