Basic Political Principles
The situation in American politics is dangerous and getting worse. To fully appreciate the dangers, we need to rigorously define our terms. Terms like “left” and “right” are spatial metaphors with no literal applicability to politics. If they are to have any meaning, “Left” must be defined as collectivism (the dominance of the group/state over the individual) and socialism; the “Right” means inalienable individual rights and capitalism. Otherwise, they are vague, meaningless terms which I advise my Logic students to sedulously avoid.
If we do jettison such figurative language, then the theme of this essay expressed in literal terms is: American collectivists/socialists push the country toward race war.
In America, “the Left” is generally taken to mean socialists and semi-socialists largely influenced by Marx and his intellectual heirs. Such thinkers view human society not in terms of individuals but in terms of groups, specifically economic classes. They hold a class war ideology according to which the poor are oppressed by the rich, capitalism perpetuates and exacerbates class oppression, and, by some coercive measures–either via massive tax-based redistribution of income or by bloody revolution–economic equality must be attained. Are contemporary U.S. Marxists full socialists of this kind, i.e., Communists? Not yet. Even Bernie Sanders does not yet call for the abolition of private property and full government control of the economy and of our lives. They are still mixed-economy, semi-socialist welfare-statists. However, over the decades, they inch inexorably closer to the socialist end of the mixed economy, and further from the capitalist.
Full socialism means that an individual’s life has been socialized. It does not belong to the individual. Rather, it belongs to society as a whole, to the state. Recall the Khmer Rouge’s (Cambodian Communists) warning to its victims: “Losing you is no loss; keeping you is no specific gain.”[i] The individual, in and of himself, has no moral value on such a code. He acquires value solely via service to the state. Capitalism, on the other hand, full capitalism, real capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, means the system of individual rights. It is the political-economic system in which an individual’s life belongs to him/her–and in which the moral legitimacy of the state lies in protecting his right to his own life and all that this entails.
Further, we must remember that Communism is but one species of full socialism. There is another species, equally baleful: National Socialism (Nazism). National Socialism holds that the state is all-powerful, an individual’s life belongs to the volk (people), moral worth is attained only by selfless service to the state, and the state can dispose of an individual’s life for any reason it deems appropriate. Hitler reputedly stated: “There will be no license, no free space, in which an individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism.”[ii] The Nazis likewise perceive the social world not in terms of individuals but of groups–in this case, not of warring economic classes but of warring races or nationalities. As one example, during World War II, the National Socialists construed the struggle as, in part, Germany versus Britain; the Communists viewed it as, in part, the German-British working class versus the German-British owning class. The Nazis are indeed national socialists, whereas the Communists are international socialists, construing the good versus evil battle as a struggle between international economic classes.
Further, Fascism, including the German National Socialist version, “may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood…”[iii] (whether at the hands of Jews or a cabal of shadowy international financiers and business interests). Fascism in all iterations involves the “primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right…and the subordination of the individual to it…[and] the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies…”[iv]
Economically, Nazis permit bankers, industrialists, farmers, and so forth, to remain at their work; no longer as owners but now as servants of the state, whose dictates, if they disobey, entail death. Private property, under National Socialism, exists only nominally; full power of right and disposal, of both property and persons, resides with the state. Communists, on the other hand, waging unremitting class war, nationalize farms and industries, and annihilate the owning class.
In brief, full socialism of either iteration is totalitarianism–total life-and-death state power over the life of an individual.
A vital point of clarification: National Socialism is as fully socialist as is Marxism/Communism. One difference between the two is that Communism is class-war socialism–and National Socialism is race-war socialism.
So it is logically senseless, for example, to maintain that Communism is the Political Left and that Fascism/National Socialism is the Political Right. Where, on the political spectrum, would that place individualism, inalienable individual rights, limited Constitutional government, and laissez-faire capitalism? In the middle? How is individual rights the middle ground between two forms of collectivism that virulently deny the right of an individual even to his own life?
