01m32s — Another day in Cuck Island. (Next door to Cuck Ireland.)
09m21s — By the great Iron Bridge. (The fruit of bureaucratic managerialism.)
17m34s — Shutting down Speakers' Corner. (Free speech is subversive.)
23m13s — Immigration officers at work. (Christians, no; ISIS graduates, yes.)
30m31s — The Beast from the East. (Heading for a Keystone Cops war.)
32m48s — Prototypes? For a wall? (How to lose elections.)
34m15s — Australia steps up for South African whites. (You can't not have a population policy.)
36m45s — Stephen Hawking, RIP. (A disciple of Horace Walpole?)
38m52s — Signoff. (Bring a soft pillow.)
[Music clip: From Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, fife'n'drum version]
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome to the podcast, ladies and gents. This is of course your atavistically genial host John Derbyshire, reporting on the affairs of the world this mid-March weekend.I am actually recording on March 16th, in that little dark gully between the Ides of March and Saint Patrick's Day. That puts me in a historical and perhaps somewhat nostalgic frame of mind, so this week's Radio Derb may be more self-indulgent than usual. My mind is on the past; but I shall strive to impart some useful information about the present, and some sensible prognostications about the future.
The land of my Birth, old Blighty, has been in the news. It seems to me there are lessons for all of us in what's happened over there, so I shall give over most of this week's podcast to stories from across the pond.
02 — Another day in Cuck Island. My VDARE.com colleague James Kirkpatrick, whose ancestors were presumably connected in some way with a church dedicated to the Saint we celebrate this weekend, has been referring to Britain in his recent pieces as Cuck Island.
That's a bit approximate: There are actually two big islands off the coast of northwest Europe there, Britannia and Hibernia, along with a multitude of small islands.We know what he means, though. "Cuck" is right on the nail; and with all due respect to Saint Patrick, it applies to the lesser island just as much as, if not more so, as to the larger one.
Multiculturalism has taken over from Roman Catholicism as the state religion of the Irish Republic. The current Prime Minister of that country is an open homosexual whose father was Indian, born in Bombay. The Irish government boasts of the number of "refugees" it takes in, most of them of course just young men from outhouse countries looking for an easier life; and Ireland's quality newspapers are full of editorial demands for more immigration.
One of these op-eds I was just reading, in the eminently respectable Irish Times, opened with a quote from sainted nationalist martyr Patrick Pearse, suggested thirty million as a suitable population for Ireland, nearly five times Ireland's current population.
The Land of Saints and Scholars is now the land of open-borders ethnomasochists and Third World parasites — the Land of Cucks and Moochers.
That's bye the bye. It's the big island, Britain, that's been in the news this week. I shall cover that; but first, here's a small item, not a headliner, that illustrates why "Cuck Island" is a pretty good descriptor for what was once a proud, energetic nation.
Wednesday this week a young woman named Mariam Moustafa, 18 years old, died from injuries she'd received when being beaten three weeks earlier, by … by whom? By "a group" says the BBC News report.
If you read 200 or so words into the BBC report you learn that it was, quote "a group of about ten girls." The beating started in the street. Ms Moustafa ran from the group and boarded a bus, but they followed her and beat her some more, giving her traumatic head injuries from which she subsequently died.
But who were these people who attacked her? "Ten British girls," said one news outlet. O-kay, so is there a race angle? Ms Moustafa was Egyptian, though light-skinned and not obviously non-British.
The London Daily Express, a major newspaper, ran a story about Ms Moustafa on Thursday this week headlined Teenage Egyptian student dies after "racist" gang attack at Nottingham bus stop, with quotes around the word "racist." Why the quotes? Because they are actually quoting someone, Ms Moustafa's family.
From this Daily Express story, quote: "The teenager's family believe the attack was racially-motivated," end quote.
We get no other information. The Express identifies Ms Moustafa's attackers as, quote, "female yobs," end quote. "Yobs" is Brit-speak for "unruly young people," with no racial connotations. You could in fact come away from the British news coverage of Ms Moustafa's cruel death assuming that she'd been set upon by young white British women who had figured out somehow that she was a foreigner and thereupon assaulted her with xenophobia in their hearts.
