Category: whiteness

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Totalitarian States: it comes from the bottom as well as the top

Vladimir Voinovich said this in the 1980s. So does my colleague Rebel Yell. People imagine that totalitarian ideology is imposed from the top. Yes, but not exclusively. It also pervades from below and around. The lie is the basis of totalitarianism. So said Solzhenitsyn. You can think of several without difficulty. Sex is a social construct. Gender trumps sex. Race is simultaneously a social construct; white people invented race in the 18th century. Black lives actually matter – more than any other race. You belong to the sex you feel that you belong to. My pronouns are…

But cancel culture is a participatory sport; anyone can join in. In fact mass participation in the denunciations of wrongthink are mandatory. It is the envious neighbour who enforces the lie far more effectively than the policeman.

Jordan Peterson touched upon this aspect of totalitarianism in a recent interview with Piers Morgan. Listen to the discussion around the little Hitler in all of us. “The totalitarian state is the grip of the lie”

 

 

 

 

 

Putin on the revolution in the west

Vladimir Putin likened wokeness to the Bolshevism of the 20th century, in a speech recently. 

THE SPEECH

“We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress,” Putin said. “Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this.”

“Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, ‘reverse discrimination’ against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal,” said Putin, elaborating on the cultural decline of the west in the name of social justice.

“Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this, we are keeping out of this,” Putin continued. “But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society — it would be more correct to put it this way – has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.”

“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness,” he added. “Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead.”

“The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all,” Putin continued, and highlighted the similarities between woke progressives to the Soviet revolutionaries who took over Russia.

“It may come as a surprise to some peo

“It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already,” he said. “After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”

“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now,” he said. “Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past.”

“The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past — such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward,” he said. “The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism,” noted Putin, who apt went on to describe the woke obsession with race and gender.

“The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour,” said Putin in reference to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech.

“I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.’ This is the true value,” he said.
“However, things are turning out differently there,” he added. “By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the colour of a person’s skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters.”

“In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go — not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women. One more step and you will be there,” Putin warned.

“Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether,” he said. “ Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracized.”

Putin then remarked upon the transgender activist movement and widespread efforts to erase femininity and womanhood.

“‘Parent number one’ and ‘parent number two,’ ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother,’ and ‘human milk’ replacing ‘breastmilk’ because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times,” he said.

“Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa,” said Putin, remarking on childhood gender transitions and the embrace of non-binary identities to the exclusion of parents. “That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists — is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.”

“Well, if someone likes this, let them do it. I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we will be guided by a healthy conservatism,” said Putin. “That was a few years ago, when passions on the international arena were not yet running as high as they are now, although, of course, we can say that clouds were gathering even then. Now, when the world is going through a structural disruption, the importance of reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed — precisely because of the multiplying risks and dangers, and the fragility of the reality around us.”

“This conservative approach is not about an ignorant traditionalism, a fear of change or a restraining game, much less about withdrawing into our own shell,” he noted. “It is primarily about reliance on a time-tested tradition, the preservation and growth of the population, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, a precise alignment of priorities, a correlation of necessity and possibility, a prudent formulation of goals, and a fundamental rejection of extremism as a method. And frankly, in the impending period of global reconstruction, which may take quite long, with its final design being uncertain, moderate conservatism is the most reasonable line of conduct, as far as I see it. It will inevitably change at some point, but so far, do no harm — the guiding principle in medicine — seems to be the most rational one. Noli nocere, as they say.”

I cannot say it better

Rex Murphy and the Suffering Servant in conversation, despairing of the state of western civilization and culture. The intellectual standards of the western world are being wrecked deliberately by idiots hunting the great achievements of the past to demonstrate false virtue to the shallow present. Rex Murphy is incandescent in the beauty of his outrage. Education is an expansion of the person. Memorization of poetry  makes you grow.

 

The division within all of us

I have been reflecting on what Solzhenitsyn said about the dividing line within our hearts between good and evil.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

There is another line that goes through our hearts, that between the liberal and the conservative. I was reminded of this line by what Douglas Murray said in his conversation with Brett Weinstein. The political realm lies in a balance between reforming abuses, and the capacity to see the abuses and the need for reforms, with the ability to pay for the reforms, to adopt new ideas of justice, and to resist excessive compassion.

