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Interview with John Derbyshire

Vox Day interviewed the “summarily executed” ex-National Review writer about his controversial magazine article on April 10th, 2012:

Somehow you managed to turn yourself into a bigger media discussion point than the guy who went and shot five people out in Tulsa. That seems a little ironic in light of concerns regarding racism in America.

I think it was two guys who did the shooting, two guys were arrested.

That’s right. But it just seems odd that some advice to your children on dealing with race in America somehow trumps actually going out and shooting people. I find it remarkable that the media considers the John Derbyshire story to be more significant and indicative of racial problems in America than a pair of folks going around shooting and killing black people.

I think you may be exaggerating there, Vox. I read a prominent newspaper every morning and the Tulsa shootings have been in that newspaper and I have not.

I’ve seen stories about you in the Guardian and other UK newspapers.

Oh, I got a notice in the Russian press too. A Russian friend sent me something all in Russian. It was quite well done. So yeah, I’m a worldwide sensation. Fifteen minutes of fame or what?

After all this time and all you’ve written, is it surprising that this article should be the one to which everyone pays attention?

It is a bit surprising, yes. I’m a bit surprised. I didn’t think there was anything that much out of the ordinary in it. I’ve written similar things before and the tone wasn’t anything sensational. It’s an odd thing. People pick these things up and they buzz around for a few days… that’s the news business.

I was impressed with Mark Steyn’s defense of your article, or rather, your employment by National Review. Was it disappointing to see the opinions of Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, and some of the others who took the opposite position?

You know, Vox, I have to confess I try not to read negative stuff about myself. You can call that cowardice if you like. The way I look at it is why spoil my digestion? But I’ve been going by friends who have pointed me to various things, a friend sent me an email saying Goldberg’s really slagged off on you. Okay, fine, so I’m not going to read Goldberg. But friends did email me and said Mark Steyn’s put up a very good and thoughtful piece and you really should go and look at it. So I did read Mark’s piece and yes, I thought it was very judicious, very well done. And that nice little quip about if stuff published on Taki’s Magazine is so outrageous, why is Taki still on the National Review masthead. So yeah, I really did like Mark’s piece. The other pieces, I don’t know, as I said, I try not to read negative stuff about myself. Why upset yourself?

For the most part, there’s been a tremendous amount of support for you across the right blogosphere, whereas there hasn’t been much defense of Rich Lowry’s position except by the other writers at National Review. I would estimate that eighty to eighty-five percent of the comments have been running in your favor. I thought that was really striking, because I’m not sure that would have been the case ten years ago.

Do you mean the comments on the National Review blog?

I mean the comments on pretty much every blog where it’s been discussed, with the exception of the left-wing blogs where the competition is to see who can feign the most outrage.

I am in quite high spirits because I’ve had tremendous email support. I’ve had hundreds of emails and I’m going to have to do some collective thank you for them somewhere because I’ve totally given up trying to deal with them. I’d answer a dozen and forty more would come up in the meantime. It’s been almost a tsunami. I’m taking my life in my hands here, I know, but almost none of them have been negative even though my email address is right there on my web page. I think by the time I got through the first few dozen, there were two negative ones. And they weren’t vituperative, they were sarcastic and sneering, but they weren’t horrible. Everything else was really positive and supportive. That’s just tremendous, I’m really heartened by it. I am going to read them all. I can’t possibly answer them all, but I am going to read them all. People have been great.

I get the definite impression that something has changed. You talk about how 50 years ago, you would have had some different opinions more in line with the Standard Model view of race. And certainly 20 years ago, the reflexive anti-racist position was the normal one in educated society. But now things have changed and people are much less terrified of having the race card waved at them. Have you noticed that yourself?

There are a number of things in play there. One, which I’ve written about more than once, I think, in the United States, is just despair. I am of a certain age, and I was around 50 years ago. I was reading the newspapers and following world events and I remember the civil rights movement. I was in England, but we followed it. I remember it, I remember what we felt about it, and what people were writing about it. It was full of hope. The idea in everyone’s mind was that if we strike down these unjust laws and we outlaw all this discrimination, then we’ll be whole. Then America will be made whole. After an intermediate period of a few years, who knows, maybe 20 years, with a hand up from things like affirmative action, black America will just merge into the general population and the whole thing will just go away. That’s what everybody believed. Everybody thought that. And it didn’t happen.

Here we are, we’re 50 years later, and we’ve still got these tremendous disparities in crime rates, educational attainment, and so on. And I think, although they’re still mouthing the platitudes, Americans in their hearts feel a kind of cold despair about it. They feel that Thomas Jefferson was probably right and we can’t live together in harmony. I think that’s why you see this slow ethnic disaggregation. We have a very segregated school system now. There are schools within 10 miles of where I’m sitting that are 98 percent minority. In residential housing too, it’s the same thing. So I think there is a cold, dark despair lurking in America’s collective heart about the whole thing. That’s one factor. Another factor is the Internet, especially YouTube. Now, you can log on any morning to the Drudge Report and see videos of crowds of black Americans misbehaving. Maybe there should be some videos of white Americans misbehaving, but there just aren’t that many. People are seeing these things and it’s fortifying that despair.