Then you might happen upon an Egyptian news outlet: the English-language outlet Egypt Today, for instance, which naturally has taken an interest in the death of a young Egyptian woman. Quote from them, Wednesday, March 14th: "In late February, Mariam, an 18-year-old engineering student based in Nottingham, U.K., was brutally beaten by 10 British women of African descent." End quote.
Just another day in Cuck Island. Wait a minute, though. Britain has a police force, doesn't it? This attack happened three weeks ago in a street, in broad daylight, and then on a bus with a conductor and many passengers aboard. Surely the Bobbies have by now figured out who done it and have them securely under arrest?
[Laugh.] Well, they did take in one 17-year-old girl on suspicion of assault; but they soon released her on bail. Britain's police are easily the most cucked sub-population on Cuck Island. They scurry around in terror that someone might call them "racist" — because, for example, they'd pursued charges against ten black girls who'd beaten a white girl to death.
Or because they'd pursued charges against Muslim gangs committing statutory rape on teenage English girls. That's the next segment.
03 — By the great Iron Bridge. I've got to assume that very few Americans ever heard of Telford, a district in the English West Midlands. Steve Sailer admits to never having heard of it; and if Steve hasn't heard of it, nobody has.
This is excusable. There was no such place as Telford until 1968. That was when bureaucratic managerialism in Britain was in the ascendant. Ancient towns and villages were being grouped together in strange new entities under stone-faced administrators filled with a conviction of their own managerial competence. Britain's old counties were reorganized to suit the inclinations and convenience of these mandarins, and people were shoveled around like so many truckloads of concrete.Shortly afterwards Britain entered the EU, and those British mandarins, to their delight, became globalist apparatchiks, with way bigger expense accounts. They must have had many a laugh with each other over the champagne and truffles, at how easy it had been.
It was the end of old England. Mass Third World immigration was a key component of the new order. British people who dared to raise their voices against what was happening — people like Enoch Powell — were insulted, abused, and hounded out of public life.
Telford was, in other words, created out of thin air just as Britain's modern Cultural Revolution was gathering steam: the revolution that turned an ancient, proud, dynamic, and distinctive nation into the third-rate multicultural slum we see today — Cuck Island.
Let's be grateful for small mercies, though. At least the mandarins gave their new creation a name, when they might have — and probably would have preferred to — just give it a number: "District 479," or perhaps "Airstrip One."
The name they gave was a fine and honorable one, too — surely an oversight on the mandarins' part. They named this new district after Thomas Telford, the son of an illiterate shepherd in the rough border country where England meets Scotland — the ancestral home of our own Scotch-Irish.
Thomas Telford became the greatest civil engineer of his time, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The innumerable roads, bridges, and canals he built were the foundation for Britain's — and therefore the world's — Industrial Revolution.
The region now called Telford was at the heart of the early Industrial Revolution. There are several excellent museums there covering the period. I strongly recommend a visit next time you are in England, especially if you have kids who need to know some history. Right nearby is the great Iron Bridge, opened in 1781 — not one of Thomas Telford's, but the first bridge of any size, anywhere in the world, made out of iron.
Please excuse my going on at such length about this, but there's a personal dimension. My father grew up Oakengates, five miles from the Iron Bridge. In Dad's childhood a hundred-odd years ago, Oakengates was a little coal-mining village. It's now been swallowed up in the Telford district. I spent time in my own childhood in and around Oakengates. Aged eight or nine, I climbed the Wrekin, which is what passes for a mountain in the flat West Midlands countryside — all of thirteen hundred feet high.
The Telford created fifty years ago wasn't just an administrative abstraction. The bureaucrats built an actual town, with lots of glass-and-concrete modern buildings, residential projects, and housing estates. People were moved in from the big old industrial cities further east: Birmingham, Wolverhampton, and Walsall.
Some of these people were old-stock English proles that Charles Dickens would have recognized. Others were Third World immigrants: Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh, blacks from the Caribbean and Africa.
Thence to last week's news. From the London Daily Telegraph, March 11th, quote:
Up to 1,000 children could have been abused in Britain's biggest ever child abuse scandal, an investigation has revealed.End quote. Notice that key phrase: "over a 40-year period." In other words, no sooner was the cement dry on this new town of Telford, and the white proles and the Muslims moved into those gleaming new projects, the Muslims were preying on the white girls.Hundreds of children, some as young as 11, are estimated to have been drugged, beaten and raped over a 40-year period in the town of Telford.
