Sent on September seventeen, 2009
Christopher Caldwell
c/o Doubleday
Random House publisher's publicity department
1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 USA
Dear Christopher Caldwell:
I am writing to say you are a remarkable looking man. No. I’m kidding. I’m writing to say I read your remarkable book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Calwell, Doubleday New York 2009. That’s an unsolicited plug, as I shall be posting this letter on my web site nobabies.net. The point of the book is that Europe will emerge from its contact with Islam profoundly changed. And it’s true. No. I’m kidding. Europe will no more emerge from its contact with Islam than the Indians have emerged from their contact with Europe.
And for the same reason.
Since you are passionate about your subject and since our interests overlap I feel the urge to tell you all I know. It can be summed up in one sentence which I’ll tell you right away. I’m kidding. But I’ll get around to it.
I noticed in your book that while you admit to a profound mystery as to why Europe has taken in so many Muslims as immigrants, you seem never to question current dogma except for the single opinion that this immigration is a problem. It seems to me if your assumptions don’t explain the facts you might seriously consider questioning your assumptions.
Just for instance you attribute the “race problem” in the United States to slavery and segregation. I hate the word slavery. It sounds like “slippery,” and sticky bodily things always give me the hiccups. Anyway we had it. Legal as all get out. Constitutionally protected. Bad thing. It needed a constitutional amendment. The rules of amending the constitution were well understood, but it wasn’t going to happen until the South graciously withdrew from the alliance and left the United States free to abolish the loathsome custom without great difficulty. Instead the Union invaded the South and a half million young men died. Then with federal troops controlling the South under Reconstruction the amendment was passed. You knew this.
Not content, the United States then confiscated the land that had belonged to slave holders and divided it up among the former slaves. Maybe you did not know this. It is called land reform, and it is perfectly legal so long as the confiscated land is paid for. It wasn’t paid for. But it happened. Now the Deep South is very good land. In fact it is about the best: fertile, warm, rained upon, few barriers to transportation. Today Alabama exports more rice than any country in the world. I’m kidding. Of course it does not export more than the United States. But you get the picture.
Other great farming areas tend to rely on irrigation, which leaves the farmer at the mercy of a government, or on fossil water as in the Midwest and northern India, and fossil water only lasts for a while. Europe has rain but it is cut up by mountains and divided into peninsulas and the weather is lousy. If you want to feed the world, you can’t beat the South. And the Black people owned it, pretty much all of it. In this regard they had more real wealth than any other nation on earth.
Of course they knew how to farm it. They’d been doing that for generations. So they just kept doing what they did so well. The land met their needs. They ate about as much as they had before, which was a lot better than white men ate farther north. They worked as hard. So nothing much changed. The difference was that they were Free. They now lived in a democracy, and in a democracy what the people want the people always get. For instance neither the people of the United States or Europe want immigration, which is why it doesn’t happen. I’m kidding of course. Your book tells us that it happens a lot despite overwhelming public sentiment. So we aren’t free at all. If policies so important and which we like so little can be rammed down our throats, none of us are free. We do what our masters, whoever the blazes they are, tell us to and then like it be cause they tell us we do. But at least the Blacks could share the delusion of freedom, which has to count for something.
Anyway, something bad happened. It was called “doing poor Black people out of their land.” And it happened right under the muzzles of Union guns. White people began to cheat the black people out of their land. They came in two flavors. Carpetbaggers came from the North and Scallywags came from the South. But a lot of both groups got rich. And the Black people went from enviable, even unparalleled, wealth for so large a group to absolute penury. THAT I say was an outrage. But nobody notices much.
Then there was segregation. Once the Union troops left, the White people started to extend their power beyond ownership of land and created a system under which two nationalities could coexist, working together but not blending. Then the Supreme Court said, without asking the people to vote on it that “Separate but equal is unconstitutional.” Segregation was bad. You could not have two societies. It had to be one. It had to be a National Society. And national socialism has been the law of the land ever since.
