John Derbyshire: "The Arctic Alliance Revisited" (2019)
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Probably everyone in this room knows about John Derbyshire.
John Derbyshire is a novelist.
John Derbyshire writes about mathematics.
But he is best known, of course, for his incisive and witty commentary on the passing scene and current events.
In his own way, I think you could describe John Derbyshire as entirely woke.
He's probably best known for his columns at V-Dare and for his Radio Derb.
And Radio Derb is someone who is very dear to me.
That is her favorite listening when she wants to get ready to go to bed.
Radio Derb.
I would also add that John Derbyshire is a friend.
I'm proud to call him a friend.
And for those who know him, John Derbyshire, besides all the other things I've told you, is a marvelous raconteur.
Well, today he will speak on an idea that is his own original conception.
It is the Arctic Alliance, and the title of his talk is "The Arctic Alliance Revisited."
Thank you, Jared.
Thank you, Jared, and thank you for showing up this weekend, ladies and gentlemen.
If there are any audio qualities, if I'm too loud or not loud enough, please just raise a hand and wave a handkerchief or something.
I'm going to introduce myself a bit redundantly, since Jared has already introduced me.
My name is John Derbyshire.
I was born and raised in England, but I've spent most of my life in the USA.
I fact check my own presentations, and I did a quick fact check, and it's just...
Today, about 51% of my life in the USA, so most is correct.
I'm a freelance writer.
When I tell people that, a very common response is,"That's nice, but what do you do for a living?" Well, that is my living, and it has been for 18 years.
I haven't got rich, but I haven't gone hungry either.
Not that the writing business worked out as I hoped.
I started with the aim to be a novelist, using persons and situations out of my own imagination and experience to make penetrating observations about human nature and the human condition.
As it turned out, far and away my best-selling book has been A non-fiction book about higher mathematics.
I still get a very nice royalty check from it twice a year, 16 years after publication, which in the book business is pretty good, let me tell you.
But, like the slapstick comedian who yearns to play Hamlet, I would rather have been a novelist.
Well, these are the vicissitudes of fate.
Along the way, all through those years, I've produced a great mass of fugitive journalism.
Commentary, opinion pieces, book reviews, and so on.
Most of it sunk into oblivion, deservedly, I'm sure.
Although I have tried to be diligent about archiving it at my website, johnderbyshire.com.
There have, however, been a handful of pieces that have caught people's imagination in some way or another, so that I still get asked about them years later.
One of those was a column I wrote in October 2007.
Sorry. With the title, An Arctic Alliance?
I wrote this for a web magazine called the New English Review, which is run by a very charming and energetic lady here in Tennessee, actually.
The title of the piece was An Arctic Alliance.
Now this was a throwaway opinion piece.
That I wrote to meet a deadline.
It's not closely argued and it doesn't contain any very deep analysis.
But it does offer an idea that I believe is worth airing and which I haven't seen discussed elsewhere.
Jared generously assigned the idea entirely to me.
As far as I know, that's true, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that somebody else has come up with it.
I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere.
And to get at the core idea, I'll just unpack the title for you.
It's an Arctic Alliance.
Arctic, by Arctic, I'm referring to those varieties of the human race that spent the very remote past up on the tundra and forests of northern Eurasia.
The Arctic peoples.
In one of my books, I call them the ice people.
And to a first approximation, it means whites plus yellows.
The people of Europe, North Eurasia, Siberia, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan.
In the world today, the Arctic peoples exhibit two characteristics that separate them quite clearly from non-Arctics, the Sun people.
One characteristic is...
High mean IQ.
The world mean IQ, the average IQ for the human race in the whole world, is somewhere in the 80s.
I keep saying different numbers, but mid to low 80s seems to be a consensus.
This is the latest estimate I've seen.
World mean IQ, 82. Arctics are smarter than that.
Mean mean, of course.
Average, average.
Arctic people's IQ is around about 100, with the eastern wing of the Arctic's a little bit smarter than the western wing.
Now, you can see rather clearly here, these are the higher IQs, these are the lower ones.
That's one characteristic all the arctics have in common.
The other characteristic is...
Low fertility.
Arctics don't have many babies.
And again, here's a world map of countries by fertility rate.
2018, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Low fertility.
High fertility.
For replacement level population, for stable population, you need a TFR, total fertility rate, of 2.1.
Depends on the level of development, but 2.05, 2.1 babies per woman per reproductive lifetime.
Not many Arctic nations have that higher TFR.
And some of them have a sensationally low one.
On the CIA table, Taiwan is the lowest at 1.13.
