PETER BRIMELOW writes: Many thanks to Dan Ryan of the National Conservative Institute of Australia for patiently hunting me down to do this interview. (It was late for him in Brisbane QLD and early for me in Berkeley Springs WV, hence my shower-slicked hair). We covered a lot of ground in an hour. Dan assures me that National Conservatism gatekeeper Yoram Hazony will not be upset that we talked!
Hope he’s right.
Possibly because of my peculiar personal odyssey (U.K.-U.S.-Canada-U.S.) and the time (1990-1991) that I spent in Australia while ghostwriting Rupert Murdoch’s autobiography (never published!), I’ve given a lot of thought to the Anglosphere, and specifically the Britosphere, the constellation of what used to be called “Dominions,” the self-governing white states within the British Empire.
You can see copies of The Patriot Game, my book on Canadian politics which for some reason I have never been asked to revise, over my right shoulder!
My conclusion: all the Anglosphere gets the same damn diseases at exactly the same time. That’s because, regardless of what their rent-seeking elites want to claim, they are a political and cultural unity.
But, in that early morning, my Australian memories were not activated fast enough to note the case of Geoffrey Blainey, perhaps Australia’s most distinguished historian, lynched Enoch Powell-style in 1984 because he expressed doubts about Asian immigration into Australia.
(But we did talk about Pauline Hanson!)
I’m delighted, and personally inspired, to see that Geoffrey Blainey is still writing at the age of 96, albeit apparently no longer focused on immigration.
Baliney popularized the Australian concern about the “Tyranny Of Distance”—their remoteness from Britain and the civilized world.
Yet Dan and I were chatting instantaneously via streamyard.
Boggle.
Here’s VDARE’s Australia archive, dating back more than twenty years.