The White’s took one look at the storm troopers who were sent in to enforce the change and promptly knuckled under. But the Blacks were Bantu. They had been farmers for a long time in Africa, had been the people who finally figured out how to make farming work in Africa. But even longer, they had been warriors. They don’t knuckle so easily. Our national society remains a work in progress. They also have “something else” that is manifest in the vigor that makes their style and music so attractive to the rest of the world, you point out. Arab terrorists dress up like American Blacks.
That “something else” is something that Whites, in Europe and America, so painfully lack.
The “something else” is hidden in that sentence I shall get to shortly. I’m kidding of course. I get to nothing shortly.
First let me disabuse you of a superstition. It can be summed up in one sentence. Don’t belabor me with seven billion valid counter examples. I know they are there. But it’s a superstition. A superstition is a belief that is stubbornly maintained when there is no evidence to support it. In this case it is a belief that is maintained even after there is proof to the contrary. Here it is:
A woman gets pregnant by having sex with a man.
I’ll be you never questioned that one. Of course you didn’t. You were told that at an early age. I didn’t learn it until I was thirty five, but I’m kind of slow. I’m kidding, of course.
They told you that, and then they went into the gruesome anatomical details with lots of sticky bodily fluids until you screamed between hiccups, “Stop, already, I believe it.” Perhaps you did not know that offending someone’s sensibilities is a standard indoctrination technique. It is a way of getting someone to believe something however preposterous. It worked. You believe it. But it’s not true.
The truth is this:
A woman gets pregnant by having sex with a cousin.
That is the most important thing you will ever learn. So stop hiccupping and learn it. Don’t bother trying to disbelieve. If you learn it, the evidence will pile up without end. If you don’t learn it, the evidence will still be there, but you will not understand it.
I’ll show you what it means.
All right. I spelled Helgason wrong. Sue me.
This is a graph out of a study done in Iceland. The horizontal axis is kinship. 2 means second cousin orr closer, 3 means third cousin or closer and so forth. They went back 10 generations and counted how many ancestors couples shared and calculated kinship from that, so third cousin does not mean exactly what third cousin means usually, but close enough. They then compared kinship with fertility. The vertical axis is relative growth rate of the community. The critical level is zero. Zero growth. Just enough children to replace the parents.
Get it?
According to the superstition, any man can have children with any woman. But in fact, when you look at the evidence, once you are out past sixth cousin you won’t make enough babies to replace yourself. Effectively, over the long haul, that strategy does not make babies. Communities die. But at third cousin or closer, the birth rate is substantially above replacement. THAT is how women get pregnant at a sufficient rate to be biologically significant.
I have put a more formal proof on the disc I am enclosing. If you want a lot more proof, peruse nobabies.net. But as I said, evidence is everywhere.
For instance, in the early 1800’s in Charleston, South Carolina, there was a Jewish community. They were highly regarded and like Quakers were known to be scrupulously honest. That was important, because a lot of the wealth of that city at that time, and there was a lot of wealth, involved slavery. There’s that damned word again. (hic!) If you take the postulate, “All slave masters are scum,” then there was a lot of influential scum. So whom could you trust? Enter the Jews. They didn’t keep slaves but they did keep their word. They are still remembered with great respect and affection.
At the same time in New York, there was another Jewish community. But there was a difference. The South Carolina Jews were Reformed Jews. They accepted recruits. The New York Jews were Orthodox. The did not accept recruits. The New York community is still going strong. The South Carolina Jews are only a wistful memory, gentle ghosts from a lost time. They died out completely. They died of not marrying cousins.
Your “demographic transition,” the phenomenon of people getting rich and having fewer babies, is no mystery at all. Rich people can travel around and marry at whim. Poor people are stuck with next door neighbors who have lived next door for generations and are cousins. Remind the Deep South some time to thank all those poor, dead, stiff, rotting Yankee soldiers they killed. It made the South poor. The South is the only part of the country that still has a substantial population with ancestors going back a couple centuries. Without the Unpleasantness Between the States, they would all have died out.
Now you know why native Europeans do not have babies. They live in a highly mobile society. They don’t marry cousins. A lot don’t marry at all, but they still have some babies. Just not enough to survive.