I’m a bit scared of it, it’s making us kind of cold. But we’re still mouthing the platitudes. It’s something happening under the surface and it hasn’t really come to the surface yet except perhaps in reaction to events like this. But I do think that in our innermost hearts we’re in a state of despair.

One of the things I’ve noticed, living in Europe, is that Europeans really don’t get the American racial obsession. It’s pretty clear that approved racial etiquette in the United States is not normal and one wonders how long it can last.

That’s always been the case to some degree. Back in the 1930s, Agatha Christie wrote a book called “10 Little N-words”. Do you know that book?

I do.

That wasn’t the title of the book of course. I’m trying to observe the proprieties. It was published like that in Britain, but her American publisher wouldn’t publish it under that title. The American publication was “And Then There Were None”.

That was before World War II, in the 1940s. But it was published under the original name in England until the 1960s, well into the 1960s. So we’ve had this difference in sensibilities between polite, well-educated, upper middle class Americans and Europeans for a long time. We’ve always had that. But contra that, it seems to me, based on reading the newspapers, that the British are even more prissy than the Americans about these things. We’re constantly hearing about somebody getting prosecuted for yelling a racist word at a soccer player or something like that.

I exchanged some email with Jonah Goldberg about this and the thing that really appeared to bother him, and the thing that appears to have bothered your other critics the most, was the idea that one should not stop and offer assistance to a black individual in apparent distress. Obviously, you’re not a Christian, so barring any sort of Good Samaritan Christian duty, why do you think there’s been such a negative response to that particular piece of advice.

I must say, I think they have a point. If I was to write it over again, that would be just about the one thing I would change. I actually wanted to add some qualifiers to that point, just to tell people to be more wary in that situation, but you know, I’m a writer and I was over my allotted word count. I would rewrite that if I could. But again, I’m giving advice to kids and kids don’t have much judgment. I do think you need more judgment in a situation like that and I put a link to where it happened. You get a regular trickle of stories about people who have tried to help in those situations and come to grief, where they’ve been turned on or its been some kind of con.

I noticed you used the words “apparent distress” in your article. I thought it was fairly obvious you were indicating that not all distress is necessarily real and sometimes it’s a trap.

Yeah, and if you’re giving advice to kids, they don’t have the judgment to know what’s a trap and what isn’t. I don’t think it’s that bad advice even as it stands. But it’s the one thing I would have elaborated on if I’d had more words to use.

One thing I think people neglect to consider about the Good Samaritan is that he wouldn’t have been in any position to help the man if he didn’t have an animal to put the guy on, money to pay his medical bills and leave him in the inn for a couple of days.

(Laughs) Come on now, Vox. You’re lawyering it. I’ve made my semi-apology, let’s leave it at that.

Fair enough, fair enough. So Mark Steyn referred to what he called your “summary execution” by Lowry. Was it really that summary? Were you given any opportunity to walk yourself back or was it just a case of you’ve stuck your head in it, so off with your head? Lowry seemed to view the article as some sort of resignation, was that your intention?

Not at all. I thought it was just a routine piece.

The other theory that was making the rounds was that your obvious guilt could be mitigated by the fact that you’d been affected by your cancer treatments. Is there any veracity to that?

Nope, I don’t believe that at all. I’m on a monthly chemotherapy cycle and at the beginning of the cycle, where they pump the poison into you, you really are out of it for a few days. But then, a couple of weeks later, you’re back pretty much to normal. And that piece was written at the end of the cycle, so, no, I don’t believe it’s got anything to do with it.

National Review has a long and rather Stalinist history of purging its writers, including Joe Sobran, Samuel Francis, Ann Coulter, and now you. Is this part of National Review’s culture or is there something else going on there?

On National Review’s behalf, let me just correct you on Coulter. She wasn’t a National Review employee, they just syndicated her column and they stopped syndicating it. I think that was all that happened there. I’m sorry to sound defensive on National Review’s behalf, but it is something they have to do, to some degree. I actually spoke to Bill Buckley about this a couple of times. As a committed conservative, it hurts to say this, but there are a lot of crazy people on the political right and if you’re going to have any kind of presentation in the media marketplace at all, you do have to keep fending them off. Unfortunately, it’s a matter of judgment about which ones you fend off and which ones you let into the tent. It’s awfully hard to get right, and I know, Bill Buckley had said to me, that he didn’t think he’d always gotten it exactly right. It’s an approximate art. You sometimes boot out the wrong person and sometimes keep in the wrong person. Bill called it a policing exercise and it does have to be done. If you’re going to be a, oh dear, respectable publication, and get your ideas out there in the marketplace, you do have to draw a line against the craziest of the crazies. It’s not an easy line to draw. It’s not an easy judgment to make. Sometimes you get it wrong. I think Bill got it wrong with Sam Francis.