If you don't count little city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, hello, which are down below 1. Contrary-wise, practically all nations with higher total fertility are non-Arctic,
and some of them are sensationally high.
Niger, we're supposed to say something like Niger, aren't we?
Niger is at 6.5 children per woman per lifetime.
My article, my 2007 article suggested that we arctics, the whites and the yellows, put our clever heads together and come up with a common strategy against the demographic and dysgenic threat.
There's obviously a demographic threat from sun people to ice people.
There's also, taking humanity at large, a dysgenic threat.
IQ is to a considerable extent heritable, so if the low IQ people are reproducing more than the higher IQ people, that's a dysgenic trend.
That was the gist of my article.
And across the years I've met many, many objections to it.
And I'm just going to counter a few of the commonest objections that people have raised in the rest of this talk.
I got up to eight common objections.
First objection, the word"Arctics" is absurd.
Singapore. Singapore is majority Chinese, so it's Arctic on my definition, but it's just, I think, one degree of latitude north of the equator.
So isn't that like stretching the word Arctic a bit?
And what about Native Americans?
Native Americans came into the Americas from Siberia across the Bering Strait 10,000 plus years ago.
So don't the Incas and the Aztecs and the Mayas, aren't they Arctic also?
Wouldn't they count as Arctic?
And so that presumably their present-day descendants are also Arctic?
Here's my reply to that objection.
The underlying question here is why did some Arctic peoples of the remote past, it's all a question of timescales, evolve into modern races with high mean IQ in highly developed societies and low fertility?
And others didn't.
Well, the answer to that is I don't know, but I do know that it's not scientifically improbable.
There's been plenty of time for genetic change on that scale to occur.
Major genetic change in isolated populations across 10,000 years is certainly possible, and in fact well documented.
But I do concede that my usage of the word arctics is short for...
Arctics who have remained stubbornly Arctic.
Objection number two.
Is this going to be an alliance or a union?
Mr. Derbyshire, are you suggesting that we subsume our nationhood in some kind of EU-style imperium under a single controlling power?
How's that going to work?
My reply, no.
I'm a strong nationalist, with a respectful nod to Sam Dixon.
I believe the sovereign state, with a settled, ethnically stable population, minding its own affairs under its own historically developed folkways, I believe that's the best form of largest scale political organisation.
So no, it's an alliance, it's not a union.
I only hope for common awareness among...
The ice people nations, common awareness of the impending threat and some common strategy for dealing with it.
Objection number three.
I'm sorry, I'm not keeping up with my own slides here, am I?
Oh, if you want to see whether that genetic change I spoke about is plausible, there's a big literature on it.
That will be your first stop, the 10,000-year explosion, but there's lots of others.
Of various degrees of difficulty.
I'll give a shout out to Hartle and Clark, Principles of Population Genetics, which is a lovely, lovely textbook.
As an old math major, I don't take a textbook seriously unless it has lots of exercises in it, so you can test your own understanding.
And Hartle and Clark have a set of exercises at the end of every chapter.
That's by the by.
Objection number three, the heading here is projection with a question mark.
I am married to a Chinese lady.
So some unkind people have suggested that I'm just projecting my own domestic circumstances onto humanity at large.
My reply to that, well, maybe I am.
But the Arctic Alliance may nonetheless be worth discussing.
The relationship between an idea and the person who originated it is not simple.
Stopped clocks are right occasionally.
George Orwell said some things are true, even though the party says they are true.
I should point out he didn't actually say that.
He said something a bit more complicated, but that was his meaning.
Some ideas are worth considering, even though the person who offers them may be offering them from low personal motives.
Tell me why there are no such threats as the ones I mentioned.
Tell me why the Arctic Alliance is not worth considering on its own merits.
Objection number four, the heading here, is the long 20th century.
My column in 2007 noted that all the great existential military conflicts of the modern age, the industrial age, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Cold War, took place between Arctic nations.
I seemed to assume in my article that that era is over and that a new age has dawned in which an Arctic alliance is possible, sort of end of history thing.
At least for Arctic.
Yet, in fact, the national passions and the rivalries that generated those great existential wars are still very much alive.
Ask a Chinese person how he feels about Japan.
Ask a Russian how he feels about America.
Or an American neocon how he feels about Russia.
Ask a North Korean, pretty much anything.
So the age of intra-Arctic antipathies has not ended.
We're still, so to speak, in the 20th century.
Historians sometimes talk about the long 19th century, the one that ended in 1914.
And in that sense, we're still in the long 20th century.