No, logically, there are only two choices: 1. We reject as inapplicable to political discourse the Left-Right spatial metaphors altogether–and discuss collectivism/socialism versus individualism/capitalism, or 2. We define the Political Left as collectivism/socialism in any of its iterations–and the Political Right as individualism/capitalism. If and only if we choose the latter, does it make sense to continue using the Left/Right terminology as a convenient shorthand.
The Contemporary American Left
However, the Marxist Left in America is evolving toward elements of National Socialism. The Marxist Left has long preached class war and now has added race war elements to its ideology: It is no longer merely the oppressive rich versus the oppressed poor–but now, it is the oppressive white rich versus the oppressed non-white poor.
In recent years, so-called “identity politics” has become prevalent on the Marxist Left. This is the belief that, fundamentally, I (or anyone) am not an individual but a member of a racial, ethnic, or gender group. Such group membership, not independent thinking or personal choices, defines my identity.[v] Where does such a theory come from? Remember that Marxism, however mistaken it is, is a philosophic system of thought–and the Marxist Left generally draws its supporters from among the educated and the intelligentsia. In our day, Marxists have integrated into their class war philosophy the main tenets of a Post-Modernist worldview generally congenial to their principles.
Post-Modernist theoreticians claim that: “Our current social context…is characterized by oppression that benefits males, whites, and the rich at the expense of everyone else.”[vi] Education, therefore, should “highlight the historical crimes of whites, males, and the rich.”[vii]
According to many of the professors who teach the current crop of educated Marxists, it is impossible to speak coherently about a reality existing independent of the human mind. Rather, reality is a socially-created construct molded differently by diverse racial, gender, and economic class groups. The basic subjective beliefs by which, for example, whites and non-whites organize their experiences and shape their diverse worlds are different, even opposed. White males construe their world in terms of free will, self-reliance, individualism, forging one’s own destiny, conquering the world, defeating enemies, oppressing the weak and the vanquished; but non-whites understand that life’s outcomes are determined by birth, race, and class, that the struggle is to escape oppression, to organize, to band into collectives, to belong to a greater racial whole, to resist colonialism, to find meaning in the group, the tribe, the race.
According to these Post-Modernist professors, there is no one truth; there is but competing group subjectivities, collective worldviews of sundry races, economic classes, and genders; contrasting philosophic languages, as it were, with no dictionaries of translation, no rational access to the other’s experience or thoughtscape, no possibility of peaceful negotiations to resolve intractable collective differences. Human disputes, therefore, inexorably devolve into violence; force is the ultimate arbiter of disagreement; and social interactions entail the relations of conqueror to conquered, dominant to submissive, master to oppressed. “Postmodern themes in ethics and politics are characterized by an identification with and sympathy for the groups perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts…”[viii]
We are ensnared in our own collective racial visions, cognitively severed from the worldview of the racial other. We are inevitably the oppressor and the oppressed.
(If a man and a woman, or a white and a non-white individual, or a person raised and educated in the USA and one raised and educated in Cambodia or Nigeria or Brazil hold a long, fruitful discussion regarding important issues, understand each other, perhaps even agree, and arrive at a meeting of the minds–how is this explained on Post-Modern premises? It isn’t. Such rational discussions, which happen every day, cannot be explained on their assumptions.)
Hence, the contemporary Marxist Left calls ceaselessly for Black Studies and black identity politics, Latino Studies and Latino identity politics, Women’s Studies and women’s identity politics. Members of such oppressed groups are exhorted to band together, to find commonality and an identity in their shared collective experiences…collective experiences radically different from those of the Other. Under the guidance of their Post-Modern university professors, all of these suppressed collectives identify who is the primordial other, the eternal oppressor, the common foe: White men.
