Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Whale of a Tale David Andrew Price ("Save the Whalers," TAS, February 1995) believes that brutality toward a species is justified so long as there is no danger of exterminating that...
...Chesterton as an anti-Semite...
...I would hereby like to draw the U.S...
...The larger point is that within the Asian model there exist many different paths, with Korea adhering most closely to the Japanese model and Hong Kong and Singapore following more classical models of free trade...
...My fear is that these two men are suffering from a common American problem with regard to our perceptions of East Asia: we cannot see the forest for the trees...
...Once in an issue is forgivable, twice is not...
...I would suggest that members of the black elite, like Dr...
...Of course Chesterton had Jewish friends...
...It would appear that the author of the article has possibly misinterpreted the communities of North Norway that would honestly say they are seeking to defend their business right to kill and export minke whale meat, a business they first developed in the 1930s...
...Although he died in 1936, before the Holocaust, he was one of the first public figures to decry what was happening in Germany and to take a stand against Hitler...
...If TAS has one failing, it is in this area...
...To the contrary, the most important seems to be Asia's almost complete lack of a welfare state (and lack of an entitlement mentality) and the recognition that the community recognizes limits on individual liberty...
...In his autobiography, Chesterton expressed surprise that he was gaining the reputation of being an anti-Semite when all his life he'd been called a pro-Semite (which, in the strange logic of offense-giving, was at that time also a derogatory term...
...Pity the poor woman who walks in a romantic sunset with the likes of Mr...
...What particularly disturbs me in this little bit of political correctness is that this relates to a time when our only friends abroad, besides the Israeli services, were the conservative Americans...
...The image of Americans then was generous Uncle Sam, but in the 1970s we realized that Americans were starting to call Japan an "enemy" of whales...
...It follows that when the two groups are matched for income, whites have the higher IQ...
...When Cecil died as a soldier in World War I, G.K...
...It is true that an outside scientist submitted a critique of the committee's estimate last May (based on technical grounds, not "computational error"), which the committee is now reviewing...
...Therefore, as he correctly points out, blacks today have about the same IQ as whites in the 1930s...
...But if I were totally disgusted with it, and if my opinion of it had hit rock bottom, then I couldn't care less for it...
...There are anti-Semites and anti-Semites...
...He should also check his facts before committing to print, as Iceland left the IWC in 1992 and has since ceased commercial whaling...
...Raymond Paul Opeka Grand Rapids, Michigan Trash Talk I was thrilled to find my way into the pages of your magazine (Current Wisdom, TAS, March 1995...
...We need him...
...E. L Sawyer North Chatham, Massachusetts P.S...
...The Norwegian foreign minister has asked the U.S...
...nothing more constructive than criticism of the Asian System for not following our own demonstrably flawed policies...
...In a way, it's too bad that whales are incapable of screaming, for then, perhaps, you might gain some understanding of the intense agony inflicted on these animals by the whalers you want to save...
...Samuel Schulmann, of the Fifth Avenue and 76th Street synagogue in New York, wrote that Chesterton's pro-Zionist book The New Jerusalem was "brilliant" but "disfigured by a constitutional Jew-baiting...
...Charles Murray has made positive suggestions for reducing the high fertility of the underclass, black and white, in the form of the reduction of welfare benefits for single mothers...
...As to Asian political and economic difficulties, the truth is, for every corrupt Korean politician you can name, we have plenty of our own...
...Sowell is surely wrong in his major point concerning the implications of the increase in average IQ that has taken place over the last half century...
...Nevertheless, Dr...
...However, I must question their conclusions...
...Much, much less...
...In general tenns the solution is to reduce the high fertility of low IQ blacks, which is dragging down the average black IQ, increasing the size of the black underclass, and giving blacks a bad name...
...Not so: IQ is partly determined by environmental factors, among which the adequacy of nutrition is probably the most important...
...I suspect just the opposite, that they couldn't care less...
...Oddmund Bye, Chairman Norwegian Fishermen's Association Trondheim, Norway While I realize his article seeks to portray an image of Norwegian and Japanese whaling in a positive light, David Andrew Price should be more careful with his facts...
...Greenpeace and other environmental protectionist groups successfully cast Japan as an eco-outlaw, all because our food has depended heavily on marine resources for thousands of years...
...The Clintons, Bonior, and Lewis need to do the same if they expect the American people to expend blood, sweat and treasure in their favorite civil wars—and their explanations had better be good...
