BOOGEYLAND RESERVATION

May 20, 1920.

The New York Times

 

CAN WHITE RACES BE SUBMERGED BY COLORED HORDES?

Timorous Author Dreads Not Only Yellow Peril But Sees Red and Black and Brown as Menace – Japanese Ambitions, Indian, Turkish and African Unrest Arouse His Fears

 

 

By T.R. Ybarra.

 

“The white world stands today at the crossroads of life and death.”

“The war was nothing short of a heading plunge into white race suicide.”

“As colored men realized the significance of it all, they looked into one another’s eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes. The white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was rived n and shattered….

Though the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whispers ’The East will see the West to bed!!!’ “

 

In those sentences lies the pith of a new book, perhaps the most striking specimen of its kind since Professor Usher’s “Pan-Germanism” burst upon us just before the war began. In this volume, “The Rising Tide of Color” (Scribners), the author, Lothrop Stoddard, advances the theory that the white race, unless it adopts drastic measures, is doomed – that it must withdraw from Asia lest it be ignominiously driven out. Weakened even before the war, terribly shaken by the ravages of the great conflict, it is now confronted with the peril of succumbing before the colored races – yellow, brown, black, red. These, unscathed by war and multiplying at a rate hopelessly outstripping the increase among whites, are everywhere showing signs of restlessness, race-consciousness and capacity for inter-racial solidarity.

 

The author links up the various phases of the colored danger which he says is now threatening the foundations of white supremacy. He shows Japan with her eyes upon hegemony in Asia: China, suspicious of Japan, yet capable of being galvanized into aggressive nationalism< India, Asiatic Turkey and Persia, Egypt, Arabia and Africa, seething with discontent and open revolt, trying to join hands with the yellow men further east, and with the Bolsheviki, arch-traitors to the cause of white solidarity, in their Russian strongholds. He shows us Latin America, rent with discord, which Japanese imperialists already covet. Everywhere it is the same picture – white men tearing at one another’s throats, their power ebbing away, their minds so blinded by intra-racial hatred that they cannot grasp the new danger: and, looking on scornfully, no longer imbued with the belief in white invincibility, constantly pilling up strength, mastery of the white man’s methods and hope of deadly revenge, the sinister masses of the colored races.

 

Race as a Basic Factor

 

The basic factor in human affairs is not politics but race, says Mr. Stoddard: the tendency to believe the reverse a dangerous delusion< those harboring it, viewing the world of today, would tend to conclude that never had white supremacy been more apparent. Yet the truth, he says, is far otherwise.

“Instead of a world politically nine-tenths white, we see a world of which only four-tenths at the most can be considered predominantly white in blood, the rest of the world being inhabited mainly by the other primary races of mankind – yellows, browns, blacks and reds. Speaking by continents, Europe, North America to the Rio Grande, the southern portion of South America, the Siberian part of Asia and Australasia constitute the real white world: while the bulk of Asia, virtually the whole of Africa and most of Central and South America form the world of color. The respective areas of these two racially-contrasted worlds are 22.000.000 square miles for the whites and 31.000.000 square miles for the colored races. Furthermore, it must be remembered that fully one-third of the white are (notably Australasia and Siberia) is very thinly inhabited and is thus held by a very slender racial tenure – the only tenure which counts in the long run.

“The statistical disproportion between the white and colored worlds becomes still more marked when we turn from surveys of area to tables of population. The total number of human beings alive to-day is about 1, 700.000.000. Of these 550.000.000 are white, while 1, 130.000.000 are colored. The colored races thus outnumber the whites more than two to one. Another factor of capital importance is that the great bulk of the white race is concentrated in the European continent. In 1914 the population of Europe was approximately 450.000.000. The late war has undoubtedly caused an absolute decrease of many millions of souls. Nevertheless, the basic fact remains that some fourth-fifths of the entire white race is concentrate on less than one-fifth of the white world’s territorial area (Europe), while the remaining one-fifth of the race (some 110.000.000 souls), scattered to the ends of the earth, must protect fur-fifths of the white territorial heritage against the pressure of colored races eleven times its numerical strength.