My reply to that I'm going to subsume under my reply to the next objection.
Next objection.
The narcissism of minor differences.
The similarity on genetic or paleoanthropological grounds is no guarantee of harmony, nor even of the ability to work together for common goals.
If you had lived in Belfast in 1972, You would have noticed that white Irish Catholics and white Irish Protestants directed much stronger feelings towards each other than either group did towards blacks or Muslims.
And then I've got a supporting quote here from the master Charles Darwin.
And I should say, I do a bit object to every time Darwin comes up, you get a picture of him in old age with that tremendous beard.
I think people should be seen in their prime.
I don't know why I think that, but I do.
So there's a younger Darwin.
I'll read you the whole piece, though the gist of it is there.
This is from On the Origin of Species, chapter 4. It is the most closely allied forms.
Varieties of the same species and species of the same genus or of related genera, which, from having nearly the same structure, constitution and habits, generally come into the severest competition with each other.
Consequently, each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred.
And tend to exterminate them.
End quote.
Sigmund Freud, here's another handsome young man.
He gets the same treatment.
Sigmund Freud remarked on a similar phenomenon in civilization and its discontents.
He called it the narcissism of minor differences.
I've enlisted this principle in my own writings.
About America's current ideological conflict.
I call it the Cold Civil War.
This is a quote from one of my pieces.
The Cold Civil War.
Two big groups of white people who can't stand the sight of each other at loggerheads.
One side enlisting coloured auxiliaries to feed the horses and dig field latrines as necessary.
But it's basically a conflict between very similar peoples.
If you engage in today's ideological conflict, you quickly notice, it's not polite to mention it, but you quickly notice that American white people care passionately what other white people think.
But nobody much cares what blacks or Asians or mestizos think.
They're feeding the horses.
Why should not, I'm still on the objection here, why should not intra-Arctic tensions and animosities prove stronger than common interests in defending against some people?
My reply, they might.
History suggests that uniting against the common peril does not come easily to human beings.
It's most likely to come when the peril is obvious.
Urgent and existential.
Okay. But if boatloads of black Africans and caravans of Central Americans in such quantities as we've been seeing on our TV screens,
if that doesn't rouse ICE people to thoughts of some common kind of strategy, what might?
Well, even bigger numbers might.
If you follow Steve Saylor's blog, you'll be familiar with this.
This is what Steve calls the world's most important graph.
It's the United Nations world population projections.
And you see the blue one is Europe, the orange one is the Middle East.
And the big black one is Africa, four billion by the end of this century.
So bigger numbers might, and bigger numbers are coming.
Or disease might.
Back in January last year, after President Trump was caught referring to certain countries, With a low scatological expression.
I did some research on sanitary conditions worldwide.
And I reported those researches at vdare.com.
And then a reader of that suggested that I read Rose George's recent book, The Big Necessity.
A very striking book about poop.
Worldwide, and different cultural attitudes to it, and the implications of those attitudes.
Here, this was an illustration I used in my Vidare piece.
81% of 1.1 billion people that defecate in the open worldwide.
So my reader suggested I read Rose George's book, and I did, not to go into too much detail.
And absolutely no offence to any individuals, but I really hope I never have to go to India.
Compounding the issue is the fact that in some people, nations, that are not desperately poor, India again leads the way here.
Overuse of strong antibiotics is rampant.
And that, of course, accelerates the evolution of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
So, a sudden major unifying threat from the Sun People nations may be not demographic, but epidemiological.
Objection number six.
I call this one Northern Hemisphere supremacy.
I got emails and a couple of personal encounters with people from the Antipodes saying,"What about us?" Should not Australia, New Zealand and the white countries of the southern South American Cone,
Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, shouldn't they be included in the Arctic Alliance, even though they're Antarctic?
They face some of the same issues as ourselves.
You can easily pick up headlines.
Here's a headline.
Amid record numbers of arrivals, Chile turns rightward on immigration.
That's from last year.
Argentina, a mirror of your future, that's from 2017, in American Renaissance, who do very good reporting on this kind of thing.
Diversity Down Under, that's the only article I've ever written about New Zealand.
Don't see many, don't see much about New Zealand.
So yes, the southern,
Our southern hemisphere cousins, and of course we should include, at least for a while longer, we should include white South Africans here, should be part of the Arctic Alliance.
Paleoanthropologically speaking, they are Arctics, not Antarctics.
However, for public relations purposes, I might consider soothing their feelings by changing my concept to the Polar Alliance.
My first thought was the bipolar alliance, but then I realized that doesn't sound too good.
