Hands Off Darren Wilson!

D J Webb

It is sometimes reported that German-Americans are the largest “white” community in the United States. In the 2010 Federal census, 49.2m Americans, 17.1% of the population, identified themselves as German-Americans. It is my view, however, that Americans of British descent are the largest component of the European-descended population of the United States.

This reflects, in part, the division of the British Isles into England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. All of these territories were in the United Kingdom between 1801 and 1922. Although it is fashionable for Americans of Irish descent to take extreme positions on the partition of Ireland, in my view this reflects the deliberate balkanization of the white population of the United States, and the incorrect refusal of the American government to promote an Anglo-Saxon identity, that is, an identity among white Americans as either descended from or assimilated to Anglo-Saxon culture, including the English language and English Common Law, reflecting the dominance of England in the British Isles and the central role of English culture in the British Empire.

In fact, as Peter Brimelow, the founder of the excellent vdare.com site, wrote in a letter to The Times (which Americans call the London Times) on March 21st 1987, outside of the specific context of Irish politics, people of English and Irish descent are culturally compatible:

The British are accustomed to thinking of the Irish as left-wing because that is where Irish political energies in Britain have generally been directed. The American experience suggests that this is an accident of history. Once the alienating effect of the argument over Ireland’s institutions is removed, the two traditions can view each other in a wider context. And they find they are fundamentally compatible.

There is such a thing as British ethnicity. We witness at present “the narcissism of small differences” in the Ukraine, where the (virtually identical) Ukrainians and Russians are engaged in a dispute based in history and politics when the rest of the world can see they are, more or less, the same people. The Irish and the English have a similar pre-Celtic origin, with a leavening, in different proportions, of Anglo-Saxon and Viking blood; the Celtic languages were once spoken all over the British Isles; the English language is now common to the British Isles as a whole; and the competition between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism is only the local expression of a wider dispute in the British Isles as a whole, a dispute that has itself receded into history. Once political topics are set aside, it is hard to find any differences at all in the cultures of Britain and Ireland.

Let us look again at the 2010 US census. In addition to 35.5m Irish-Americans, there were 26.9m “English-Americans”, 19.9m “American Americans” (an ethnic identity found in the colonial south, where people of tenth-generation American Colonial ancestry record their ancestry as “American”; these are almost all of English descent or of mixed white descent where a good proportion of the ancestral lines are to the 17th-century English colonial stock in the original 13 colonies), 5.7m Scottish-Americans, 5.1m Scotch-Irish (an ethnic identity that embraces Scots and Ulstermen, as opposed to Roman Catholic Southern Irishmen); and 1.9m Welsh-Americans.

This adds up to 95.1m Americans of British descent, where the word British refers to the pre-1922 borders of the United Kingdom, equivalent to 30.8% of the total US population of 308m. This dwarfs the German-American part of the US population. It is worth noting there were officially 223m white Americans in 2010, a category that the US Census Bureau considers to include Middle Eastern and North African groups, such as Lebanese and Moroccans. This doesn’t seem to be a sensible definition. The number of Americans of European ancestry is therefore over 200m, and nearly half of them are of British descent. Germans and Scandinavians, who might be considered to be peoples very closely related to us, account for a good proportion of the rest. Including all those with minority British descent (including German-Americans with one English-descended grandfather and people like Barack Obama, who, while identifying himself as black, is of English and Irish descent), it seems clear that claims that the German-American population exceeds the British-descended part of the population are overblown, probably for the political purpose of arguing that Anglo-Saxon identity has been lost in the mists of the past and that America has to embrace its multi-ethnic future.

Like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, America is a country founded by the English on the basis of English culture, most of whose inhabitants have assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon culture. This is still the case today. I think this is the reason why Englishmen have accepted US hegemony so readily. We have been convincing or kidding ourselves for decades that “people like us” are still in charge, although Americans are raised to regard themselves as separate, to regard their culture as having originated, all of a sudden, in 1776, with no antecedents. Er, what was George Washington in 1775, pray?

We need therefore to face up to the fact that the government of America contemns the country’s Anglo-Saxon heritage and has plans, in a fairly advanced state of implementation, to create a new population less clearly focused on an Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural core. When I read at Vdare that Darren Wilson (does the name ring a bell? There must be many thousands of Darren Wilsons in England), the police officer who faced politically-motivated charges for defending himself against a black thug in Ferguson, is likely to face a lifetime of legal harassment by the government, I instantly felt the wrong of standing by in silence while an American of British descent faces harassment on the basis of his ethnicity. This is indeed what cashiering a white American for dealing appropriately with an African-descended thug amounts to.

The Chinese government objects if ethnic-Chinese citizens of Indonesia come under attack or discrimination. It doesn’t make any difference that many such Chinese communities are of relative longstanding in the East Indies. As America moves away from being an Anglo-Saxon state to a multi-ethnic state where Anglo-Saxons are a particular object of state-directed cultural pressure, I would argue that the issue must form part of the UK’s relationship with America. British politicians should denounce the behaviour of the American state; Britain should offer to assist with the legal costs of Americans of British descent seeking redress against harassment on the grounds of their ethnicity; and Britain should in general seek to consolidate the 95m Americans of British Isles descent into sympathizers with Britain’s geopolitical interests in the same way that other ethnic groups in the US support their ancestral countries.

We would benefit greatly from a rediscovery in America, in Canada, in Australia and in New Zealand of our joint Common-Law traditions. A free government in the UK would protest loudly against the trampling on the Common Law in America—and demand Hands Off Darren Wilson!