It's the Rotherham scandal of five years ago all over again. As there, nobody much cared about these girls. From the point of view of the globalized mandarins and the middle-class social workers with degrees in Sociology from Cuck University, the girls were just white trash, totally lacking in the vibrancy and diversity that make a modern society worth living in.
Also as in Rotherham — and in Nottingham, where Ms Moustafa was beaten to death by Third World savages — the police had no interest in investigating what was going on, much less in arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators. If they did show such interest, someone might call them racist. [Scream.]
At this point, though, you might be getting a bit puzzled. Okay, British law enforcement won't pursue rapists and murderers who are black or Muslim. Doesn't that leave them with time on their hands, though? What do British cops and other law enforcers do all day long to justify their salaries?
This week we found out.
04 — Shutting down Speakers' Corner. The locus of this segment is Speakers' Corner in London.
This is an open area at the northeast corner of Hyde Park in west-central London. It's been famous for two hundred years as a spot where dissidents, political radicals, religious zealots, self-styled prophets, and just plain cranks can get up on a soapbox and say what's on their minds. Wikipedia says the following, quote:Speakers' Corner was frequented by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Ben Tillett, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and William Morris … Its existence is frequently upheld as a demonstration of free speech, as anyone can turn up unannounced and talk on almost any subject, although always at the risk of being heckled by regulars.End quote. Wikipedia missed one of my favorites, although as he's fictional I guess they can be excused. This is the one in Chapter Four of Evelyn Waugh's 1933 novel Scoop. I'll quote the passage, if you don't mind; partly to remind you that some of the nonsense you hear nowadays goes back a long way, and partly just because I like it.
You need to know that in the novel, there is a war going on in a fictional African country named Ishmaelia. Edited quote from Scoop, 1933:
William walked to Hyde Park. A black man, on a little rostrum, was explaining to a small audience why the Ishmaelite patriots were right and the traitors were wrong …End quote. So that's Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park."Who built the Pyramids?" cried the Ishmaelite orator. "A Negro. Who invented the circulation of the blood? A Negro. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you as impartial members of the great British public, who discovered America?"
Well, British dissident Tommy Robinson, who has made a name for himself by protesting about the flood of Muslims coming into Britain, went to Speakers' Corner last weekend to get up on his soapbox and speak to anyone willing to listen. His subject, very apt for Speakers' Corner, was freedom of speech.
Tommy had barely cleared his throat when the Peelers showed up — at least four of them, in a squad car. They told him to pack up his soap box and leave, if he knew what was good for him. Tommy caught the whole episode on video.
Put this together with the episode at King's College in London that I reported on last week, and it's clear that the British authorities now regard freedom of speech to be a subversive notion, at any rate when the speech is directed against Islam.
Speakers' Corner may be in the news again this weekend. Sunday, March 18th, Tommy Robinson and other Dissident Right activists plan a rally there, again in support of free speech.
At this point it would not be at all surprising if the British authorities found some way to forestall this Sunday gathering, perhaps just by arresting all the dissidents. Perhaps they'll commit them to mental hospitals, as the old Soviet Union used to do with theirs. I hope I'm not giving them any ideas here.
You can be sure at any rate that if the event isn't shut down in advance somehow, the Bobbies will be there in force to protect Islam from any negative remarks.
It's not just the street cops, either. Britain's immigration officers are fully invested in defending Islam against any criticism.
Or rather — I'm straining to be fair here — are fully invested in trying to prevent the Muslim riots and terrorism and mayhem they know would result if Britain's legacy population were to be allowed to vent their feelings about Muslim supremacy and ask to have their country back.
05 — Immigration officers at work. Last Friday American Dissident Right activist Brittany Pettibone and her Austrian boyfriend Martin Sellner arrived at an airport near London to meet with the aforementioned Tommy Robinson and join him at this Sunday's event on Speakers' Corner. British immigration officers detained them for two days, then deported them.