It is in the weakening of resistance to excessive compassion that is causing society to disintegrate, or to “deliquesce” to use a word I last saw in an issue of The Idler back in the 1980s; to disintegrate from the inside out.

It is obvious to me, as a conservative in this sense, that we have swung too far over into a land of therapeutic remediation of all previous offences against the  equal dignity. of people and cultures. The BLM  ideology, “whiteness” as a spiritual disease, the endless guilt tripping over Indian residential schools, the entire settlement of North America by white people: each and all are held to be examples of the offence that white people – as whites- have wrought against natives and Africans. It will not be long before punctuality, hard work and discipline are held to be examples of sick white culture.

Back in the 1990s I attended some weekend sessions taught by people from the Diamond Heart school of philosophical inqury. As  a discipline it  had much to recommend it, including especially its central idea that it was not a therapy: it was not trying to cure you or your condition. At some point in a session we were talking about compassion. One of the first ideas that you get in these kinds of schools is that you must first have some compassion for yourself if you are to have compassion for others. Yet our class leader immediately took up a phrase I used when I said some people need the “boot of compassion”. She agreed. Compassion is not only  open-hearted listening. It actually involves taking steps to get people off their addictive or self destrctive behaviours.ld just as well be expressed by the admonition “get a grip”.

I am suggesting that part of the problem is that it is becoming morally impossible to tell people to get a grip. A grip on reality, a grip on their addictions, a grip on their tendency to self-pity, and a grip on their inability to look themselves in the mirror and see that what needs improvng is not society but themselves.

In short, the boot of compassion is needed at all levels of discourse.

I think that most of what Jordan Peterson has been aiming at is a purposeful life. This is not the same as a the boot of compassion, but the boot of compassion is a good place to start the voyage.

 

 

 

 

 

Woke versus anti-Woke

The theme I have been exploring on this blog is that a lot of people are more scared of the woke than they are of Trump, whereas all we hear in most media is from people of the opposite belief. The people more scared of Trump than the woke fill the pages of the New York Times, the Globe and Mail and the MSM in general.

Rod Dreher explores these themes in an article in the American Conservative: Joe Rogan World versus NPR World, One Country Two Nations.

A citation:

“If you’ve never heard Joe Rogan’s podcasts, I urge you to listen to them. Rogan has right-wing guests on, but only because he finds them interesting. He endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, favors drug legalization, supports LGBT rights, and so on. He’s a left-libertarian, as far as I can tell. What makes Rogan so much fun to listen to is — again — you feel that you are listening in to a conversation by someone who is genuinely curious about the world, and who is not afraid to talk about things that the prissy, censorious left-wing media are.”

“I am sure Joe Rogan differs from Orthodox Christian socially conservative me in a number of ways, but I would a thousand million times rather live in Joe Rogan World than NPR/NYT World. The stories Joe Rogan lives by are not the stories I live by, mostly, but I would trust Joe Rogan to defend people like me against the Pink Police State that the left seems bound and determined to create. One thing he said in that Douglas Murray podcast that resonated deeply with me: him and Murray agreeing on how insane Trump is, but how people on the left simply cannot grasp that they alarm many center-right people so much that they are less worried about crazy Trump than they are about the crazy left. This seems to be the neuralgic point between my self-described anti-woke liberal reader, and me: that we look at the same things, and dislike the same things, but that he is much more alarmed by Trump than by the woke, while I come down on the opposite side.”

To illustrate my point, this morning’s snippet of wokeness is from that poseur idiot Ibram X. Kendi, with reference to the Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett’s adoption of two Haitian kids:

“Some White colonizers “adopted” Black children. They “civilized” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. twitter.com/jennybethm/sta

 

 

 

confessions of a student marxist

Tobias Fibbs, a Cambridge graduate, dissects expertly the emotional and moral atmosphere of the modern university. 