...Five boring pages of it...
...And then there's Ben Stein's Diary...
...The population figures for the minke whales hunted by the Norwegian mini-factory ships (vessels able to catch, flense, and process the meat at sea) in the northeast Atlantic are not accepted by the IWC as being at 86,700...
...Heartily I do indeed despise these Hitlerites...
...Price and The American Spectator...
...Enclosed is a check for $2.95 for the first issue just received—dated February...
...It Takes Gaul No luck with my new subscription...
...Besides that, Chesterton did tell some painfully funny Jewish jokes...
...He was recently confronted with an old letter full of military loathing, Vietnam War despising rhetoric...
...to put a stop to Sea Shepherd's use of U.S...
...If illiberal trade practices, paternalistic government-industry relations, and keeping domestic consumption down can work such miracles as we have been shown, perhaps we should stop complaining and start taking notes...
...Andre M. Rossfelder La Jolla, California Addicted to Morphing I was a Cold War Hawk...
...Because Chesterton has been called anti-Semitic by his detractors, the epithet has been used by everyone else...
...What a pleasure to read...
...C3 The American Spectator May 1995 79...
...In his writings, Chesterton defended the Jews, pointing out how unfairly they'd been treated throughout history...
...Shigeko Misaki Institute for Cetacean Research Tokyo, Japan . . . The fishermen of Norway and the Norwegian Fishermen's Association applaud and thank Mr...
...for better or worse, they appear intent on keeping the ban in place no matter what the numbers show...
...Mark Clifford's book deals with the opportunity costs involved with the Korean model, and I believe his conclusion—that an increasingly global economy is making it ever more difficult for a top-down economy like Korea's—is well borne out in comparative statistics showing the Hong Kong citizen to enjoy a per capita income more than twice that of Korea's...
...Ethnicity and Intelligence It was a pleasure to read Thomas Sowell's article on The Bell Curve ("Ethnicity and IQ," TAS, February 1995...
...This of course has not stopped (continued on page 74) 10 The American Spectator May 1995 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 10) Norwegian whalers from trying to continue their export trade of meat to Japan, as the 1993 discovery of whale meat at Oslo airport destined for the Far East showed...
...Chesterton Cheek Vanessa Redgrave has always made me puke, so I'm not sure why I even bothered reading Stuart Reid's review of her autobiography (TAS, March 1995), but not only did my stomach turn, my heart sank when Reid referred to G.K...
...Ed Rosenblum Brooklyn, New York David Andrew Price tells us of U.S.-based Sea Shepherd's attempts at sinking whaling boats in Norway...
...You will find no Jarlsberg cheese or Icelandic fish in my house, and I buy as few Japanese goods as I possibly can...
...David Andrew Price replies: It is the anti-whalers who should be more careful with their facts...
...Well, now that I know where to find you, maybe I'll stay in touch...
...Robert J. Thomas Lilburn, Georgia Thanks for the article by David Andrew Price that came to me like a fresh breeze amidst the polluted air over the quake and fire that infested Kobe...
...Hatzilambrou Scottsdale, Arizona Troubled by the Tigers Re William McGurn's review of Mark Clifford's Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea (TAS, March 1995): I do not doubt that South Korea has many of the specific problems mentioned by Mark Clifford and William McGurn...
...Peterson believes...
...The same is true, I suspect, of Mr...
...He wrote: "Thousands of Jews have recently been rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes...
...I agree that animals shouldn't be killed for food in a gratuitously cruel manner, but whaling doesn't fall into that category any more than deer hunting...
...The quality of these environmental factors can be roughly indexed by income, since high income buys a good environment...
...He had many close Jewish friends who adored him and who enlisted him as an important advocate for Zionism...
...But lo and behold, I was lucky enough to find a copy in a garbage can outside the White House...
...The words, phrases, and sentences just "sing...
...Not to mention a whole host of social and cultural problems that the Japanese, Koreans, or Chinese would be appalled to contemplate...
...Having been tipped off by a subscriber, I rushed down to my local 7-Eleven to buy a copy...
...Ahlquist has a delicate stomach...
...Really enjoyed The American Spectator this month...
...Chris Stroud Campaigns Manager Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society Bath, U.K...
...Richard Lynn Professor of Psychology University of Ulster at Coleraine Coleraine, Northern IrelandLess Is More I love TAS...