The contemporary hatred openly unleashed by the Marxist Left against whites–especially males–is eye-opening. Journalist, Sarah Jeong, for example, wrote: “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” Further: “Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” She tweeted a crude graph showing that as whiteness increased so did awfulness–and the more white one was, the more one inevitably smelled like a dog when it rained.[ix] Such overt racism did not restrain the New York Times from hiring her as a tech editor.[x]
Similarly, Toronto Black Lives Matter co-founder, Yusra Khogali, tweeted: “Plz Allah give me strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today.”[xi]
Additionally, Don Lemon, CNN news anchor, stated about the recent spate of vicious murders perpetrated by white racists (and by many such atrocities in the past few years): “We have to stop demonizing people and realize that the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right. And we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them….They had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban. So what do we do about that?”[xii]
Let’s pretend that I wrote regarding the high homicide rate in Chicago: “We have to stop demonizing people and realize that the biggest crime threat in this country is black men….They had the Muslim ban. There is no native-born black-guy ban. So what do we do about that?” Rational human beings would properly point out the racism of such a thought. They would proclaim: “Dr. Bernstein, we have a crime problem in Chicago (and elsewhere). We don’t have a black guy problem. We have a problem not because some persons are black, but because some persons–regardless of race–think, or feel, that they have a right to initiate brute force against innocent others, assaulting, raping, robbing, and/or murdering them.” And my critics would be absolutely correct.
Similarly regarding the racist murderers to whom Don Lemon refers. We don’t have a white guy problem; we have a racist problem, we have a brute force problem, we have a murder problem, we have a problem that some persons–regardless of race–think, or feel, that they have a right to murder innocent others because those others belong to a different race, ethnic group, or religious denomination than they do.
The problem regarding all of the murderers referred to in the two paragraphs immediately above is not how much melanin exists in their skin but in the way their minds work, in the way they think, in the choices they make. Violent crime, including murder, is caused by the choices people make–something open to their volitional control. Crime is not caused by the race the criminal happens to be born into–something not open to his volitional control. This is why we properly can and do morally condemn murderers. If their racial membership necessitated they act in a lethally violent way, they would be akin to wild beasts: We would have to take protective actions against them, but it would be senseless to morally condemn them. If a tiger kills and eats a human being, should we put it on trial and convict it of murder?
However, the ne plus ultra of au courant anti-white racism (to date) was achieved by an essay posted several years ago at vice.com entitled: “Dear White People, Please Stop Pretending Reverse Racism Is Real.”
Among other claims, the essay states: “Racism is based on a couple of things—historical, systemic oppression and power….And as far as history goes, white people have never been persecuted for the colour of their skin—so there’s no point comparing their experiences to those of black, brown, and Indigenous folks….even if all people of colour straight up said they hate white people, it wouldn’t affect a white person’s ability to get a job, an education, or increase the odds that they’d get carded or charged for a crime.”[xiii]
Based on such considerations, the author concludes: “It’s literally impossible to be racist to a white person.”[xiv]
So, on this view, racism requires power to systematically oppress members of other races, and is not possible in its absence. So if, for example, a gang of non-white, white-people-hating toughs kidnapped, tortured, and murdered an innocent white family–and did so because of the victims’ color of skin–this is not an instance of racism, because the toughs are not part of a racial majority and therefore lack the political authority to systemically persecute whites.However, the same crimes, wrought by the same perpetrators, against the same victims, driven by the same motive, if committed in a society where the murderers were part of a racial majority, would constitute an instance of racism.
World history and current events show us the pandemic existence of savage persecution based on racial, tribal, ethnic, and religious differences: Horrific mass murder of Hindus by Muslims in Indian history[xv], the genocidal slaughter of the Algonquin by the Iroquois in North America in the centuries before the arrival of Europeans[xvi], the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire[xvii], the Holocaust,[xviii] the Rwandan Genocide in 1994,[xix] brutal enslavement and murder of blacks in the U.S.[xx], even worse in Brazil[xxi], and iron-fisted subjugation in South Africa under apartheid, among numerous others. One such persecution, all but forgotten today, was the horrific enslavement of Sub-Saharan blacks by Middle-Eastern and North African Muslims.[xxii] (While we recount atrocities, let’s add in the Communists, who, fighting class war–not race war–murdered by conservative estimate 100 million innocent civilians in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Korea, and elsewhere[xxiii].)
