Friday, April 28, 2006

Some Internet bloggers and others are infuriated by the thought of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in a language other than English, and the version of the song has already been the target of a fierce backlash.

[...]

Bryanna Bevens of Hanford, Calif., who writes for the immigration-focused Web magazine Vdare.com, said the remix particularly upset her.

“It’s very whiny. If you want to say all those things, by all means, put them on your poster board, but don’t put them on the national anthem,” she said.

Center for American Unity
www.cfau.org

Long-time anti-immigrant activist and author Peter Brimelow is the president of the Center for American Unity, a Virginia nonprofit foundation "dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century." On the surface, the center is concerned with promoting English as a common language, but a bit of digging reveals concerns that non-white, Catholic, and Spanish-speaking immigrants are polluting America.

This is most obvious in the foundation's VDARE project, which is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World in 1587. Brimelow says that he once planned to bestow Dare's name upon "the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation [his anti-immigration book], about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles."

Reviving a favorite theme of early nativists and the Ku Klux Klan, Brimelow attacks 19th-century Catholic immigrants for being supposedly subservient to popes and monarchs, and thus incompatible with democratic self-rule.

The VDARE Web site also contains an archive of columns by Sam Francis, the immigrant-bashing editor of the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens*. In his columns, Francis rails against the "emerging Hispanic majority," plugs conspiracy theories, and promotes white racial consciousness.

In April, VDARE took one more step toward the racist right, publishing an essay on its Web site by white supremacist Jared Taylor that dismisses "the fantasy of racial equality," claims the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "stripped Americans of the right to make free decisions," and says that "[b]lacks, in particular, riot with little provocation," unlike the far more peaceable white race.