...Please don't be so careless...
...I am fond of Jews [he wrote] / Jews are fond of money/Never mind of whose/1 am fond of Jews/Oh, but when they lose/Damn it all, it's funny...
...The estimate of 87,000 minke whales in the northeast Atlantic is the current estimate of the IWC's scientific committee and was provided to me by Dr...
...Alas, they had never heard of it...
...American Occupational Forces in Japan in 1946 prudently encouraged the Japanese to repair a wrecked tanker to use as the mothership for Antarctic whaling, yielding the product that saved millions from starvation after World War II...
...There probably isn't a better writer in the twentieth century, and probably isn't a writer more timely and vital, even 78 The American Spectator May 1995 though he's been dead for almost sixty years...
...Instead of lying, counter-attacking, or wallowing in self-pity, he carefully explained his thinking at the time and how it evolved...
...public's attention to the fact that this organization is a registered charity and is consequently granted tax exemption...
...It won't matter to me one whit if you don't print this letter...
...Hence the blacks today have substantially greater real incomes than whites had in the 1930s...
...I couldn't care less...
...Obviously, times have changed...
...In 1983, over 50 percent of the whale meat processed through Norway was exported to Japan, and proved to be a lucrative addition to their existing fishing activities...
...People need to read Chesterton now more than ever...
...The long-term decline in the relative value of our currency...
...But (side issue) can Mr...
...TAS routinely makes light of animal pain and all too often finds animal suffering a source of amusement...
...CORRESPONDENCE Whale of a Tale David Andrew Price ("Save the Whalers," TAS, February 1995) believes that brutality toward a species is justified so long as there is no danger of exterminating that species...
...As Buddhism prohibited eating of terrestrial mammals until the Meiji restoration in the 1860s, the Japanese, believing that whales were a kind of fish from the sea, utilized whales, which are rich in protein and low in cholesterol...
...Let's leave at least a little of God's world as He made it...
...Mrs...
...Leafing through one page after another of shriveled-up spite, relieved only by the wit and originality of the classified ads, I realized that this is where all the ultra right wing male huff puff extremists hang out...
...The U.S...
...Erik Peterson Gresham, Oregon William McGurn replies: I would be the last to question East Asia's success in pulling itself out of poverty in a single generation...
...Dale Ahlquist Bloomington, Minnesota Stuart Reid replies: Mr...
...So have the Jewish writers Israel Zangwill, Humbert Wolfe, and Philip Roth...
...Because of these reactions, I could care less for TAS...
...According to Norwegian sources, the smuggler is believed to be an employee of the head of the Norwegian Whalers Association...
...territory as a base for terrorist attacks abroad...
...Independent analysis of the original Norwegian data concerning this population showed that Norwegian scientists had failed to notice a computational error that conveniently skewed the figures upward...
...In the case of Chesterton, that would be a tragedy...
...I lost interest on Wednesday, right after he buys "a thing called Game Gear...
...Sowell, would serve their community better by taking this conclusion on board and thinking about what can be done about it...
...He was not blinded by his prejudices, but the point is that he was prejudiced...
...Anti-Semite" is an ugly and loaded label that, once it is stuck on a person, is almost impossible to get unstuck...
...But whether the IWC ultimately lowers its estimate, increases it, or keeps it the same is irrelevant to the policy of the U.S...
...I wonder what would happen if we imposed our ethics on Americans by asking them to stop eating beef...
...Stroud, which makes his objection somewhat disingenuous...
...Deer are plentiful in the United States: Does that mean you should promote a deer harvest system that involves shooting one or more spears (with or without exploding heads) into a deer and then having the bleeding, dying animal painfully pull a wagon by means of ropes attached to the spears in its body...
...From virtually nothing in 1945, these nations collectively appear to be within a decade or two of surpassing the wealth-creating capacity and technological sophistication of the United States and Europe combined...
...This conclusion supports several other lines of evidence pointing to a genetic basis to the racial difference in IQ, of which probably the most important is that blacks reared by white graduate parents show no gain in IQ...
...has banned the import of all marine mammal products—even including the products from species of seal that number in the millions...
...Incredibly, they also remain proud of their former anti-warring and never explain how they "morphed" from Doves to Super Hawks...
...Granted that most people believe that man has dominion over animals, it makes man more human when he chooses not to fully exert that dominion as most countries have done, with the exception of the outlaw countries of Norway, Japan, Iceland and the Soviet Union...