You sound remarkably comfortable having been found to be on the wrong side of the line.

Well, I say again, it’s a hard thing to get right. Did Rich Lowry get it right in my case? You be the judge.

Who will be the next to be purged at National Review? Most of the betting money is going towards Mark Steyn or Victor Davis Hanson.

What, no Mark Krikorian? No, VDH and Mark Steyn will have positions at National Review as long as they want them. VDH will self-purge before it becomes necessary to excommunicate him.

Some things must be read

If one is to believe them. This is an incredibly amusing letter from a white, deeply liberal, very not-racist woman who is deeply concerned about the insufficient profits of a prospective hip-hop club proprietor:

My name is Jennifer McMillen, and I live only a few doors down from the proposed site of Prime 6. Like most of the folks at the CB6 meeting on Monday night, I too have been concerned about the impending entrance of Prime 6 into our community and our daily lives.

I’m not generally the type of person that speaks up, (I remained silent during the entire Monday night meeting), but in this situation, I’m hopeful that I’ve stumbled onto a solution that makes so much sense for *both* parties that I’m beyond excited to share it with all of you.

First, let me explain what’s at the heart of this conflict: I know for a fact that there’s no single type of establishment (or type of bar/club patron for that matter) that Park Slopers would inherently view as “undesirable.” I don’t think anyone would deny that Park Slopers are about the least “racist” people on the planet.

What IS causing strife in this situation is that over the last ten years, Park Slope has become a family-oriented and family-centric community. This can be annoying at times – believe me, as someone who has chosen not to have children, I’m more than aware of the self-entitled attitude that often pervades parts of our community.

Nevertheless, it’s just a fact that in this neighborhood, family comes first.

Prime 6 has to realize this – but at the same time – Park Slope families need to realize that this is a free country, and that Prime 6 has a right to exist. Furthermore, no one can legally stop the owners from doing what it is they’re going to do.

So here’s the gist of my big idea: Isn’t there some middle ground between this spot being a stroller repair shop and it being a full-on hip-hop club?

No one can change the fact that Prime 6 WILL exist – they have their liquor license, and nothing’s going to deter them from opening. BUT: What if owner Akiva Ofshtein could be convinced that his business will see far more financial success as a different kind of nightlife establishment. Instead of focussing on hip-hop and urban entertainment, what if Prime 6 embraced some of the more indie local artists of ALL races who live and perform in the area.

Now, why might this devoutly anti-racist woman imagine that having an establishment devoted to “hip-hop and urban entertainment” would not be compatible with families or white spinsters like herself? What could the problem possibly be?

The only difference between white “racists” like John Derbyshire and avowedly anti-racist whites like Ms McMillen is that the latter completely lacks self-awareness. The observable and provable reality is that every single mentally functioning adult on the planet is racist because racism, in its most commonly recognized form, is nothing more than the possession of a functioning pattern-recognition capacity.

But the woman’s solution is even more amusing than the self-delusion. What a surprise that a liberal white woman would believe that an “indie” club would be more popular than an urban one. After all, doesn’t everyone love, love, love Tori Amos and Sarah Mclachlan?

Abandon the Word

This is not a statement about Christianity, but rather, concerns that infernal organization known as Microsoft and one of its flagship products that has badly lost its way:

Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages. Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the resulting electronic file for nonsense and typos. If the scanner wasn’t in the mood, we would prop up the hard copy beside a computer and retype the whole thing. Technology was changing fast, and some people were a few steps slow. You couldn’t blame them, really, but for those of us who were fully in the computer age, those dead-tree sheets meant tedious extra work.

Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.

I switched over to OpenOffice years ago, then after Sun was acquired by Oracle, to LibreOffice. I had to use a recent version of Word a few months ago, and although I’d been using Word since it was first released, I found the latest version very difficult to use. It’s the perfect example of a software company taking a perfectly useful, if flawed, piece of software and methodically making it less and less usable with every release.

If I was in charge of the Word project, I would throw out everything and start over from scratch. The fact that a single eight-character document is automatically transformed into a 16,224-character monster is lunacy squared.

Feminism is failure

Female careers are a fallback plan:

Forget ambition, financial security and that first-class degree. A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married. The research team, made up of three women and two men, said that when men are thin on the ground, ‘women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby’.

And the plainer a woman is, they claim, the more she is driven to succeed in the workplace.

It’s long been observed that the uglier a woman is, the more likely she is to be a feminist. And it was always logical, too, that women who couldn’t compete with other women in the traditional manner would seek to change the rules of the game. But now there is some scientific evidence supporting both the logic and the observation, and it could be very useful in helping counteract the feminist propaganda that inundates young women from the time they are girls, encouraging them to waste their youth and fertility in chasing careers rather than families.

The message is a simple and straighforward one: feminism is for female losers in the game of Life.

