AND ANOTHER THING
Eurocrats rush in where Hitler and Verwoerd feared to tread
PAUL JOHNSON
13 ritain is quite right to veto the propos- al to establish the 'European Union Centre for Monitoring Racism and Xenophobia'. Its officials would have the authority to investigate 'offences' anywhere in the EU and drag those they accuse before the European Court. This is a very suspicious idea indeed. In the first place it comes from the Irish republicans. One of the many dis- advantages of belonging to the EU is that it gives them the opportunity to put forward schemes whose chief object is to embarrass or annoy the English or forward the cause of Irish reunification. Their strategists have been longing to get Britain on a racist rap, and they believe they can put forward a ease that the very existence of Northern Ireland is racist. The xenophobia charge is a second barrel to the gun if the first fails to work. What is xenophobia anyway? Almost anyone can be charged with it. It will cer- tainly be used against those who oppose European supranationalism — if you are anti-federalist you are, by definition, xeno- phobic. I do not fancy ending my days in a Brussels dungeon. A second objection is that bodies which are set up to counter racism, real or imagi- nary, invariably end up by becoming racist themselves. That is certainly illustrated by the gruesome history of the British race relations industry, dominated by embit- tered anti-white racists. Britain has never been racist, though it sometimes tends to be xenophobic. But its xenophobia has found religious rather than racial expres- sion. The only truly racist institutions in Britain today are the National Front, which is anti-black, and the Commission for Racial Equality, which is, in effect, anti- white. The first supports itself and the sec- ond is paid for by taxation, which means that all of us, in a sense, are accessories to racism.
It has been the same story in the United States, where the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the centre of a huge network of agencies set up to enforce anti-racist policies, soon became an anti- White racist body itself. One of its statutory functions was to ensure that government employed minorities in proportion to their share of the total population. In no time at all the EOEC's budget shot up from $2.3 million to $125 million, its staff from 314 to 3,746, and of these 49 per cent were blacks, though blacks make up only 12 per cent of the total US workforce. Whites were crowded into a ghetto of 20 per cent. Chal- lenged on this, the EOEC bosses replied blandly that their situation was 'rather unique'.
Once you try to introduce remediable measures on race — as opposed to letting time and common sense perform their healing work — you find yourself engaged in the worst kind of compulsory social engi- neering, with quotas and targets and enforced inequalities. And immediately you introduce quotas and privileges based on race or ethnic origins, you run into prob- lems of classification. The history of race classification is peculiarly grisly. In the British Caribbean islands, baffled 18th- century governors tried to settle on eight types in addition to white: negro, sambo, mulatto, quadroon, mustee, mustiphini, quintroon and octoroon, all except the first being based on degrees of interracial mar- riage. Some Latin-American territories had 128 official combinations. There were 492 in Brazil. All these systems eventually broke down under the weight of the human race's propensity to propagate itself in ways bureaucrats find inconvenient.
When Adolf Hitler began his experiment in social engineering in 1933, he ran into exactly the same problem. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were an attempt to solve the problem of classification. They did not suc- ceed. Nor did the Nazi name decree of 1938. Hitler's race experts were still work- ing on the problem of how exactly to define Jews, Aryans etc. when the entire regime collapsed in ruins. It was the same with apartheid, originally worked out in the soci- ology department of Stellenbosch Universi- ty by academics who never succeeded in defining race categories in ways which were workable. That system had to be aban- doned too.
Now the American social engineers are facing the same dilemmas. Their race clas- sification system, devised by a 'social real- ist' lawyer called Alfred Blumrosen and set down in 1973 in a document called Statisti- cal Directive 15, divides Americans into five races, some of which are entitled to affir- mative action privileges, some not. Those anxious to get access to the privileges, which include not just jobs and university places but the right to be awarded govern- ment contracts, want a sixth, mixed-race category to he introduced. Others want an eight-group breakdown: American-Indian, mestizo, black, Indo-European, Turko-Ara- bic, Malay, Mongoloid and mulatto. Others want three: Eurasian-American (baddies), African-American and American- Indian/mestizo (the last two goodies). Whatever classification you use, however, any system — as Hitler discovered to his fury — produces endless opportunities for race fraud. San Francisco laid it down that 80 per cent of its legal services had to be provided by favoured categories. Then it emerged that many of them were acting as fronts for unfavoured categories (i.e., whites). Hitler too found that Aryans were sometimes fronts for Jews. In America today, a white who claims to be five-eighths Indian to get what is known as a set-aside contract cannot in practice be convicted of race fraud because of the impossibility of disproving his claimed blood-lines.
I shudder to think where the Eurocrats will end once they begin to tread the fatal road of race legislation, especially if they bring in the xenophobic-ethnic angle too. History is full of ironies. It could well be that the zealots who draft the proposed European Centre's race and xenophobia code will be the children or grandchildren of officials who once drafted the Nurem- berg Laws or Mussolini's 1938 race laws or the Vichy race code or, in Spain, the descendants of those who drafted the 16th- century limpieza de sangre statutes, aimed at Jewish and Moorish converts and enforced by the Inquisition.
We must keep well clear of this evil non- sense. But no doubt Brussels will go ahead without us, since the British veto means nothing these days, and the creation of a European race relations industry means plenty of cushy, well-paid jobs for the garcons. If you worked for the Inquisition, you didn't get sent on dangerous missionary work in the Indies. Nazis who managed to land a post under Hitler's race expert, Dr Globke, escaped the slaughter of the East- ern Front. I can see the future. 'What do you intend to do when you grow up, Hans, mein Liebchen?"Well, mama, I rather thought of a career in race-monitoring.'
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