...Could this lack of commitment to preventing "whale rights terrorists" from using the U.S...
...Contrary to Mr...
...Wells, who called the Jews "a parasitic people" (and with whom Chesterton agreed on absolutely nothing), and Chesterton's own brother, Cecil, who was the subject of a libel suit from two Jewish businessmen, the Isaacs brothers...
...What most distresses me about former anti-warriors like Hillary and Bill Clinton, David Bonior, and Anthony Lewis (Mark D. Tooley's "Mad About Methodism" and Tom Bethell's "Bomber Bonior," TAS, March 1995) is not that they opposed the struggle against the evil empire, but that they are now such aggressive Super Hawks, eager to send our soldiers off to suffer, die, and kill in meaningless Third World civil wars...
...In any event, he does not dispute the worldwide minke population estimate of around 900,000 noted in my article...
...Whales have been a staple of our traditional diet since the time of the Manyo-shu anthology of poems (4th-8th century...
...Hilaire Belloc wasn't an anti-Semite either, but we'll leave that for another day...
...Last April, the U.S...
...But he was not an anti-Semite...
...Well, hello, hello, hello...
...For instance, our trade deficit...
...While I agree on most of that issue's piece by Roger Kaplan on "Vichy Francois" (I was an early member of the French Resistance in North Africa and was put twice on the firing squad by Admiral Darlan's men during the Allied Landing of November 8, 1942), I find it unacceptable to see history being rewritten about the Frenchmen of Algeria and their misery being dismissed with an evocation of the Gestapo...
...No one needs whale products, and they should be left alone if for no other reason than to prove to ourselves that we have the humanity to do so, and if their charismatic quality helps us to do this, so much the better...
...I find it incredible that the prevailing response of American economists, politicians, and industrialists continues to be, in the face of what is by now many years of successive market defeats or abandonments on our part (TVs, autos, semiconductors, etc...
...Sowell maintains that this has "devastating implications" for the genetic theory of black-white IQ difference...
...bitterly berated the Isaacs in print and openly questioned their loyalty to England...
...The post–World War II East Asian economies, especially Japan's, have been astonishing success stories, perhaps without precedent in world history...
...In other words, its terrorist activity is indirectly supported by the U.S...
...Georg Blichfeldt High North Alliance Reine i Lofoten, Norway As a conservative since birth, I want to be sure that liberals who may read TAS do not come to believe, based on David Andrew Price's article, that all conservatives are as ill-prepared to appreciate God's romance as is he...
...ft would go over big in my redneck of the woods...
...Our federal debt...
...perhaps some of his best friends were Jews...
...While the article tries to label the anti-whaling movement as seeking to destroy cultures, I would point out that Mr...
...This line of thinking will do far more for the ultimate improvement of the status of blacks in American society than will Thomas Sowell's efforts to persuade people that the problem of the low average black IQ does not exist...
...Rather, success has been achieved by the frank, unabashed implementation of nationalistic mercantilism...
...in the dust...
...Ray Gambell, the Secretary to the Commission...
...The worst part of it is, while Americans continue to deny the increasingly self-evident success and quite possibly superiority of the Asian way of doing business, Japan and the little tigers are whipping our pants off in the real, un-Friedmanesque world of business...
...Chesterton's reputation as an anti-Semite may have something to do with some of the people with whom he was associated, including H.G...
...Today, average black incomes are around two-thirds those of whites, but average incomes today are more than twice as great in real terms as they were in the 1930s...
...Please cancel it...
...They've beaten, bullied poor Jews in concentration camps...
...It is evident from what follows that he meant the latter...
...I couldn't have done a better job of finding you myself...
...Stroud is wrong about the minke whale figure in the article...
...An attempt to remove minke whales from Appendix I of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES) (Appendix I means a complete ban on trade) in November 1994 was defeated because of the very uncertainty in the stock figures for minke whales...
...Or our federal deficit...
...Certainly that is not the belief of a Japan still recovering from a severe recession, a country where the newspapers speak in awe of America's economic restructuring...
...Norway did not comply with the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling, as the article would have us believe...
...With a single serving of whale meat costing up to $100 in Japan, it's business as usual when it comes to trying to circumvent international agreements...
...Remember how Japan's govern(continued on page 78) The American Spectator May 1995 75 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 75) ment-subsidized bid to establish high-definition TV was going to leave the U.S...