Anonymous comments

A word of warning. Because it has gotten too confusing too keep track of them, all Anonymous comments will be shot on sight from now on. If you’re going to comment and aren’t logged in with Google, make use of the Name/URL option; you don’t need to enter a URL, just a name.

“Never worked a day in her life”

James Taranto correctly excoriates the feminist philosophy that served as the foundation for Hilary Rosen’s epically stupid attack on Ann Romney:

In truth, anti-momism was the very heart of “The Feminine Mystique.” Friedan’s argument was that motherhood and homemaking were soul-deadening occupations and that pursuing a professional career was the way for a woman to “become complete.” She agreed with the midcentury misogynists that a stay-at-home mother was, in Friedan’s words, “castrative to her husband and sons.” But she emphasized that women were “fellow victims.”

The book might as well have been titled “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” Today, of course, she can, and because feminism has entailed a diminution of male responsibility, she often has no choice. As we’ve noted, an increasing number of women are choosing domestic life, finding it a liberating alternative to working for a boss. But to do so requires a husband with considerable means.

Fifty years ago, Ann Romney’s life would have made her just a regular woman. Today, she is a countercultural figure–someone who lives in a way that the dominant culture regards with a hostile disdain. And she has chosen to live that way, which is why Hilary Rosen, as an intellectual heiress to Betty Friedan, regards her as a villain rather than a victim.

Taranto also points out something that I consider vital. He effectively draws the distinction between Romney’s accomplishments and Rosen’s: “Raising children is a lot of work, and we’d venture to say it’s more valuable work than, say, lobbying for the music industry or helping BP with its crisis communications, to name two of the highlights of Rosen’s career.”

I’ll go even farther. Bearing and raising children is far more important than anything any working woman has ever done in her professional career in the entire history of Mankind. The silly, short-sighted, white trash teen mothers on MTV are contributing more to the human race than the most intelligent, highly educated, and accomplished women have ever done for it.

If a woman wants to devote sixteen or more years of her life to “education”, then follow it up by sitting in a cubicle and transferring information from point A to point B, that’s her legal right. But it’s not doing anything for the human race, and indeed, considering the economically negative effects of the government agencies and human resources departments where women are inordinately employed, economic irrelevance is probably the best case scenario.

Linda Hirschman once claimed: ““The tasks of housekeeping and child-rearing are not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.”

But she had it wrong. She had it completely backwards, because there is absolutely nothing a woman, however educated and intelligent, can do that is more important or more vital than raising children. And while home-making not the physical equivalent of working in a coal mine, it is at least as laborious as most white collar employment. I have no affection for Captain Underoos and if he wins in November I think he will probably be even worse than Obama has been. But it is as evil as it is stupid to attack his wife for doing the one thing that the human race absolutely requires for its survival.

The end of the Holocult

Germany is finally rejecting the self-serving religion of collective ethnic responsibility for historical crimes:

Sharp criticism of Israel, particularly from the left, has long been a tradition among European intellectuals, and Mr. Grass’s poem caused little stir on the Continent outside of Germany. But political and scholarly elites here have more often resisted that trend, tending to see basic support for Israel as a German responsibility, if not a necessity, after the Holocaust.

But the public response to the furor over Mr. Grass’s poem suggests that that attitude is breaking down as World War II recedes into history. “In the populism you see surfacing on a large scale, the public is all behind Grass,” said Georg Diez, an author and journalist at the magazine Der Spiegel who has written critically of the poem.

One needn’t be a Holocaust denier nor an anti-semite to recognize the fundamental absurdity of the “Never Again” cult. After all, there is no more justification to hold the Germans of today responsible for the large-scale slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews sixty years ago than there was for medieval Christians to hold the Jews of their day responsible for crucifying Jesus.

The Holocaust doesn’t justify anything. It doesn’t justify Jewish paranoia about American Christians, it doesn’t justify open immigration, it doesn’t justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East, it doesn’t justify American aggression in the Middle East, and it certainly doesn’t justify the neocon willingness to sacrifice American interests for Israeli ones. The Holocaust was just one of the many bloody historical tragedies that illustrate the fallen state of Man, and it wasn’t even unique at the time given the Nazi slaughter of the Slavs, the Soviet slaughter of the Ukrainians, and the Japanese slaughter of the Chinese that all took place during the same historical milieu.

Nor is it necessary to justify the existence of Israel. Israel has the same right to defend itself that every other nation does. Israel has the same right to exist that every other nation does. Israel is neither a saintly nation that can do no wrong nor an evil fascist state that can do no right. It’s just a small nation-state that is both praised and criticized to a degree that greatly exceeds what its actions merit.

Now, despite the best efforts of Hollywood’s Jews to preserve it as a useful propaganda device, people are increasingly beginning to abandon the iconic notion of collective ethnic responsibility for past events. This is in part due to immigration, as I doubt any of the 50 million Central and South Americans now resident in the United States feel any more residual guilt for the Holocaust than they do for 19th century slavery or the Mongol invasions. But it’s also due to the perspective that the passage of time always eventually brings.