Objection number seven.
The white race is too far gone in ethnomasochisms.
Why would East Asians yoke themselves to a loser race?
This is a bit harsh, I know, but it's a thing that people have raised.
The only thing I can say is, well, Why indeed?
But this is a council of despair.
And despair, as every well-brought-up Christian child knows, is a sin.
So I'm just going to say that movements like ours exist to oppose that kind of negativity.
And dun speramus speramus.
While we breathe, we hope.
And--
And if your speramus needs a boost, don't miss Jared's talk this afternoon.
Title, Why We Are Winning.
And while that is a depressing objection, it's not the most depressing one.
Here is the real wrist slitter.
This one, objection number eight.
Argues that ethnomasochism is an inevitable development in any post-industrial society.
It's just part of the post-industrial development curve.
And East Asians just aren't there yet.
We got the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, early 19th.
They just got it in the middle of the 20th century, so they just haven't caught up with us yet.
But they will go just as ethnomasochist as we have.
Which I think is more depressing even than the previous one.
And indeed, yes, there are periodic news stories about Japan loosening up on immigration.
You can pull these up for yourself.
I've just picked out a few.
Japan immigration hits a record high as foreign talent fills gaps.
Japan's historic immigration reform, a work in progress.
Japan passes controversial new immigration bill to attract foreign workers.
A new immigration policy for Japan.
As its population ages, Japan quietly turns to...
and so on.
Lots of headlines on that.
A lot of them from Japanese sources, I should say.
And there's a big...
Colony of black Africans in Guangzhou, which is a megacity in South China.
Been there for a couple of decades.
Now, their numbers have been declining recently.
China's little Africa.
But not actually by much.
And the decline has not been driven mostly by Chinese ethnocentrism.
It's been driven by the fact that, one, most of them are small merchants and traders.
Whose fortunes depend on the ups and downs of the commodity markets, which have mostly been against them in recent years.
And number two, the Chinese authorities got a bad scare in the early 2000s with the SARS epidemic, S-A-R-S.
And so when Ebola came into the news ten years later, They panicked and started restricting visas from Africa.
So it's, yes, the population of China's Little Africa is static or declining, but no, it's not mainly driven by Chinese ethnocentrism.
So are these things, the loosening of Japanese immigration, African settlement in China, are these minor circumstantial aberrations?
Or are they straws in the multicultural wind blowing through all the Arctic nations?
I don't know.
East Asian ethnocentrism looks pretty robust to me.
But then, I'm old enough to remember when British ethnocentrism looked pretty robust.
There's Churchill's book, The Island Race, 1964, when I was in college.
So, could East Asians succumb to multiculturalism?
I wouldn't say it's impossible.
Will they?
I don't know.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you.
As usual, I will take questions.
As I said, this has been one of my pieces that has got a lot of attention from people over the years.
So if you think you've found a fatal flaw in it that I haven't covered, you're probably wrong.
I've probably heard it already, but I'll do my best.
Yes, sir?
There used to be a lot of talk of something called the Anglosphere, somehow a union of English-speaking peoples derived from a common geographic or racial background.
Where does that figure in your concept of the Arctic peoples, is it dated at this point?
Is it a step on the way towards an Arctic alliance?
Where does it fit?
I would put it under the heading"False Dawn" just because It's a great idea, and there's some reality to it.
For example, cooperation of intelligence agencies on things like terrorism is very much better among the Anglosphere nations than it is between them and others.
But it was a false dawn.
And again, you come back to the fact that nobody's going to do anything about this kind of thing until there's some obvious, preferably existential threat.
By which point, of course, it may be too late.
That's the problem with existential threats.
The Chinese are very heavily invested in Africa.
How would you convince them to partner with the Anglosphere?
I think that they're more interested in exploiting Africa's natural resources and forcing their people up into Europe than they would be in helping us.
I wonder what your thoughts on that are.
I think you're absolutely right, and there's a lot of attitude changing that needs to be done.
And again, attitude changing like that only occurs when there's some clear and present danger that everybody can agree on at some level, which at the moment doesn't seem to be, in spite of all those caravans and all those boatloads,
and in spite of the fact that it's starting to happen in East Asia.
There was a kerfuffle in South Korea recently about a mass of Yemenis, people from Yemen, which has one of those endless civil wars going on, flooding into South Korea, and the South Koreans are out on the streets demonstrating about it.
So it's starting to happen, but of course it's happening much more in Europe and North America and South America, the cone countries, Argentina, as that excellent American Renaissance article.