Monday this week a Canadian dissident, Lauren Southern, also arrived in Britain. Same deal: Detention, interrogation, deportation.A nice ironic touch here was that during the course of Ms Southern's interrogation she was asked whether she was a Christian extremist. This, by law-enforcement officials of a nation which has Christianity as its state religion, and whose head of state is also head of the state church and Defender of the Faith. You can't make this stuff up.
My feelings about those incidents are somewhat mixed. I strongly support the right of any country to refuse entry to anyone, for any reason. I wish this country, the U.S.A., would refuse entry to a whole lot more people than it does.
The trouble is, of course, that the Pettibones, Sellners, and Southerns — mild-mannered middle-class white Americans, Austrians, and Canadians who seek to stop the demographic transformation of their countries — these are the only people the Brits turn away at their airports.
While immigration officials were spending several man-days interrogating these three, unknown hundreds of parasites and lunatics from the most benighted hell-holes of the Third World were being waved in to Britain with cheery smiles, given public housing, welfare benefits, and healthcare.
For a random instance of just how deranged the Brits now are, check out the case of Ahmed Hassan, eighteen years old, from Iraq. Young Ahmed sneaked into Britain hidden in a truck that brought him through the Channel Tunnel from France. British immigration officers intercepted him. Ahmed told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS. Let me just repeat that: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.
Ahmed was not refused entry. Instead, he was given free accommodation, first in a charity shelter, then in a pleasant middle-class foster home. He was sent to school, at British taxpayer expense of course. His teachers reported him telling them it was his duty as a Muslim to hate Britain.
Today, Friday, Ahmed was convicted of making a bomb and trying to detonate it in a London subway train last Fall. Fortunately the thing didn't explode properly; but it still left 51 subway passengers with serious burns.
Let me just repeat one more time: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS. Enoch Powell got it right: "Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad."
Just a footnote here on those immigration officials who refused entry to Brittany Pettibone. Ms Pettibone posted, on Twitter, an image of the letter given to her by British immigration as they booted her out, her "Notice of refusal of leave to enter."
It is plain that the letter was composed by someone with limited English-language skills. Sample:
Furthermore, [comma] Your [capital "y"] boyfriend have [not "has"] in his possession the Leaflets [capital "l"] with scenarios regarding possible violence at his speech.Sample:
I believe that your planned activities … are likely to insight tensions … ["incite" spelled "i-n-s-i-g-h-t"].If you have passed through British immigration recently you will know that the officials dealing with you do not much resemble Michael Caine or Helen Mirren. They are much more likely to resemble Idi Amin or Indira Gandhi.
You're a committed Christian? Sorry, no entry. You trained with ISIS? Enjoy your stay! Here, take these welfare vouchers!
In the event that I myself get refused entry to the land of my birth, I can't make up my mind which would hurt more: Being turned away by a white cucked British pod person, or by a sneering black or Muslim triumphalist.
Then, thinking about it some more, I'm not sure either would hurt at all. I've given up on Britain. The place is gone, gone into multicultural darkness, never to return.
06 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: One more from Britain, then I'll leave the accurséd place alone.Last week I reported on the incident where a Russian ex-spy in Britain had been poisoned, together with his daughter, by a Russian nerve agent.
This week saw some major escalation, with the Brits expelling Russian diplomats and Mr Putin threatening retaliation.
It so happens that Britain's been hit by major storms recently — snow and ice storms. One of them was called the Beast from the East. This expression, the Beast from the East, was all over tabloid headlines in the British papers.
I skim those papers, in their internet versions, as part of my morning news trawl. I'm not always totally awake when I do this, though; and I've been concentrating on the contretemps with Russia, not reading the weather stories. So I'd see this expression "the Beast from the East" in some headline, and think to myself: "Oh, come on, Putin's not that bad …"
Well, the Russia thing is getting nasty. There is even talk of Britain and Russia going to war. That would be something to see.
I assume that at this point in the national decline, Britain's armed forces are manned … Oh wait, I can't say "manned," can I? … are peopled entirely by overweight lesbians and Muslim transsexuals. Russia's, given the decrepit state that country is in, I assume are peopled by malnourished drunks who'll sell you their rifle for a bottle of vodka. It would be a Keystone Cops war. Bring me some popcorn.
Item: President Trump was down in California on Tuesday, inspecting prototypes for the border wall he promised us on the campaign trail.
