The limitations of non-racist imperialism

Thanks to $10 Penguin Classics, I've just finished reading Niall Ferguson's controversial book Empire: How Britain made the modern world.

This work was regarded as controversial when it came out in 2003, because of Ferguson's positive assessment of British imperialism, which he believes had a beneficial impact on the countries that Britain colonised.

Unfortunately, he overlooks (or ignores) the point that the success of British imperialism depended on an assumption of racial superiority on the part of the British soldiers and officials who administrated the Empire.

This issue was picked up by Jared Taylor in an excellent review on the VDare site.

As Taylor points out, it simply isn't possible to run an empire without the ruling class believing it's racially superior to the people being ruled over. Hence when egalitarian ideology prevailed after WWII, the British quickly lost the will to keep their Empire together.

Admittedly, even if the British still had the will to keep the Empire together after the war, they would have struggled to do so. Following the Japanese defeats of British forces in South East Asia, British prestige was in tatters, and most of the populace in that part of the world no longer bought into the myth of white racial superiority.

Success in Burma later in the war couldn't make up for the calamitous defeats of European forces in Malaya and Indonesia.

African troops serving in the defeated French armed forces also came to the conclusion that Europeans weren't quite as competent and imposing as they appeared back in Africa.

Perhaps the closest thing to a viable form of non-racist imperialism was the mercantile imperialism adopted by northern European powers in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

In the 18th Century Britain, France and Holland didn't try to conquer large swaves of territory or impose their cultures on the locals, as they would go on to do in the 19th Century.
Instead, they established carefully located trading settlements such as Batavia and Cape Town, from which they could trade with the hinterland and exchange ideas and technology.

This wasn't practical in North America though, where the settlers had already established large colonies on their own initiative, and British attempts to discourage them from moving West of the Appalachian mountains ended in defeat for Britain in the War of Independence.

It would be an interesting to speculate what would have happened if the European powers had continued with the 18th Century model of pragmatic, piece-meal colonisation into the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Certainly the white position in South Africa would be a lot different. Instead of a few million marginalised whites inhabiting a large country populated mostly by Black natives and immigrants, the whites would probably be concentrated in small white majority states around the main trading ports like Capetown and Durban - arguably a more sustainable situation than the present one.

Politics and free speech

Jim Kalb has an interesting article at Turnabout on political correctness and its opponents.

Mr Kalb points out that right-liberals support politically incorrect free speech more than left liberals because they are less concerned with results than with principles.

Since left liberals believe that liberal principles such as non-discrimination need to be translated into less discrimination in terms of real world outcomes, they are willing to override traditional reasons for defending free speech, such as a concern for establishing the truth or countering corruption, through legislation like hate speech laws.

For example, in the left-liberal view, if free speech makes a particular group, such as women or muslims, feel alienated or insulted, then it is acceptable to restrict freedom of speech.

In contrast, right-liberals are generally opposed to introducing laws to enforce people to conform to liberal principles, as they believe in equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome.

Hence, while right-liberals believe people should respect liberal principles of equality, they don't believe they should be restricted from saying things which violate such principles.

Subsequently, the defence of free speech has been a lot stronger in the United States than in many European and Commonwealth countries, where elites have a greater concern with equality in practice rather in theory.

Among the various liberal groups in the U.S, libertarians have been the strongest supporters of free speech and are well represented on the Internet, which has a disproportionately high percentage of libertarians.

However, those groups which stand to lose the most from the censorship of free speech, are not libertarians but particularists like traditional conservatives and ethno-nationalists, who wish to directly challenge liberalism over key liberal concepts like the malleability of human nature.

So although particularists and libertarians don't have a lot of common in terms of political ideology (with most, but not all libertarians shying away from the topic of equality) particularists seem to be somewhat dependent on libertarian support in getting their message across to the public.

Kalb says that the popular and intellectual appeal of libertarianism is growing, and its growth appears to be influenced by the growth of new technologies such as online business, which appeals to the laissez-faire/individualist ethos of libertarians.

If libertarianism does continue to grow, it will be interesting to see if particularism does also, and whether the two forces will move closer together, as in some form of paleo-libertarianism, or drift further apart.

Right liberalism - the fool's gold of the centre-right

While the popularity of the centre-right is on the wane in many western countries, centre-right parties should not get sucked into the idea that right-liberal policies are the way to win back voters.

The decline in support for centre-right parties over the last 20 years basically comes down to three factors:

1. unmarried women are tending to support the centre-left

2. declining home ownership is having an adverse impact on support for centre-right parties

3. ethnic minorities are voting for the centre-left.

The basic strategy of mainstream conservative parties since the early 1980s has been to try and contain left-liberalism through neo-liberal economic policy, and abandon the supposedly less important social sphere to the centre-left.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in increased immigration of left-leaning minorities and an accompanying increase in property prices which has made it harder for people to get a foot on the property ladder.

