Coming Home
The mysterious homing instinct of animals, and the human sense of home and homeland
THE Manchester Guardian may have been a liberal publication when it was founded in 1821. When I first began to glance occasionally at copies of it, a hundred and thirty years later, it had already become an evangel for “Liberal intellectuals,” telling them what to think — or to recite without troubling their consciousness with thought. I am, by the way, becoming very tired of putting quotation marks about a phrase that designates a horde of chatterboxes who are neither liberal (1) nor intellectual. “Liberal intellectuals,” as Joseph Sobran once dared to say publicly, to the displeasure of his editor-in-chief, (2) are only slightly disguised Communists, i.e., votaries of the Marxian religion, although some may be too ignorant to know it.
(footnote 1. In political terms, a liberal necessarily desires a society fit for liberi, free men, and, heeding George Washington’s warning that “government, like fire, is a useful servant, but a fearful master,” he will strive to reduce governmental control of individuals to a very minimum — the very antithesis of the slavery desired by the self-styled “Liberals,” who perpetually agitate for more Soviet-style legislation and more degradation of their own race, which they take pride in denigrating and betraying. And they have already imposed on us Marx’s dictatorship of the Sheenies and their thugs who control a mindless proletariat. The last American liberal was Albert Jay Nock, whose Our Enemy, the State (New York, Morrow, 1935) should be read by everyone who is at all interested in politics in the true sense of that word — the sense in which it was used by a constitutional lawyer, who was fond of remarking, “Never try to discuss politics with a politician: he couldn’t understand it, and wouldn’t give a damn, if he could.”)
(footnote 2. Cf. Liberty Bell, August 1987, pp. 2-5.)
As one would expect, recent issues of the Guardian’s weekly supplement, which is widely distributed in this country, are filled with passionate yelps that the “rich nations” (that means you, sucker) must reduce their own standard of living so that they can give trillions of dollars to the “poor nations” (and that means billions of niggers, wogs, and other biological detritus) to help them “save the planet” (by breeding faster). (That is the hogwash purveyed by the Gore who is now, incredible as it seems, a candidate for the office of Vice President.) (3) There is naturally no mention of the only pollution from which the planet needs to be saved, the horrible overpopulation by billions of vocal anthropoids that are multiplying like guinea pigs, thanks to the fatuity and subconscious death-wish of our own ill-starred race.
(footnote 3. Cf. Liberty Bell, April 1992, pp. 21-22.)
Occasionally, however, the Guardian Weekly prints something worth reading. In the issue for 21 June 1992 there is an item by Ralph Whitlock, which, I hope, may have reminded the paper’s habitual readers that there is much that neither they nor we can understand about our fellow creatures, who have as much right to this planet as we do, although our race, long bemused by a pernicious superstition, thought that they were made for our swollen-headed species to use and abuse. It is worth quoting.
Mr. Whitlock says that last May he and a neighbor were commenting on the late return of swallows and house martins when
Over the meadows before his house, dipping and diving toward us as they hawked insects on the wing, were four or five martins. Suddenly they were with us, and, losing their interest in flies, they made straight for the sites of their last year’s nests. Without hesitation and with no exploratory reconnoitering, they flew directly to the vestiges of the nests that had survived the winter’s gales, and clung to them twittering. It was as if they were saying, “Well, here we are Home again! and so glad to be here!”
And I fell to marvelling at the unerring instinct that had brought them all those 7,000 miles from their winter quarters in South Africa, 14,000 miles if you reckon the autumn journey. When the time came to begin the journey the birds must have had a clear picture of their destination, and a detailed programming of their route. … And there was no mistaking the impulse which guided them, for, the next day, they were busy laying the foundation of a new nest under the house eaves, using what remained of their nest of the previous year.
In the martins and many other species of birds, as I remarked when commenting on Dr. Rhine’s imposition on the credulity of the public, we have a genuine instance of “extra-sensory perception.” Their astonishing journeys are certainly not explicable in terms of the five senses that we possess. The most plausible theory is that they somehow perceive the lines of force in the earth’s magnetic field and, perhaps, the angle of the sun’s rays. But whatever the explanation, we have here a phenomenon of what can be called a “spiritual force” and is much more worthy of our attention that absurd religions about supernatural beings, whether old and outworn superstitions or newly invented by the hucksters of marvels for the gullible.