 

Social theorist Mark Fisher described from first-hand experience the manipulation of this scene as a Vampire Castle which “feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more marginal, the better — into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampire Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.” The Vampire Castle recruits on the promise of community and self-healing. The reality is an ouroboros of emotional manipulation, stripped of the political and of all that makes life interesting and worthwhile…..

We would have laughed at the idea we formed an elite and we certainly didn’t act like one. But we were the vanguard for a movement that has swept the English-speaking world in the subsequent decade. We still professed to be fighting the old powers — patriarchy, white supremacism, the nuclear family, colonialism, the university itself. But in truth we represented what Christopher Lasch called psychological man, “the final product of bourgeois individualism,” and were being trained in elite formation for the therapeutic age just as surely as our forerunners had been for the previous, paternal age….

The material genesis of the radical cultural politics that has shown its strength in the last few months lies in the overexpansion of higher education, which produced a new middle class that is materially discontented and uncomfortable in its own skin. The globalisation of American pathologies has given this new urban class, present across the Western world, a politics that is carving through our institutions….

 

If white supremacy is incurable, why fight it? If race is paramount, then why not be a racist?

At minute 35:00 of the interview on Triggernometry, Bret Weinstein is asked about the prospects of race war. Worth a look.

If whiteness is incurable, as is proposed by those who foster the “whiteness” canard, then what is the point of fighting it?

If it is incurable, and everywhere, why fight it?  “One step into it, it has no logic” says Weinstein.

I paraphrase Weinstein: “If seventy percent of the people are told they are defective because white, and that every institution in the country is claiming they are defective, then how can they fail to coalesce around their race?”

 

Your whiteness problem

For more details got to https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness

The interesting things about this portrayal of whiteness is how much of it is simply the virtues necessary for orderly and prosperous existence. The same requirements would apply if you were Chinese, Japanese, or Indonesian.

“Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared. Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America’s history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.”

Rather, whiteness was a cultural presumption. If the continent had been settled by Japanese people, japaneseness would have been the baseline assumption. Every culture in the world, including people direct from Africa or the Caribbean, are succeeding in the United States, because they arrive here expecting to work. Not so the American blacks. They seem to expect to be served. Another legacy from slave culture?  Or is it welfarism and toxic ideology?

In any event it is interesting to read how much of what whiteness consists of in this anti white screed is simply virtue.

 

 

Berlin 1928

I have been reading the wonderful, and last, book of the late Philip Kerr, called Metropolis. Kerr died untimely at age 62 in 2018. Metropolis is set in Berlin, in 1928. The Nazis and the Commies are engaged in street fighting. The political order is delicate. The government can barely summon a majority of centrist parties. Jews, many of whom are in senior positions in government, carry pistols for self protection. Jew hatred is rife; it has become socially normal in broad sections of the public. In Berlin, homosexuality both male and female is broadly tolerated and almost normal. The nightclubs offer British and other foreign visitors the same kind of sex tourism we have heard about in Thailand. Veterans in tattered uniforms without legs or arms beg in the street. Gangs of young thugs prowl the city looking for people to beat or rob. The police are barely able to keep a lid on the chaos.

Into this mess steps the young Bernie Gunther, newly appointed to the murder section of the Kripo, the criminal police. Bernie is a veteran of the trenches, and has a drinking problem. He lives in a boarding house. He is a widower. A man is killing and scalping young whores, and leaving behind false clues that take up police time in wild goose chases. Another killer is putting bullets into the heads of veterans begging on the streets, and sending taunting letters to the police department mocking their inability to catch him.

Many  scenes are set in various night clubs where, if the shows are not sexual they involve cruelty and degradation of the performers or of the audience. As I read one particularly horrid passage, where the talentless were humiliated before a howling audience, I thought of the idea of a stand up comedian telling the audience, in 1928, just for laughs, what would happen to Berlin and Germany in the next thirty years. I wonder if such a comedian could make it sound funny. I bet you he could carry it off for a while.

