SELF-HATING IMMIGRANT

There are some immigrants to our country who hate other immigrants, hate people who employed them and were generous, and apparently hate themselves. One is author Peter Brimelow from Lancashire, England, who has written for a number of good publications and worked as writer-editor for the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., founder and editor of National Review magazine. Buckley recently died at age 82 after a distinguished career as writer, television emcee of “Firing Line,” mentor and adviser to the late Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and the current President George W. Bush. Buckley was hardly cold in the grave after a marvelous 50-year writing and publishing career when Brimelow, his former employee at National Review wrote a scathing nasty piece, dripping with hatred for Buckley, posted on Brimelow’s VDARE.com web site, which is one of the most loathsome hateful pieces I have ever read. Brimelow’s main cause these days is to halt immigration to the United States. Brimelow is anti-Hispanic, anti-Asian, anti-anyone except white Anglo-types like himself -– a nasty racist, a so-comfortable look-down-your-nose type person, with a hooty British accent and published views that show his racism, anti-Christian prejudice, and bring vistas of colonial control in early America that caused Jamestown heroes to flee across the ocean centuries ago. According to his piece about Buckley, Brimelow and Buckley disagreed on the immigration issue and a huge shake-out occurred at National Review as a result. Both Brimelow and I are immigrants from England, grew up in towns seventy miles apart. Yet Brimelow states on his own VDARE.com web site that he is a “paleoconservative and maintains that America’s culture and way of life are threatened by immigration.” We disagree. Brimelow is a racist, and his published attack against Bill Buckley is proof he is a low-life, ungrateful, and scurrilous. In his piece, Brimelow called Bill Buckley “an Irish-American social climber,” said he had “an unmistakable effeminate streak,” accused him of “fratricidal savagery ... viciousness ... malicious spite,” and wrote: “I consider his character to have been among the most contemptible I have encountered in public life.” This is on the days immediately following the death of the man for whom he worked, who founded and edited National Review, a magazine that made a real difference to further the conservative-libertarian movement for five decades. Peter Brimelow is scum. He left National Review more than a decade ago over disagreement with Buckley and other editors and writers over immigration issues. Since, he has scurrilously slashed Buckley and former National Review colleagues. In his so-called obituary of Buckley, just several days ago, he was maniacal in his attack. He said Buckley, icon for millions of American conservatives, had a “four-decade fizzle of his once brilliant career.” He said Buckley was “hysterically sensitive to criticism” and panned his “plutocratic lifestyle,” whatever that means. He said Buckley was “deeply insecure,” “achieved nothing,” accused him of “selfish sycophancy,” and said of people’s comments about Buckley’[s constant kindness, “I never saw that side of him.” This was a hateful piece by Peter Brimelow. He said Buckley, after 1970, “simply ceased to function in a political sense, although his ego remained insatiable.” He inferred that Buckley was hooked on alcohol and prescription drugs and attacked Buckley’s 1992 columns criticizing columnist Patrick J. Buchanan’s views against immigration as “fratricidal savagery.” Brimelow wrote of “poisonous abuse” against him by Buckley because of his anti-immigration views. “After 1998, National Review stopped stridently claiming opposition to immigration as a conservative cause” – which Brimelow had pushed while on the magazine’s staff, and why Buckley and the magazine’s directors fired him. He said of Buckley: “He was not, at least in the 30 years I knew him, particularly interested in ideas at all, and certainly not capable of the focused effort required to master new ones … What really motivated Buckley was ego and vanity.” These are words of a deranged man, a disgruntled ex-writer for National Review magazine, and hopelessly wrong, as Bill Buckley’s history and 40 erudite, witty, and interesting books show, years of television shows on “Firing Line,” compared to Peter Brimelow’s paltry authorship of a few articles and two awful bigoted books against people emigrating to America. I was appalled and vexed by Peter Brimelow’s below-the-belt attack against Bill Buckley. Brimelow is unfortunately like so many failures in the commercial writing and publishing world: Ungrateful to those who gave him a spot, spiteful because of his own failure, and trying to take it out of the hide of someone else, namely wonderful hard-working immigrants to America. Well, excuse me. Brimelow can’t take it out of the hide of Bill Buckley, whose motto when he ran for mayor of New York City against John Lindsay in 1965 was, “He has the guts to tell the truth: Will you listen?” Bill Buckley always listened throughout his life, always spoke the truth eloquently from his heart and mind. Disgruntled Peter Brimelow has not, and should be ashamed.