It’s hard to believe in the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust in the light of the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the massacres in Rwanda. It’s even harder to believe that the National Socialists were viciously attacking completely innocent scapegoats for absolutely no reason in light of how the members of an ethnic group that comprises only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population are now massively overrepresented in the House and Senate, at 6.2 percent and 13 percent respectively. And while the Federal Reserve isn’t doing anything it hasn’t been doing since 1913, it probably doesn’t greatly help the Jewish cause that Ben Shalom Bernanke is the individual now presiding over a particularly problematic stage for the US fiat currency.

Anyhow, my thought is that if a small and distinctive group of people want to band together and acquire as much political power as possible, they had damned well better be sure to do a good job of running things for the benefit of everyone, not merely their own particular interests, because if they’re simply going to play the interest group game, eventually the majority or one of the larger minority groups is going to band together and do whatever is necessary to throw them out of power and keep them out. The fact that the two primary interests of the U.S. Congress presently appear to be a) sending trillions to Wall Street and b) supporting Israeli foreign policy does not bode well in this regard, as it suggests that there is a small, but real risk that if the U.S. economy crashes and the nation begins to divide on its ethnic fault lines, even Americans may eventually find themselves casting about for an all-too-familiar scapegoat.

The global medieval

While it is generally a category error to talk about the medieval period outside of Europe, it is perfectly appropriate to discuss the warming that took place during medieval times and has bedeviled the climate change propagandists. Unsurprisingly, the latest evidence indicates that the AGW/CC scammers are incorrect – again – and the warming period was not limited to Europe:

Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times areas as far apart as Europe and Antarctica both warmed up. It then cooled down naturally and there was even a ‘mini ice age’.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe. In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica.

At present the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was confined to Europe.

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that the climate scientists have been shown to be wrong again. Remember, experiment-backed science is only about 11% reliable according to the scientific method itself, so you can safely expect that whenever scientists make a new public announcement, they’re going to be wrong around 90 percent of the time.

The rule of thumb is that if you can’t make a physical object or machine based on the scientific principles involved, the scientists are wrong. One can reasonably trust engineers, engineering, and technology, one cannot reasonably place any confidence in scientists, science, or the current scientific consensus.

“The Deported”

In honor of The Original Cyberpunk belatedly getting the March issue of Stupefying Stories out the door, which as I mentioned contains one of my short stories, I’m posting the story that was published in the October 2011 issue. Ten points if you can correctly identify the author whose style I imitated here – and if you happen to already know, please keep your mouth shut and let those who don’t see if they can guess it. “The Deported” was written in keeping with the “ghost story” theme of the October issue, but the most frightening thing about it may be that the Italian town in which it is set was all but destroyed by flooding and mudslides in the same month the anthology was published.

The Deported
Stupefying Stories, October 2011
Vox Day

It was the fourth day of our summer holiday in Vernazza, a little fishing village in the Cinque Terre. We had spent the morning on a charming hike through the hills, lunched in Monterosso al Mare, then enjoyed a languid afternoon in the sun on the beach there. After hiking back and taking a brief but restorative nap, the six of us had reconvened for the evening on the terrace overlooking the sea. We were well into our second bottle of prosecco as Francois attempted to convince Bertrand’s wife, Michèle, that one could not genuinely claim to be an atheist and yet still believe in ghosts.

“There is more to a term than its etymology, ma cherie,” he declared, punctuating his words with an authoritative jab of his cigarette. “When we reject the possibility of existence of gods, we are necessarily rejecting with it the very idea of the supernatural. If one cannot see it, or touch it, or experience it in any material manner, then it is entirely apparent that it simply does not exist.”

“But what about love?” Michèle protested. She was an intelligent, educated woman, without a religious bone in her slender body, but she did harbor a lamentable affection for crystals, feng shui, and any number of fashionable absurdities. “What about hate?”

I reached out to place my glass on the side table when I noticed a smile on the face of the young German man sitting to our left. I had seen him before. He arrived in Vernazza the day after us, but apparently alone, for we had not seen him in the company of anyone other than the occasional waiter since then. He nodded to me, which I found to be a little surprising, as we had, of course, been speaking French. The German, for such I naturally assumed him to be, was a big, beefy fellow, with a sun-reddened face and the sort of fine blond hair that is all too liable to disappear before a man’s fortieth year.

“Pardon me, monsieur, I merely happened to overhear the conversation,” he said in fluent, if provincial, French. “It reminded me of something.”

“Ghosts or gods?” I asked him. The others, surprised to hear the German speaking our language, stopped talking and turned to listen to us.

“Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. Who can say?” He gave a shrug that was almost Gallic in its fatalism. “I only know there are things in this world that neither priest nor scientist can explain to my satisfaction. Things I have seen with my own eyes.”