  • within the next 5 years, Hitler would bring the Nazis to power (scattered boos, plenty of applause)
  • The night clubs of Berlin would be shut down immediately after the Nazi take-over (much booing, scattered applause)
  • Germany would absorb Austria, repudiate the Versailles treaty and re-arm (more applause)
  • Jews would be publicly humiliated, their wealth ripped off by the Nazi state, and they would be disbarred from public office (mixed applause, nervous laughter)
  • The Sudetenland would be absorbed into Germany, and Czechoslovakia would be dismembered (more applause)
  • The British and French reaction to the rearmament and these events would be supine passivity (wild applause)
  • Hitler and Stalin would make a non-aggression pact, as Great Britain dithered too long in its dealings with Stalin  (scattered shouts of disbelief) leaving Hitler a free hand in the East (strong applause)
  • In 1939, only eleven years into the future, Poland would be invaded and crushed in weeks, while 240 French divisions  do nothing on the German border. Some French troops march ten miles into Germany and then march out again. (cries in incredulity, scattered applause)
  • In 1940, Germany invades France through the Ardennes and conquers France in six weeks using a combination of tank and airpower to achieve paralysis of the French ability to combat the Germans effectively. (wild applause)
  • The English manage to get out of France by a massive sea lift from Dunkirk, leaving their equipment behind. (cheers, boos)
  • The German air force fails to suppress the British air force, and gradually calls off major air operations over England by 1941 (boos)
  • Winston Churchill is made British Prime Minister, and offers his people nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. (more booing)
  • Hitler invades the USSR in 1941 and nearly reaches Moscow. The Soviets reel and fall back, but do not give up. German casualties approach 1.5 million dead. (silence, some booing)
  • Having engaged Germany in a two front war, Hitler declares war on the United States after the Japanese neutralize the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. (Stunned silence)
  • Hitler launches an attack into the Caucasus, and sets the Sixth Army into Stalingrad on the Volga. In late 1942 the Sixth Army is surrounded and forced to surrender, with 600,000 prime German troops marched into captivity, from which maybe 15,000 would ever survive. (Boos, calls of “traitor”, and moves to get the comedian off the stage)
  • North Africa, Sicily, southern Italy reclaimed by the Allies in 1943. (more booing, hoots of derision)
  • Decisive defeat of the Germans at the battle of Kursk in 1943 (throwing of objects at the comedian)
  • Mass slaughter of Jews and Poles continues in captured Polish territory from 1942 onward. (silence)
  • Allies land in France in 1944 at the same time as German Army Group Centre collapses in Byelorussia in a military catastrophe so large it still does not have a place name assigned to it.
  • Russians conquer Berlin by May 1945 (gasps of horror, boos, calls to get the damn fool off the stage)
  • Communism imposed on eastern Germany, parliamentary government in the west  by late 1940s (boos).
  • Europe divided between communist east and capitalist west until 1989, when Russia throws in the towel and European Communism disappears as an effective force (the few communists in the audience boo, the rest give tepid applause)
  • Germany re-unites as a federated democratic republic. (tepid cheers, scattered boos)

At this point the Nazi sympathizers in the audience haul the comedian off the stage and beat him. Communists join in.

The point of this recitation of facts is that it would have been completely incredible to the louche and worldly audience in a Berlin nightclub in 1928, even as the chaos of Berlin was immediately before their eyes.

And I think that equivalent, and equally incredible, things are happening in western society today. The undermining of the host society by the termite forces of leftism is now revealing itself everywhere: abolition of the past, hatred for one’s own culture, anti-white racism, banning and exclusion of any thought that contradicts the Black Lives Matter narrative, total corruption of universities, firings, shamings, Maoist insurrections, the long horrid consequences of Jacques Derrida and the French nonsense machine, third rate Nietzscheans all. Prof. Gad Saad speaks of idea pathogens.

Where will it end? Either in revolution or in counter-revolution.

When will it come? The revolution is underway already.

The counter-revolution is not far behind.

Only those with impoverished imaginations fail to see it coming.

As Orwell said, sometimes it takes all our powers to see what is before our eyes.