"I Seem To See The River Seine Foaming with Much Blood" | Blog Posts

"I Seem To See The River Seine Foaming with Much Blood"

11/13/2015

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It's 23 years since I wrote my National Review cover story "Time To Rethink Immigration?", twenty years since I wrote my immigration book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, almost sixteen years since we started VDARE.com. On the on the one hand, this fill me with profound sorrow when I contemplate the tragedies, like that in Paris tonight, that could so easily have been avoided. On the other hand, it means we always have apposite commentary already on the site:

Here's Enoch Powell on the Paris massacres—in 1968:

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.
In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: At each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “if only”, they love to think, “if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen”. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after...

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” (Emphases added).

Here's me in the wake of the CHARLIE HEBDO massacre, a mere eleven months ago:

Today’s shootings in Paris (12 Dead in ‘Terrorist’ Attack on Paris Satirical Newspaper, by Dan Good and Meghan Kelly, abcnews.com, Jan 7 2015) remind me of the late Lawrence Auster‘s proposal for dealing with Muslims in the West: they should simply be expelled. He worked this out in considerable detail here; there’s a video version here.
Today, of course, the idea that any immigrant group should be expelled from anywhere in the West is simply unthinkable. But the unthinkable happens quite often.