“Do you believe in God?” Bertrand leaned over and asked in an aggressive tone. He is one of my oldest and dearest friends, but at times, he can be a trial. He lost his beloved father at the age of seven in an automobile accident and has been demanding answers of God and anyone who is foolish enough to admit to believing in God ever since.

But the blond man only chuckled at his vehemence and raised his glass of red wine in an ironic salute. “I am Swiss. Of course I believe in God. Do we not worship Mammon?”

“Don’t we all,” Michèle said theatrically. Everyone laughed except Bertrand.

The Swiss’s name was Beat Kistler. He was, he explained, from an old family in the canton of Zurich, but his mother was Vaudoise and he was awarded a criminology degree by the University of Lausanne. After graduation, he joined the Geneva police force and in his third year was reassigned to a task force assisting the Swiss Federal Migration Office in processing immigrants who were seeking asylum. And it was there, in the detention center, that he had seen something that he found inexplicable, even now. We were all interested to hear his mysterious story, for it was eminently clear that he was an educated and level-headed man. He told us his tale without resort to drama, in a calm and relaxed manner.

“The first thing you must understand,” he said, “is that most of the asylum seekers we see in the federal system are Africans. Nigerians are the most common. They’re economic migrants, of course, but somewhere along the way, word gets around the community that if they can present themselves as political victims, there is a chance they will be able to receive a residence permit and stay in the country. We can’t allow most of them to remain, you understand, because they have no skills, they have no means of supporting themselves, and they simply cannot afford to live in such an expensive country. The franc is very high, you know. And, in any event, we have no room for them; there literally isn’t anywhere for them to live. The city of Lagos alone has more people than we have in all of Switzerland.

“The Migration Office reviews about fifteen thousand applicants per year. About a third of them can be sent immediately to other European states, because the Dublin accord requires them to apply for asylum in the state that served as their port of entry. So we send them to Italy, Spain, or in some cases, to you, in France. Another third leave on their own once we explain to them that they will not, under any circumstances, be permitted to remain. But the remainder—ah, well, that is where things occasionally get out of order.

“You should hear the lies they tell. Many times, they are most amusing. The sort of young men who are adventurous enough to make it all the way to Switzerland from Africa seldom have much in the way of education and so it’s not uncommon for them to fail to properly understand what their legal advisers are telling them to say. So we hear men claiming they are facing female genital mutilation should they be forced to return home, or telling us their entire family was killed in a massacre even though we already have the rejected applications from three of their brothers in our files. Occasionally a story will check out and permission will be granted, but only in the most extreme cases. Out of the two thousand Nigerians who applied last year, I think perhaps one or two were given residence. The rest, we must somehow transport back to their home country.”

“Only one or two?” my wife protested. “Out of thousands? Surely you could take more!”

Beat smiled and shook his head. “A fifth of our residents are already foreigners as it is. And recall, none of these people are being oppressed or tortured in any way, in which case we would have a moral duty to help them. They simply want to live off the Swiss people. It’s not possible.”

“Enough about the Africans, what about the ghosts!” Bertrand was getting impatient.

“Before you can understand the significance of this, my friends, you must first accept the context of the situation. But I see that you have grasped the general idea, therefore I shall move on to the specific case of which I speak.

“Two years ago, I met a Nigerian man who did not fit the description of the sort of asylum seekers we are accustomed to see every day. He was older, in his fifties, and instead of giving his religion as either Christian or Muslim, his file showed that he was classified as an animist. The traditional religions are officially recognized in Nigeria, and in fact many of those who call themselves Christians or Muslims still pay due regard to their tribal gods and ancestral spirits.

“I was tasked to accompany the social worker who was assigned to interview him for his appeal hearing. This was necessary because both the asylum seekers and the deportees are held in detainment facilities, and, like prisoners everywhere, they sometimes get unruly. It’s mostly those who have already been sentenced to deportation, since they have little to lose if they behave badly, but sometimes the asylum seekers forget themselves and get out of hand as well.

“The contrast between the facilities and the inhabitants is stark. It is literally black and white. Most of the facilities are very new, all squares and fluorescent lighting, with undecorated walls painted white and the ceilings and floors covered with white tile. You cannot imagine a more lifeless and sterile environment. The Nigerians, on the other hand, are very dark-skinned and full of life. When they are happy, they sing and smile, and some of them play a sort of rhythmic music with their hands on the walls to which the others dance. Of course, some of them, particularly the less intelligent, are demoralized by their incarceration. In such cases, their behavior at times borders on the bestial. They glare and they snarl, they beg and they plead, at times they offer their bodies for pleasure, other times they spit at anyone who walks past their cells.

“This man was not one of the ones who act like animals. He had a dignity to him, and his file showed he had been a man of some substance in Lagos. His brother, now deceased, was a senior official in the Ministry of Finance, but he was closely tied to the progressive opposition party, which accounted for his emigration from the country after the corrupt election of 2007 that was essentially stolen by the party in power today.