There is a subtle point here. I have a good friend who, as it turns out, is from South Carolina. He raised his family and then he raised his grandchildren. When they brought him his first great grandchild, he refused to take the baby in his arm. He said, “I have raised two generations. That is enough. Somebody else needs to care for the grandchildren.” He knew, from long experience, that if he took the baby in his arm he would henceforth be that baby’s slave. (hic!) That’s the way it works. Babies command service. Be it nature or nurture, the society that does not worship babies cannot survive.
That’s why the pusillanimous, elite of Europe has so regularly betrayed their people. It’s those damned babies of the immigrants. They will lie, cheat, steal, subvert, whatever it takes to safeguard the interests of babies. Anybody’s babies.
If you take a gander at Habits of Empire, Walter Nugent, Alfred A. Knopff. New York. 2008, you will see that the United States expanded against all odds. Europe was just as supine against American demands then as they are against immigration now. It was those babies. Americans could make them.
The poor Indians. I mentioned them before. Their birth rate was marginally adequate. That is no mystery. The Indian civilization was very old. They had a tribal system, but the tribes were too large. According to the book, the birth rate of the pioneers was about 15 per family. It was a tidal wave of white skin. The Indians should have won. They had greater numbers. Like the Bantu, they were a warrior society. They had weapons comparable to those of the Whites. According to Winston Churchill, it was not until the battle of Gettysburg that the gun proved superior to the bow and arrow. (Actually, it was only in the Deep South that wood suitable for the best bows was found. In other areas the Indians poisoned their arrows.) But he missed the point. It was only at Picket’s charge when a Napoleonic bayonet charge was repulsed by guns. Napoleonic is a misnomer. The sharp stick was available and used in Neolithic times. And the Indians had sharp sticks.
Militarily it was a wash. The Indians were better farmers. The Pilgrims did not teach Squanto how to grow corn. He taught them.
Better numbers, equal or better weapons, better organized, older warrior culture, better food, better knowledge of the land, moral high ground, equal or better medicine … how did the Indians lose? Babies. The Indians barely could replace themselves. The pioneers had fifteen children per couple. They simply buried the Indians in white flesh.
They were expanding into a garden, the “wilderness.” Every little white village produced a slew of children. When it was time to move, a clutch of families from one town bought wagons from the Conestoga factory and started west. In the next generation, a clutch from that town continued on. The gene pool size stayed very low. The birth rate stayed very high. The empires of Europe trembled. The Indians fell back. If a generation time is 24 years, and there are 16 babies per family, 8 per adult, that is 3 doublings per 24 years or a doubling every 8. If Indians and Whites lost each half of a population in a campaign, 8 years later, the Whites outnumbered them 2 to 1.
Of course the European natives are feckless. An Indian chief once lamented, “My people carry their lives around in their fingers.” They didn’t have the confidence, the assertiveness, the drive, in short the babies.
European natives will be on reservations in a couple or three generations. I’m kidding. The weight of the evidence is that native Europeans will be extinct by that time.
But the thing is that it’s all unnecessary. Native Europeans can have as many babies as they want. They only have to remember the one sentence. Quiz time. Do you remember it? A woman gets pregnant by having sex with a cousin.
Marry cousins and it all goes away. Right now Europe, like the Indians, has the numbers, the resources, the military power, the organization but not the babies. Change that, and the continent will be assertive, confident and invincible and will claim the moral high ground.
You could do it, you know. You could save that continent. Maybe America as well. It might be too late. But it’s not too late to try. You have shown that you are able to write and publish a book that is counter to received wisdom and relies on evidence. Do it again. I dare you.
It would be nice to have you remembered as the man who saved the planet. Of course you could do nothing, but that would make both of us look bad. The truth will come out eventually, probably too late, and when it does, everybody is going to get to read this letter, and they will hold us up to bitter scorn, me for having failed to persuade and you for having failed to be persuaded. Give me a call and let’s fix this.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
ps. I still think it’s a remarkable face. Is it a wide angle lens?
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