Since property owners are more likely to favour low taxes and economic stability, this decline in home ownership had undermined the traditional support base of the centre-right. Making things doubly bad is the fact that, as Steve Sailer points out, property affordability is also a decisive factor in family formation.

Most potential centre-right voters are rational people who are unlikely to start a family until they have a reasonable chance of getting an affordable mortgage. While the marital or property status of men does not have a particularly big bearing on their political views, it often has a decisive impact on the voting patterns of women.

The longer women stay unmarried, the less likely they are to vote for the centre-right and the more likely they are to be swayed by the generous welfare policies of the left. This is a point highlighted by Democrat pundits Jon Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their new book The Emerging Democratic Majority. According to Judis and Teixeira, during the 2000 congressional elections, single women backed the Democrats over the Republicans by a massive 63 percent to 35 percent.

The centre-right's strategy of liberalising the financial sector, while increasing non-western immigration, may have helped it gain short-term support from big business, but it has done massive damage to its electoral base. The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, in which taxpayers are having to bail out bankrupt lending institutions, is likely to further undermine popular support for the centre-right.

In recent decades, centre-right parties, such as the New Zealand National Party and the Australian Liberal Party, have tended to assume they could count on the support of economically successful minorities. However, recent evidence suggests that this assumption is no longer valid. For example, in California and Australia, East Asian voters are tending to vote for centre-left candidates, which seems counter intuitive from a class interest perspective. Part of the reason for this may be that Asian immigrants support the well-funded health and education services found in many English-speaking countries, but are able to avoid paying for the full cost of these services through taxation by earning a lot of their income overseas.

The current strategy of the centre right, as typified by National leader John Key and Conservative leader Duncan Cameron, is to move further to the left on social policy, so as to attract voters away from the now dominant centre-left, whilst maintaining a neo-liberal stance on economic issues. However, since centre-left parties have already moved towards the centre on economic issues, the centre-right is effectively chosing to campaign on territory where the centre-left is already well entrenched, and in so doing is failing to provide voters with a distinct alternative.

Since the Iraq War has done serious damage to the right's reputation for handling foreign policy issues, the most promising area where centre-right parties can recover lost ground is by moving to the right on immigration. Opinion polls show that the majority of voters in western countries are in favour of immigration restrictionism, and the social and economic externalities of immigration are probably the hotest topic on talk radio.

Given big business's involvement in promoting immigration expansionism and its tarnished reputation for passing on externalities to consumers, as seen in the blundering inefficiency of many national telecoms, and the corruption of companies like Enron, centre-right parties should not be promoting neo-liberal ideologues like libertarian Ron Paul to lead the charge against the centre-left.

In 2005, the National Party went to the polls with a libertarian ideologue of its own, former reserve bank governor Don Brash ( New Zealand's answer to Alan Greenspan) and despite a reasonable showing in the provinces, failed to regain office for a third time.

Sadly though, the centre-right is still not yet learning from its mistakes. In the US primaries many conservative voters and pundits are chosing to back the neoconservative canditate Rudy Guliano over the more conservative Fred Thompson, while limited immigration advocate Tom Tancredo has already pulled out of the running.

How many more electoral defeats will the centre-right have to suffer before it swings back to conservatism?

Islamophobia

In a new post on the Anti-war blog, Pat Buchanan points out the misguided focus of the right-liberal Islamophobes who claim Arab terrorism is a mortal threat to western states.

“For all the blather of a restored caliphate, the “Islamofascists,” as the neo-cons call them, cannot create or run a modern state, or pose a mortal threat to America. The GNP of the entire Arab world is not equal to Spain’s.”

The real threat posed by Islam is not terrorism but demography. In the absence of strong economies, Middle Eastern states only really have one weapon with which to seriously threaten the West and that’s an expanding population.

One reason why there’s been little progress in improving relations between Israel and Palestine is because of Palestine’s burgeoning population. In Israel’s eyes, Palestine is waging a pretty successful demographic war, and unless growth in the Palestinian population slows pretty sharply, Israel isn't likely to come out with an olive branch anytime soon.

France is now getting a taste of what may be in store for the rest of Europe as it’s economy labours under the weight of a rapidly growing Muslim underclass.

In the wider scheme of things, terrorism is only a major threat to the West if the West falls prey to its own ideological delusions.

Al Qaeda’s ongoing strategy seems to revolve around goading America and Britain into getting involved in protracted wars in the Middle East with the aim of slowly bleeding their indebted economies and turning western public opinion against interventionist strategies.

The West should take a lesson from Israel’s predicament and limit Muslim immigration to a small number of skilled immigrants who will follow the middle class pattern of, for want of a better term, "small family values."