“He spoke English; better English than I do. When the social worker interviewed him, he explained in a very lucid and coherent manner that to return to Nigeria meant death, not only for him, but for everyone around him. The reason he gave was that he had been cursed by an Igbo shaman in the employ of the new finance minister, the same man who was responsible for his brother’s death. He told us he was a shaman himself, but his ancestral spirits had been defeated by the shaman’s spirits during the conflict that surrounded the election in 2007.”

Michèle and I laughed. Bertrand snorted. “How did the immigration judge view that?”

“The social worker tried several times to explain to him that his appeal would be rejected, as ancestral spirits are not listed among the potential justifications for asylum accepted by the foreign office, but the Nigerian was absolutely insistent. He said he would not lie and he was absolutely convinced that his return would prove fatal, because the Igbo spirits would not permit it. As I said, he was a serious, dignified man, and if his claim hadn’t been so clearly impossible, one might have almost found it to be persuasive.

“I don’t know if the social worker actually cited the spirits or how things went at the hearing, all I know is that the appeal was unsuccessful, which of course was hardly surprising. The whole incident was very strange, but at the time I thought nothing more of it until two months later, when my entire unit was summoned in the middle of the night to help the Securitas guards deal with a riot that had broken out at that very facility. We were sent in wearing full riot gear, although we were only armed with mace and batons. We left our shields in the bus they used to bring us there, since they would only get in the way.”

“You must have been very frightened,” interjected Aurélie, Francois’s partner of the last five years.

“No, for the most part we were annoyed at being dragged from the comfort of our beds. A few of the more aggressive lads, they were bragging about how they were going to break heads and so forth, you know the type. But mostly we just wanted to go in, get the job done, and hopefully return in time to get a few hours of sleep before the sun came up. I’d been on duty since the morning at the federal court in Bern, so my main feeling was one of exhaustion.

“Once we entered, we quickly realized it wasn’t a riot. All the lights were out, but the facility technicians said there was no loss of power, which was confusing. Our helmets have flashlights, so we switched them on and entered. There was screaming, but they were screams of terror, not the wordless roaring you hear when a crowd is out of control, and they were coming from somewhere deep inside the building. The asylum seekers were still in their cells, but most of the deportees were gathered in the cafeteria and out of their heads with fear. They weren’t rioting; they’d broken out of their cells because they were all scared to death of something. They greeted us with hugs and tears, as if we were their saviors. Right about then, the screams stopped. I think the sudden silence, more than anything else, started to make us feel nervous.

“Our captain talked one of them, a big man with a shaved head, into leading us towards the deportee cells from where the screams had been coming. Most of the cells were empty, but then we came upon a cell with a closed door. The captain had the keys, so he unlocked it and discovered two dead Nigerians inside. Their eyes were open, but they were dead and there wasn’t a mark on them. The deportee who was acting as our guide was shaking a little, but he said he was a Jesus man and ‘the shadow that kill’ couldn’t touch him. We passed two more locked cells and found a pair of dead Nigerians inside both of them, and again, the dead men were unmarked.

“Now remember, it was pitch black down there, except for our helmet lights, which aren’t as powerful as they should be. I thought I heard something, so I took my baton out, shook it out to its full length, and went to investigate. I looked in a cell on the other side of the hall, and first things I saw were two eyes; big, round, white eyes, almost like when your automobile catches a fox’s eyes along the side of the road. Then I saw the rest of it…

“I must have shouted because there were eight or nine lights shining into the cell almost right away.”

“The old man, the shaman—,” breathed Francois.

“Precisely,” nodded the Swiss. “He was crouched over the body of his cellmate, eating his heart! It was him we had heard screaming earlier; the cellmate, because the shaman had painted all sorts of evil-looking symbols on the walls of their cell in his blood, before finally taking his heart and killing him. He must have been doing it for an hour or more, because the floor was completely covered in blood. When they counted later, there were more than one hundred separate symbols on the walls.”

“What did the symbols mean?”

“The psychologists asked him that later. We didn’t ask questions then, you see, we just unlocked the cell, threw open the door, maced him and put him in shackles. There wasn’t anything we could do for the cellmate, of course. But the symbols; that’s the intriguing thing. He told the psychologists they were to summon the spirits of the Igbo ancestors and offer them the lives of the men in the cells around him as an attempt to appease them. He said the six men who died in the other cells meant that his offering had been accepted, but it was all to no avail since we had interrupted him before he could finish the ritual. His cellmate was Igbo, so that’s why he had to eat his heart; to sort of make himself Igbo, in a way, so the spirits would see him as one of theirs and leave him alone when he returned to Lagos.”

“That sounds rather heartless of the man,” Bertrand commented wryly.

“Bertrand!” Michèle protested. “But didn’t you say you had to unlock his cell when you found him?”

“It was definitely locked. So were the other cells. But the other men were definitely dead as well and the times of their deaths were consistent with the time that the lights went out and the riot started.”