Er, excuse me? Prototypes? For a wall?
If I invent some new kind of gadget with 200 moving parts, I understand the Patent Office will want me to demonstrate a prototype; but a wall? A wall is just one row of bricks or blocks on top of another, on top of another, on top of another, … until you reach the required height. Doesn't the President have some background in construction? I seem to remember …
Mr President: Your party, the GOP, lost a Pennsylvania House seat this week in a special election, a seat you won handily in 2016. You lost it by a whisker, but you lost it. Perhaps if you took a break from tweeting about Alec Baldwin and concentrated on doing the things you promised to do on the campaign trail, perhaps your party would be in better shape politically.
Item: Two weeks ago I proposed a special visa for white South Africans wishing to escape their persecution in that country. White farmers in South Africa are currently being murdered at the rate of one a week.
Well, see the power of Radio Derb! This week we learned that Australia is actually considering such a visa. Australia's Home Affairs minister told the London Daily Telegraph on Wednesday his department was looking at methods to fast-track South African farmers into Australia on humanitarian visas.
In related news, I see that the leader of the Labour Party down under has called for Australia to have a national population policy. Labour is the center-left party down there, currently out of power at the federal level. Being of the center-left, the party leader of course phrased his call in the cuckiest way possible, ruling out any kind of, quote, "racially discriminatory migration policy," end quote.
Whatever, Bruce. I'll just say again the thing I said in We Are Doomed: You can't not have a population policy. To pretend you don't have one, and to discourage your citizens from thinking about population issues, is itself a population policy — most likely one of very fast and unlimited population growth.
It's like what Aldous Huxley said about metaphysics: The choice is not between having a policy and not having one, it's between having a good one and having a bad one.
If this visa for white South African refugees comes to reality, Australia will at least have a somewhat better population policy.
Item: The physicist Stephen Hawking left us this week at the age of 76. Hawking was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease in 1963 and given five years to live. That was 55 years ago.
I recall the first time I ever heard of Hawking, or rather saw his name in print. It was in Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's classic book Gravitation, which I acquired sometime in the mid-1970s. There was a picture of Hawking in the book, looking more or less normal, with a reference to his overcoming severe diability.
The disability got worse. By his seventies he could only move one finger and an eyelid. Nothing ever seems to have gotten him down, though. His spirit never failed — a model to us all, as we cope with far lesser problems.
And Hawking was a genius in his sphere — the sphere of theoretical physics. His ideas about worldly matters were often silly, but that is frequently the case with geniuses. We should smile and put up with it, especially when intellectual power, no matter how narrowly focused, is joined to such a wonderfully robust spirit.
Horace Walpole said that the world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. Hawking was a thinker, and I believe he really did look on life as a comedy. Perhaps he was right; perhaps it is. Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking.
07 — Signoff. There you have it, ladies and gents; another week slips away into oblivion. There have been so many … 107,538 since Julius Caesar got his ticket punched on that other Ides of March, if my arithmetic is sound. The opening words of a half-remembered poem come to mind: "Softly the civilized centuries fall …" So they do, and we with them.
Well, thank you for listening, and apologies for the melancholy note there. Once in a while we get to thinking about life in the round, about our own stumblings and fumblings as part of history's grand pageant.This mood came upon me the other day after a conversation with a friend about music. My friend had read somewhere that you get imprinted with music you hear around age 14, and your musical taste never thereafter drifts far from that. I expressed skepticism. I got hooked on opera in my thirties, never having previously paid it any attention.
Well, the world is full of theories. The conversation did, though, turn my thoughts to the music I really liked when I was fourteen.
Here to play us out is a sample, a pop hit that I was enthralled by at age fourteen. Uncharacteristically for me: I'm a words guy, not often captured by purely instrumental music. I want to hear the human voice. This is an exception, an instrumental piece.
It takes me all the way back across the decades to my innocent adolescence in dear old England, when such a country still existed, before the damn fool politicians — aided and abetted, I guess it has to be said, by the damn fool voters who elected them — before they wrecked the place.
You want melancholy? I got melancholy.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week. Now, assume a horizontal position, with a nice soft pillow under your head, and close your eyes. Take it away, Santo and Johnny.
[Music clip: Santo and Johnny, "Sleepwalk."]