 

Colored Races Grow Faster

 

There can be no doubt that at present the colored races are increasing very much faster than the white. Treating the primary race-stocks as units, it would appear that whites tend to double in eighty years, yellows and browns in sixty years, blacks in forty years. The whites are thus the slowest breeders, and they will undoubtedly become slower still, since section after section of the white race is revealing that lowered birth rate which in France has reached the extreme of a stationary population. * * *

 

“Wherever the white man goes he attempts to impose the bases of his ordered civilization. He puts down tribal war, he wages truceless combat against epidemic disease, and he so improves communications that augmented and better distributed food supplies minimize the blight of famine. In response to these life-saving activities the enormous death-rate which in the past has kept the colored races from excessive multiplication is falling to proportions comparable with the death-rate of white countries. But  to lower the colored world’s prodigious birth-rate is quite another matter. The consequence is a pretentious increase of population in nearly every portion of the colored world now under white political sway. In fact, even those colored countries which have maintained their independence such as China and Japan. Are adopting the white man’s life-conserving methods and are experiencing the same accelerated increase of population.”

 

The inevitable result will be, says the author, a tremendous and steadily augmenting of colored men from their overcrowded homelands. Logically, they would tend to go into the emptier regions of the earth under white political control. But the white man forbids this: in consequence. “the rising flood of color finds itself walled in by white dikes debarring it from many a promised land.” What is the result? He continues:

“The colored world, long restive under white political domination, is being walded by the most fundamental of instincts, the instinct of self-preservation, into a common solidarity of feeling against the dominant white man, and , in the fire of a common purpose, internecine differences tend, for the time at least, to be burned away. Before the supreme fact of white political world-domination antipathies within the colored world must inevitably recede into the background.”

 

Taking up first the Far East, Mr. Stoddard writes of Japan watchfully waiting, fishing in troubled waters, one of the Allies yet far from hostile to the Central Powers, now that she holds Tsing-tao, wrested from Germany. Ruthlessly aiming at domination of China, she counts upon Chinese aid, he says, to further her ambition to be the controlling power in the Far East.

“Germany’s sudden collapse and the unexpectedly quick ending of the war has a blow to Apanese hopes and plans in more ways than one,” he writes.

“Despite official felicitations, the nation could hardly disguise its chagrin. For Japan the war had been an unmixed benefit. It had automatically made her mistress of the Far East and had amazingly enriched her economic life. Every succeeding month of hostilities had seen the white world grow weakened and had conversely increased Japanese power. * * *

 

Vast Power of Japan

 

“Whatever may be its ultimate goals, Japanese foreign policy has one minimum objective: Japan as hegemony of a Far East in which white influence shall have been reduced to a vanishing quantity. * *  *

“The notable progress that Japan has made toward the mastery of the Far East is written plainly upon the ma, which strikingly portrays the broadening territorial base of Japanese power effected in the last twenty-five years. Japan now owns the whole island chain masking the eastern sea frontier of Asia, from the tip of Kamchatka to the Philipines, while her acquisition of Germany’s oceanican islands north og the equator gives her important strategic outposts in mid-Pacific. Her bridge-heads on the Asiatic Continent are also strong and well located. From the Korean peninsula ( now an integral part of Japan) she firmly grasps the vast Chinese dependency of Manchuria, while just south of Manchuria, across the narrow waters of the Pechill Strait, lies th e rich Chinese province of Shautung, become a Japanese sphere of influence as a reslt of late war. Thus Japan holds China’s capital Peking, as in the  jaws of vise, and can apply military pressure whenever she so desires. In Southern china lies another Japanese sphere of influence, the province of Fukien, opposite the Japanese island of Formosa. Lastly, all over China runs a veritable network of Japanese concessions like the recently acquired control of the great iron deposits near Han-kow, far up Yangtse River, in the heart of China.”