What explains the incessant atrocities? Granted that power–military and/or political–is necessary to impose one’s will and rain destruction on the weaker tribe, this still raises the more fundamental question: What force impels the destruction? Obviously, there are racial/tribal hatreds at work. However, hatred is an emotion; it is not self-evidently a bad thing; its moral status depends on who or what it is directed against, and for which reason. Is it, for example, morally wrong for a humane individual to hate Hitler?
More fundamental than the emotion, and giving rise to it, is the thought: (1) My race or tribe is fundamentally different from the other. This way of thinking rejects the antipodal idea that: (2) We–members of both my tribe and others–are all human beings, fundamentally similar regardless of such superficial differences as skin color, hair texture, facial structure, and so on.
The first way of thinking is the essence of racism. The second conviction is the essence of color-blind individualism.
Racism is first, foremost, and always thinking in racial terms. It is thinking that race matters, that race is important, that tribal membership is a definitive factor determining one’s identity. Specifically, racism is thinking that intellectual and/or moral characteristics are determined by one’s racial membership–and are transmitted genetically. The first step in racism is to cognitively distinguish human beings into tribes conceived of as fundamentally different from each other. There is us–and there is the other. From this critical beginning, it is not a large step to construing the other as a rival, a danger to us, and to hating them. And from hating the other, it is neither a large step to demonizing them nor to then warring on them.
Anyone who thinks in racial terms–who considers racial membership the defining factor of an individual’s intellectual and/or moral characteristics–is a racist, regardless whether his race holds military and/or political power, regardless whether his tribe imposes its bloody will on those tribes weaker. The weak can be just as irrational as the strong. A minority may hate as blindly and as fulsomely as might a majority. The Neanderthals may have lost the species war to the Sapiens–but, presumably, they were no more civilized.[xxiv]
One wonders how becoming a majority able to systematically persecute whites transforms individuals not antecedently racist into a racist mob.
It does not.
Becoming part of a majority increases one’s power; it does not alter one’s thinking. Five hundred (or five hundred million) color-blind non-white individuals do not become a dangerous racist horde by virtue of becoming a majority. Rather, a racist horde was a collection of racist individuals before forming into a horde.
Racist individuals of all kinds abound. For example, Henry Grady, a past editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote: “The supremacy of the white race…must be maintained forever[and blacks subjugated]…because the white race is the superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts.” (Quoted in Leon Litwack, Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners In The Age of Jim Crow, 218.) But no less racist was Elijah Muhammad, past leader of the Nation of Islam. He taught that the white race was created from the original black race by an evil scientist named Mr. Yacub: “The humans resulting, he knew, would be, as they became lighter, and weaker, progressively also more susceptible to wickedness and evil. And in this way finally he would achieve the intended bleached-out white race of devils.” In time, the white devil race was created: “On the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils–savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all fours and they lived in trees.” And on it goes. (Quoted in The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, 168-169.) One of these theories was widespread in America and did a great deal of harm. The other was not–and did not. But each is a racist theory, whether held by one individual or by one hundred million of them. A theory is racist by claiming that moral characteristics are determined by race and are genetically transmittable–and is racist regardless the theory’s number of adherents.
Related: One does not require power to persecute an entire race in order to victimize individual members of it. Colin Ferguson, for example, a black Jamaican immigrant who hated whites, opened fire on white passengers on the Long Island Railroad in December 1993, killing six and wounding nineteen. Numerous persons who knew him claimed subsequently that, for years, he had spouted virulent hatred of whites. But, according to the theory, this was not an instance of racism. According to the theory, “it is literally impossible to be racist to a white person.”
