The other day I gave a passing mention to Adam Ellwanger, Professor of English at the University of Houston. Prof. Ellwanger had posted an excellent piece August 14th at The American Mind on terminological creep, citing as an example the creep from “illegal alien” via “illegal immigrant,” then “undocumented person,” through to “migrant worker,” the term preferred during the Obama Administration.

The terminology has since crept further, passing from the mere blamelessness of “migrant worker” to the heartstring-tugging sympathy of “asylum seeker,” as if every one of those well-dressed, tough-looking young men with smartphones was a desperate, helpless refugee escaping political or religious persecution.

How much further can it creep? Will it go all the way to sanctification? Ten years from now shall we be referring to illegal aliens as “blessed children of sorrow”? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Meanwhile the people promoting this linguistic legerdemain have been de-moting their political opponents from mere “Republicans,” “conservatives” or “reactionaries” to the scarier-sounding “MAGA Republicans,” “white supremacists,” and “Nazis.”

Efforts by our own faction to perform similar magic have had little success, mainly of course because the other side controls all the major media outlets and we don’t. “The Left,” “Progressives,” and “radicals” are still, after several decades, common terms of reference used on our side of the divide for the Other.

The word “Woke” and its derivatives—I particularly like “the Great Awokening”—have added something new, but the connotations are lightweight; the image conjured up is more of fussy schoolmarms than stone-faced commissars.

“Cultural Marxists,” which is perfectly justifiable on semantic grounds, has gone nowhere much in spite of Wikipedia’s 6,600-word coverage, which helpfully begins “The term ‘Cultural Marxism’ refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory.”

When Bill de Blasio was Mayor of New York City, I took to referring to him as a communist, very reasonably—the guy took his honeymoon in Fidel Castro‘s Cuba, for Heaven’s sake, violating a U.S. embargo to do so.

Peter Brimelow told the American Renaissance conference back in 2021 that:

We have to recognize that we are in the early stages of a communist coup. It just crept upon us.

The Boss has been repeating that warning ever since, with useful explanations as to why the word “communist” is apt in current circumstances.

Other writers at VDARE.com have followed suit. Tracking back just through this month I see usage by Lilith Powell on the 29th, Carl Horowitz on the 27th, Patrick Cleburne and A.W. Morgan on the 23rd, Federale on the 21st, Washington Watcher II on the 20th, Former Agent on the 19th, …

We are leading the way here, and picking up followers. Most recently I spotted Laura Loomer on Twitter, August 28th.

I don’t have a problem with “communist”—obviously!—but we are pressing forward against headwinds of ignorance. Astonishingly to anyone acquainted with the appalling massacres and cultural destruction wreaked by communists, those horrors are not taught to children in our schools.

For decades now it has been possible, indeed normal, to grow up in the U.S.A. exposed to Main Stream Media and entertainment outlets, educated from kindergarten through to graduate school, without hearing anything about the atrocities of communism. A quarter-century ago I published a book that contained passing references to the great Mao Tse-tung famine of 1959-61, whose death toll was so great it is not known even to the nearest ten million. A common question from the audiences on my book tour was: Did such a famine actually occur?

To most Americans, the word “communist” is a quaint mid-20th-century relic, only mildly pejorative, if even that. The word is associated in some way they vaguely recall with the unjust persecution of Hollywood names seventy years ago. “Communist” has no power; nothing like the power it should have, nothing even close to the power of “fascist.”

Are there any other calumnies we can deploy? I’ve long had a fondness for H.L. Mencken‘s mocking term “world-savers,” which he applied to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. That fondness is rooted in having heard my dear old Uncle Fred Littlehales—an ordinary English working man of not much education—scoff at the 1970s U.K. left as “the love-the-world people.”

I doubt either term will ever get much traction in our political vocabulary, though. “World-savers” fits Republican neocons just as well as it fits lefty ethnomasochists. As for “love-the-world people”: our opponents would take that as a compliment. In their outlook, loving the world is far superior morally to such antiquated, deplorable attachments as loving your country.

As a footnote here: I get occasional emails from readers asking whether I am the originator of the term “congresscritter.”

No, I am not. I picked it up from the late Jerry Pournelle. He and I were both participants in Steve Sailer’s HBD email group back in the late 1990s, and Jerry was a frequent user of “congresscritter” and related terms. Whether he was the originator of it, I have no idea.

We began August with a trip to Vermont for the Coolidge centenary. I have sufficiently documented that trip at Radio Derb; but we came away from Vermont with one small non-Coolidge-related mystery I only solved—on the internet, of course—after we got home.

The centenary celebrations over, we had driven up to the Shelburne Farms Estate up on the shore of Lake Champlain for some sightseeing.

What a beautiful place! We’d hiked around there for a couple of hours, ending up at the Inn—a charming old Gilded Age time capsule, perfect for relaxation after the hike.

The mystery had appeared as we hiked through some dense woodland near the Inn. The trees, we’d started to notice, were connected to each other by thin plastic tubes—miles and miles of them stretching back from the trail, looped and joined in all sorts of improbable ways. What were they?

The best guess we could come up with was that this was some mass-production method for extracting maple syrup from the trees. The objection to this was, that the tubes were much too narrow: the maple syrup would just clog them.

ORDER IT NOW

Eh, townies! In an idle moment back home I looked up the Shelburne Farms website in hopes of enlightenment. They did not disappoint. Yes: those trees are maples and the hollow tubes—technically “sap lines”—are tapping them for maple sap … which is watery stuff much less viscous than the maple syrup produced from it.

The whole process is very well explained by the two videos here. The sap lines are introduced at 8m25s into the first video.

And the mystery turned out to have been not totally unrelated to the thirtieth president. His father told one of Coolidge’s early biographers that “Cal could get more sap out of a maple tree than any boy I ever saw.”

Showbiz news in early August was still dominated by the simultaneous releases on July 21st of Universal Pictures Oppenheimer and Warner Brothers’ Barbie.

No, I don’t have anything like a review of either movie to offer. As I am sure I’ve mentioned before, I’m just not a movie person. I’ve watched plenty and enjoyed many, mostly the big old classics, but never engaged in any serious way with what the studios put out. For movies, Steve Sailer’s your guy.

Now I’m less and less interested. Most likely it’s not them, it’s me. I was a bookish child, and am now well into second childhood.

Mrs Derbyshire is much more of a movie buff. We rent a weekly DVD from Netflix to watch on Saturday evening after dinner. It’s unusual for me to stay awake all the way through a two-hour movie. For anything longer than that, it’s unknown. Oppenheimer is three hours—no chance. Barbie is only 1h54m, but … nah.

Some of the cultural side-effects of Oppenheimer have caught my attention, though. (I was originally going to say “some of the cultural fallout,” but I thought better of it.)

One of those side-effects has been a renewal—actually, by my memory, a re-re-re-re-re-renewal, at least—of outrage at the horrors we inflicted on the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when we dropped atom bombs on their cities.

Those cities were hit on August 6th and August 9th, 1945, so the outrage ignited by Oppenheimer was waxing especially hot early this month. Horrific clips from the 1983 Japanese anime movie Barefoot Gen have been much aired on our social media

If you are watching #OppenheimerMovie , consider watching #barefootgen (or reading this article). It shows a ground zero perspective of a child living in Hiroshima who survived the blast. It’s graphic and heartbreaking.

It’s what Oppenheimer created. https://t.co/2DBtcDfGKc

— M.H