 

“Whether this Japanese imperium over China maintains itself or not, one thing seems certain: future white expansion in the Far East has become impossible. Any such attempt would instantly weld together Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism in a ‘sacred union’ whose result would probably be at the very least the prompt expulsion of the white man from every foothold in Eastern Asia.

“That is what will probably come anyway as soon as Japan and China, impelled by overcrowding and conscious of  their united potentialities, shall have arrived at a genuine understanding. “

 

Outlets for the Chinese.

 

The Chinese, declares Mr. Stoddard, can find an outlet for the surplus millions of their population in portions of Asia, such as the British Straits Settlements, North Borneo, French Indo-China, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and Siam, where Chinamen, wherever they have had a chance, have already reduced natives to an impotent and vanishing minority. “Many observers”, he says. “predict that most of these lands will ultimately become Chinese. * * *

 

It is estimated that undeveloped portions of the Dutch Indies alone are capable of supporting 100.000.000 people living on the frugal Chinese plane. Their present population is 8.000.000 semi-savages.”

Japan, on the other hand, cannot look to such regions as an outlet for her surplus population. Japanese cannot adapt themselves to foreign climates as can the Chinese; a fact which, Mr. Stoddard thinks, will prevent Siberia from being a solution of Japanese emigration problems even If Japanese troops occupy it permanently.

 

“For Japanese migration neither the empty spaces of northern or southern Asia will do”, he says. “The natural outlets lie outside Asia in the United States, Australasia and the temperate arts of Latin America. But all these outlets are rigorously barred by the white man, who has marked them for his own race heritage, and nothing but force will break those barriers down.

“There lies a danger not merely to the peace of the Far East but to the peace of the world. Fired by a fervent patriotism; resolved to make their country a leader among the nations, the Japanese writhe at the constriction of their present race-bounds. Placed on the flank of the Chinese giant whose portentous growth she can accurately forecast, Japan sees herself condemned to ultimate renunciation of her grandiose ambitions unless she can somehow broaden the racial as well as political basis of her power. In short, Japan must find lands where Japanese can breed by the tens of millions if she is not to be automatically overshadowed in course of time, even assuming that she does not suffocate or blow up from congestion before that time arrives. This is the secret of her aggressive foreign policy, her chronic imperialism, her extravagant dreams of conquest and ‘world dominion’ * * *

“Whether Japan avows it or not her persistent aim is to gain mastery of the Pacific.”

 

How They Are Linked.

 

Passing to the Near and Middle East – to Brown Man’s Land – the author falls again into pessimistic arguments. The constantly growing solidarity, especially marked since the war, among the far-flung branches of the colored races. It is growing, he says, despite distance, despite differences of religion. Bound together by something subtle and intangible, the brown men of Asia everywhere face the white man in sullen hostility. Especially the leaders of Pan Islamism have their ears to the ground. “They know both Europe’s strength and their own weakness. They know the peril of premature action. Feeling that time is on their side, they are content to await the hour when internal regeneration and external pressure shall have filed to overflowing the cup of wrath. This is why Islam has offered only local resistance to the unparalleled white aggressions of the last twenty years. This is the main reason why there was no real ‘Holy War’ in 1914. But the materials for a Holy War have long been piling high * * * “

The author ven speaks of certain signs seemingly portending an understanding between Asiatics and Africans – In other words, a Pan-Colored Alliance against white domination; he also speaks of the great effect made on the Eastern world by Japan’s rise to the position of a world power on a par with the great countries of the whites, of the strong admiration felt for Japan even by Asiatics whose religious tenets make them consider the Japanese idolatrous heretics. This tendency to forget religious differences for the sake of a common cause against the whites is also noticeable, he adds, amount the Moslems of Brown Man’s Asia and those belonging to other sects.