The same inexplicable power of perception is present in various species of mammals. If you ride a horse over winding trails in the foothills, which he has never visited before, the instant his head is turned homeward he will know it, although you may not, if you have not consulted a map. There are apparently unquestionable reports that if a baboon is carried, in a vehicle from which he cannot look out, a hundred miles along the two legs of a right-angle triangle, he will, when released, start homeward across the hypotenuse.
We lack that power of extra-sensory perception, although some have claimed that vestiges of it are to be found in the most primitive species of talking anthropoids, Capoids and Australoids. However that may be, as the late Robert Ardrey has insisted in several of his books, all of the higher mammals, at least, including us, possess an instinctive sense that connects them with a specific place, a home. And all of them, if not degenerate, will fight to the death to preserve that home.
We all have that instinct, although “Liberal intellectuals” and other nitwits try to deny it. I have met a highly intelligent woman, who holds a quite responsible position in a large city, but maintains, at considerable expense, a house in the town in which she was born, a thousand miles away; she refuses to rent it, and has it maintained by a hired caretaker, although she can visit it for a few days only once or twice a year. “Without that home,” she said, “I would feel lost, a mere bit of flotsam adrift in the human sea.”
The perspicacious lady is right. We are truly human only when we own some plot of ground with a house that is our home, from which we may wander, but to which we can always return. That is why the World Destroyers are imposing real-estate taxes, usually for socially pernicious ends, such as “Welfare” and the monstrously overgrown boob-hatcheries, that reduce “ownership” of a home to renting it from the tax-collector; and use the Communist devices of income and inheritance taxes to make it admittedly impossible for most of the younger generation of Americans ever to have, even provisionally, a home of their own. That is why they have almost succeeded in liquidating families and making marriage a purposeless farce. (Although holy men rant about marriage as a magical “sacrament,” the social function of marriage is to ensure the inheritance of property by the owner’s legitimate children. One cannot speak of another possible result of marriage, the lifelong devotion of a man and a woman to each other, without exciting shrieks from the harridans of female “liberation,” who are currently concerned with the danger that their “liberated” sluts might live with one man long enough to become accustomed to him.)
Much effort has been devoted to reducing Americans to “flotsam adrift on a human sea,” individuals as rootless as rats in a sewer. In this, they have had the coöperation of the large corporations, which have become another device for destroying private property. In 1945, all the businesses in a typical American town, with the possible exception of a branch of the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company and perhaps one of United Cigars, were owned by local “capitalists.” Today the town has only “outlets” of huge corporations, managed by hirelings who are shifted about the country from state to state like tumbleweed on a desert, precisely for the purpose of preventing them from staying long enough in any one place to acquire property, form family connections, and put down roots.
Our enemies have created a generation of isolated individuals as unconnected with others as billiard balls and half-mad with the terrible loneliness of a man in a crowd. In this work of devastation they are abetted by mattoids and rancorous misfits, such as H.G. Wells, (4) who realize that there is only one way to produce a “warless world” and that is to abolish humanity and replace it with zombies deprived of their racial instincts. The dehumanized animals will be herded by God’s People, of course.
(footnote 4. That Wells knew what he was doing when he became, like Toynbee, an agent of a dire conspiracy is shown by one significant novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. His motive, so far as I know, has not been determined. On Toynbee’s impudent confession of conspiracy against civilization, see Liberty Bell, May 1988, pp. 7-8.)
The territorial imperative is inherent in our racial inheritance — and no doubt, with variations, in other races, which need not concern us. The blind forces of biological evolution have so formed our species that we are fully human only when we are attached to property, a home, and, if possible, a family that has a known past and could have a future. The great majority of Americans became so befuddled that they, having at first accepted Marx’s income tax in the spirit of the girl who was not worried by becoming “only a little bit pregnant,” have been brought by their unappeasable enemies, step by step, to a plight in which almost the whole of their lives is a continuous revolt against nature.
The laws of nature are absolute and from them there is no appeal. They may be violated for a time by individuals, nations, and races, but never with impunity. The ultimate and inescapable penalty for all is death.
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