...I love it very highly...
...Especially Joe Queenan...
...Perhaps Messrs...
...Besides the fact that it isn't true, the worst thing about it is that once a writer is so stigmatized, the average and ignorant reader will automatically avoid anything that writer has written...
...He was not a bad man...
...His thoughtful and temperate discussion of race differences in intelligence is a striking contrast to the poorly informed, ideologically motivated, and malicious reviews and commentaries which have appeared in the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the Scientific American—the general 74 The American Spectator May 1995standard of which can only be described as contemptible...
...Price should also seek to place Norwegian and Japanese commercial operations alongside the Innuit hunts that are recognized by the IWC...
...The death of whales has made people rich before, and if Mr...
...Sally O'Keefe Stafford, Virginia End on a Sweet Note I was so impressed by the beautifully written review by Geoffrey Norman of Edward 0. Wilson's book (TAS, March 1995...
...Price has his way, it could make even more even richer...
...How much less...
...In a similar vein, when Joe Queenan writes ("The Week of Smoking Dangerously," TAS, March 1995) that ". . . the employees could have cared less if I smoked" (page 27), does he mean that the employees were very concerned about his smoking and were anxious to stop him from doing so, or does he mean that they were indifferent to his smoking and thus they couldn't have cared less...
...Over the last few years the whaling interests of Japan and Norway have invested heavily (millions of dollars) in protecting their industry...
...My esteem for your magazine is enormous...
...This increase amounts to about 15 IQ points, and this is also the difference between blacks and whites...
...as their base have anything to do with the U.S.'s fundamentalistic marine mammal policy...
...Such a brutal and barbaric method is comparable to that used in the whale fishery, as the industry has been traditionally called (not whale "hunt," a somewhat more venerated term used so facilely by Price...
...His biographer Michael Ffinch (no detractor) says that Chesterton became strongly anti-Semitic during the years after 1907 (when Hilaire Belloc began to assert a strong influence on his thinking), and in 1921 Dr...
...He saw early on that Hitler was a monster, and deplored the Nazi persecution of the Jews...
...Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries have bans on the import of all pork products...
...In the very next article ("China Shops") the lead under the title states that "...Bill Clinton and Roy Brown could care less...
...And for all the talk about "Japan finally showing the strain of all its inefficiencies," we all know of many strains showing in the American system we would love to be able to trade for Japan's set of problems...
...Embassy in Norway stated that its "lawyers are still considering under which conditions Sea Shepherd's tax exemption could be revoked...
...Becausethe industry still has the capacity to produce huge profits if it is allowed to do so...
...The Weiner Library in London, the archives of anti-Semitism and holocaust history, has defended Chesterton...
...New assessments could indicate that the current International Whaling Commission's (IWC) classification of this population as a "protected stock" should stand...
...Ahlquist really believe that Chesterton was probably the best writer of the century...
...Pity...
...Chesterton was in many ways a child of his times...
...Just the audience I've been looking for...
...and other non-whaling nations...
...Nothing has happened so far...
...Peterson, however, moves from this to string together a number of extremely questionable assertions, including the idea that "Japan and the little tigers are whipping our pants off in the unFriedmanesque world of business...
...Rosenblum's implication, my article didn't "make light of animal pain...
...Where does he place Joyce, Waugh, Nabokov...
...Not only did the country disregard the scientific advice concerning the population estimates at that time, it immediately instigated so-called "scientific whaling," which effectively allowed it to carry on commercial whaling despite the ban...
...The exception is Vice President Al Gore...
...Or Dave Barry...
...Kind and generous Uncle Sam is no longer a friend, but a baby-faced American environmental activist...
...This is not to say there are not lessons we should take from the Asian models...
...He regarded English Jews as aliens...
...Recent DNA fingerprint analysis of whale meat on sale in Japan has revealed North Atlantic minke whale meat on sale despite Japanese and Norwegian law banning such trade...
...Smith and Friedman are not nearly as irrelevant as Mr...
...This success has not been achieved by Japan (or Korea) paying the least bit of attention to Adam Smith or Milton Friedman...
...You don't hear much about Japan's HDTV plans now that the American-led digital revolution has rendered Japan's multi-billion dollar investment a flop...
...Don't pick on N. Gingrich too much...
...My own response to the outlaw countries in question is to make them pay economically in other ways...
...authorities...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