 

Then came the Peace of Versailles. It was just what the leaders of sullen Islam wanted. Now, they exultantly argued, they could knit their peoples together in moral solidarity, because “the Near and Middle East were subjected to European political domination as never before.”

And here the spirit of self-determination evoked during the war, says Mr. Stoddard, came potently to the help of those pan-Islamic leaders intent on smashing the white man’s strangle-hold on the East. He writes:

“During the war years the allied statesmen had officially proclaimed times without number that the war was being fought to establish a new world order based on such principles as the rights of small nations and the liberty of all peoples. These pronouncements had been treasured and memorized throughout the East. When, therefore, the East saw a peace settlement based, not upon these high professions, but upon the imperialistic secret treaties, it was fired by a moral indignation and a sense of outraged justice never known before. A tide of impassioned determination began rising which has already et the entire East in tumultuous ferment, and which seems merely the premonitory ground swell of a greater storm.”

 

Weakness of the White Men

 

Throughout this fermenting East, continues Mr. Stoddard, the white man’s control is menaced by a fatal weakness: the fact that it is political, not racial. Nowhere in the lands of the brown man, he points out, is there a large white population except in the French colonies of Algeria and Tunis. Elsewhere, as an English student of Eastern problems wrote, there is “no white anything” – if white rule vanished tomorrow it would leave no trace behind.

“Let the brown world once make up its mind that the white man must go and he will go.” Declares Mr. Stoddard, “for his position will have become simply impossible. This is not solely a question of a ‘Holy War’; mere passive resistance, if genuine and general, would shake white rule to its foundations. And it is precisely the determination to get rid of white rule which seems to be spreading like wildfire over the brown world today. “

 

Surveying Africa, the continent of the black man, Mr. Stoddard finds the danger not so great as with the yellow and brown man – but peril he finds, notwithstanding. One difference between the white man’s status here and his status in Asia, he writes , is that there are in Africa large tracts where a white population has taken root. The crox of the African problem, he argues, is whether the white man, through consolidated racial holds in Northern and Southern Africa, will be able to perpetuate his present political control over the intermediate parts of the African Continent where he is debarred from planting colonies by the climate.

Against the white masters of Africa stand the champions of Islam, the Arabs from Western Asia, who have been active of late years in proselytizing among the Africans.

“The Arab and the European are, in fact, rivals for the mastership of black Africa,” writes Mr. Stoddard. “The Arab had a long start, but the European suddenly overtook him and brought not only the blacks but the African Arabs to be seen whether the Arab, allying himself with the blacks, can oust his white rival. “

Islam has made steady progress in Africa, he continues – “every candid European observer tells the same story.” Militant Mohammedanism has become a serious factor in the development of the fight for racial supremacy in Africa. Recently the British authorities in Nyassaland discovered that the Mohammedan religion was spreading at an alarming rate; investigation showed that this was due to the work of Zanzibar Arabs. They began their work of making converts in 1900, and ten years later every village in southern Nyassaland had its Moslem teacher and its hut set apart as a Mohammedan mosque.

“Although the movement was frankly anti-European, “ continues Mr. Stoddard, “the British authorities did not dare to check it for fear of repercussions elsewhere.”

 

In addition to the anti-European Mohammedan propaganda among the natives of Africa, the author also calls attention to the work of the so-called Christian Ethiopian Church, which is frankly anti-white in character. Relations between whites and blacks are bad in South Africa, he adds, and are becoming worse. “

The yellow man has his eye on Latin America, says Mr. Stoddard.

 

—

 

 

“Internecine discord.” That, as the possible Nemesis of white supremacy throughout the world, is constantly harped upon by Mr. Stoddard. It is assailing a white world already ebbing in power, its idealism brushed aside by materialism, its birth rate decreasing.