“Interesting,” mused Bertrand. “Of course, these other Nigerians were uneducated, superstitious, and more or less animists for the most part. Therefore, it is safe to assume they were highly susceptible to suggestion. You said that even the Christian man was terrified. So, if they knew he was a shaman and became aware of what he intended, it’s entirely possible that they were quite literally frightened to death!”

“But that doesn’t explain the lights,” I pointed out.

“That might have merely been an unfortunate coincidence.”

“The lights came on a few minutes after we maced the shaman,” the Swiss explained. “But that’s not the end of my story. Three months after the riot, my friend Walther and I were assigned to the squad that accompanies the deportation flight to Lagos. When we reviewed the deportee list, I recognized one of the names as belonging to the man I’d last seen devouring his companion’s heart. I will not lie; at that moment I felt such a fear as I have never known before. I heard no voice, but suddenly I understood the message, as clearly as you hear me speak to you now, that I should not, under any circumstances, board that flight. The ancestral spirits had been strong enough to kill six healthy young men a continent away—and the ritual to appease them was a failure.

“I made some excuse to my captain, told him I was unwell or something, I don’t recall. To my shame, I did not do more than make a half-hearted attempt to convince Walther to avoid the flight as well. I arranged to have lunch with him, but when I mentioned my fears, he laughed at me for being an irrational, superstitious fool and I was too embarrassed to argue the point with him. I bitterly regretted that a week later, when I received a telephone call from my captain. He told me that the Swiss flight from Zurich to Lagos had gone down not long after entering Nigerian airspace. There were no survivors.”

“Oh my God,” breathed Michèle.

“How awful for you,” said my wife.

The Swiss only smiled ruefully and lit a cigarette. He inhaled thoughtfully, and tapped out the small amount of ash on the tip. “Rather more awful for Walther and the others, I should think.”

“What caused the crash?” I asked. “I can’t imagine the aviation authorities attributed it to angry ancestral spirits.”

“After the black box was analyzed, the experts concluded that the co-pilot had fallen asleep and the pilot had a heart attack. But to my mind, that sounds like an attempt to explain away the inexplicable. There was no mechanical failure; no signs of distress from the cockpit. Unfortunately the plane burned, so conjecture was all that was left to them, in the absence of anything conclusive from the black box.”

He looked at Bertrand. “So, have you an explanation for me, other than an unfortunate string of unlikely coincidences?”

Bertrand, to his credit, wasn’t inclined to bluster. “I fear you have anticipated me, monsieur. Of course, I am hardly an expert on aviation.”

We were all quick to protest the idea that Bertrand might be anything less than expert on everything. It was an old joke among us. Amidst the laughter, the Swiss extinguished his cigarette and rose from his chair.

“Ladies, gentlemen, I bid you une bonne soirée and a pleasant remainder to your vacation. And I hope my little tale has not disturbed you.”

Bertrand and I hastened to assure him that it was impossible, as we had enjoyed it immensely. Were we not all français, hailing from that most rational of nations? We bade him farewell, and the last we saw of him was his broad back, as he returned to the bar inside.

But later that evening, as my wife slept by my side, there was a soft knock on my door. It was Bertrand, and he was holding his iPad. “Come outside and look at this,” he whispered.

I followed him out to the patio where we had been drinking earlier that evening. We could hear the sound of the sea below us, but where there had been a broad expanse of clear blue water only a few hours before, there was now nothing but a vast black emptiness, devoid of reflections from the shore or even the pinpricks of starlight that animated the night sky above. The glow of the tablet screen was so bright against the darkness that it was almost painful to my eyes. And what had been unthinkable under the warm glow of the Italian sun suddenly seemed all too possible, when standing above the inky abyss of the Mediterranean at midnight.

“I looked it up. A flight from Zurich to Lagos that was carrying twenty deportees, eight police, and the two pilots went down about eighteen months ago.”

“So that much was true, anyhow.”

We stared out at the black depths of the sea. It was a quiet evening and the Moon was obscured by clouds that had crept in under the cover of darkness. The waves lapped at the rocky shoreline hundreds of meters below us, indifferent, mindless, uncaring, exactly as they had one thousand, two thousand, three thousand years ago.

“This doesn’t prove anything about the existence of ghosts, much less God,” Bertrand suddenly declared.

“Of course not,” I said. “But still….”

“But still,” he agreed.

Stupefying Stories: March 2012

The new Stupefying Stories is out as of March 42nd, and it includes a story from yours truly entitled “The Last Testament of Henry Halleck”, which concerns the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the madness of William T. Sherman, and, of course, the Cthulhu Mythos.

“The fifth volume in award-winning editor Bruce Bethke’s new ebook-only original anthology series features ten all-new tales of science, hope, magic, and passion, by Beth Cato, Jason Wittman, Chuck Bordell, J. R. Johnson, Paul Dixon, Aaron Bradford Starr, Kersley Fitzgerald, Richard Zwicker, Vox Day, and Alex Shvartsman.”