“That period,” says Mr. Stoddard, “was dominated by two antithetical schools of political thinking: national imperialism and internationalism. Swayed by ill-balanced spirit of the times, both schools developed extremist tendencies, the former producing such monstrous aberrations as pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism, the later evolving almost equally vicious concepts like cosmopolitanism and proletarianism. The adherents of these rival schools combated one another and wrangled among themselves. They both disregarded the basic significance of race, together with its immediate corollary, the essential solidarity of the white world.”

            Then came the war. White men hurled themselves furiously at each other’s throats. By every means they sought to kill each other. Not only soldiers but civilians, and well-nigh incalculable accumulations of wealth, were sacrificed- and all the time the colored races looked on in grim expectancy. Mr. Stoddard quotes one estimate of $337, 000, 000, 000 as the total cost of the war to the white race. The total loss of life, civilians as well as combatants, he places at 40,000,000, and, adding the decrease due to smaller birth rate, he arrives at a total loss of 50, 000, 000 white lives! – to which must be added further the great loss of life among civilians since the war due to the terrible conditions prevailing in Europe.

 

Menace of Bolshevism

 

As if the white race were not sufficiently menaced by the restlessness of the colored races and the terrible ravages of the great war, the Bolsheviki, whites themselves, yet playing the game of the colored races, now raise their heads and openly toy with the idea of alliance with the yellow and brown men for the purpose of hurling white supremacy into the dust.

“The menace of Bolshevism,” declares Mr. Stoddard, “is simply incalculable. * * * It is not merely a war against a social system, not merely a war against our civilization; it is a war of the hand against the brain. For the first time since man was man there is a definite schism between the hand and the head. Every principle which mankind has thus far evolved- community of interest, the solidarity of civilization and culture, the dignity of labor, of muscle, of brawn, dominated and illuminated by intellect and spirit – all these Bolshevism howls down and tramples in the mud. * * * “

What can the white man do? First, he must forego dreams of dominating the whole world, says the author, for he can no longer hold it in his weakening grasp. Resistance, the author argues, will be useless in the Asiatic strongholds of the yellow and brown man, where the renaissance among the natives “will eventually result in the substantial elimination of white political control from Anatolia to the Philippines.” He favors withdrawal of whites from Asia as strongly as he advocates a firm stand against encroachments by colored races on white supremacy elsewhere. Such withdrawal, he asserts, will avert cataclysmic disasters.

“Our true ‘outer dikes,’ “ he says, “stand not in Asia but in Africa and Latin America. Let us not exhaust ourselves by stubborn resistance in Asia, which in the end must prove futile, “

But the statesmen of Versailles could not see it, he continues. Once more they relied on imperialistic secret treaties, drawn “precisely as though Armageddon were a skirmish and Asia the sleeping giant of a century ago.” As a result, “the brown world, convinced that its aspirations can be realized only by force, turns to the yellow world and listens to Bolshevist propaganda, while pan-Islamism redoubles its efforts in Africa. * * * The white man, like King Canute, seats himself upon the tidal sands and bids the waves be stayed. He will be lucky if he escapes merely with wet shoes. “

 

Safeguards Which Are Suggested

 

What is to be done? The author advances the following as the “irreducible minimum”:

“First and foremost, the wretched Versailles business will have to be thoroughly revised. As it stands, dragon’s teeth have been sown over both Europe and Asia, and unless they be plucked up they will presently grow a crop of cataclysms which will seal the white world’s doom.

“Secondly, some sort of provisional understanding must be arrived at between the white world and renascent Asia. We whites will have to abandon our tacit assumption of permanent domination over Asia, while Asiatics will have to forego their dreams of migration to white lands and penetration of Africa and Latin America. Unless some such understanding is arrived at, the world will drift into a gigantic race-war and genuine race-war means war to the knife. * * *

“Thirdly, even within the white world, migration of lower human types like those which have worked such havoc in the United States must be rigorously curtailed. * * *

“ Such are the things which simply must be done if we are to get through the next few decades without convulsions which may render impossible the white world’s recovery.”

 

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