Power to persecute includes ability to victimize “merely” one or several innocent individuals. Racism involves morally judging persons based on race regardless the number of persons a racist has the power to victimize.
(And, yes, white people have been persecuted for the color of their skin: As one example, the million to one-and-a-quarter million white European slaves of the Barbary pirates in North Africa during the 17th to 19th centuries were persecuted at least in part because of their race and religion.)
Tribal and racial savagery is globally ubiquitous…and has long been. Further, the class war of Communism is an intellectual/moral sibling to it: The collective to which you belong–not your own thinking and personal choices–defines your identity. And if you are a member of the other group, you are marked for destruction. As Martin Latsis, one of Lenin’s secret police officers told his men regarding Soviet policy: “We don’t make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”[xxv]
The rise of racism on the Marxist Left is disturbing. The National Socialist element they have integrated into their class war ideology merely transposes favored and dis-favored races: It is not “reverse racism.” It is simply racism.
Making matters worse, they are not the sole version of racism in the contemporary socialist camp.
The Baleful Rise of the Alt-Right
We are now witnessing the rise of a new (very old) Leftist phenomenon–the so-called “alt right.” Roughly twenty-five centuries ago, the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, said: “The beginning of wisdom it to call things by their proper name.” The alt-right is not an individualistic, individual rights phenomenon. Rather, they are the opposite–a human being’s worth or lack thereof, to them, is defined not by his/her own personal choices and character but by the racial group into which he/she happens to be born. The racial group, not individual thinking or choices, is morally pre-eminent. The “alt-right” is a racist, white supremacist[xxvi], statist, and socialist movement: They would use the power of the state to coercively keep non-whites out of the country, to separate the races, to re-distribute income and run a welfare state for poor white Americans.[xxvii]
What of the inalienable rights of honest, hard-working non-whites, who might choose to live in towns or neighborhoods alongside of whites? What of the inalienable rights of a white man or woman who seeks to marry a non-white individual and continue to live in the white portion of the country? The rights of bi-racial children who grow into honest adults and choose to live in the white man’s land? There are no individual rights in the white “ethno-state” these racists seek to impose. The race is all-important. Individual rights are subordinated to its needs, perhaps even abrogated entirely. In exact literal terms, who are these mentalities? They are neo-Nazis. They are the National Socialist Left.
Richard Spencer and other leaders of the National Socialist Left often show their indebtedness to current identity politics and to Post-Modern philosophy that gives rise to it. Following the lead of identitarians who maintain that only women can understand or talk meaningfully about women’s issues and that only blacks can understand or talk meaningfully about black issues, etc., the new Nazis maintain that only whites can understand and/or talk meaningfully about the white experience. As with any other racial collective, whites have experiences and issues unique to them–and, in the seething cultural maelstrom of ethnic and gender collective subjectivities, it is equally important that white voices be heard as it is that black or women’s voices be heard. “White lives matter,” chant the new Nazis.
Related, to these white racists, whites are as vulnerable as any other ethnic group and require cultural “safe spaces” for their protection. Richard Spencer, for example, acknowledges that Asians generally score higher on IQ tests than do whites, argues from this that Asians are, on average, more intelligent, and concludes that this truth lends greater urgency for imposing immigration controls and establishing a white ethno-state to protect whites from Asian superiority.[xxviii] The sociologist, Dr. Nikos Sotirakopoulos, writes:”The Alt Right is a ‘trendy’ version of old racism, because it is in tune with the cultural script of our time. It is…promoting ‘white vulnerability’. Playing the victim card pays, so they are cashing in on that.”[xxix]
The National Socialist Left promotes a series of racist ideas integrated around a central theme: Intelligence and civilization are genetically-based. For example, Jared Taylor is a writer and founder of the white nationalist on-line magazine, American Renaissance. “Taylor argues that Blacks are generally less intelligent than Hispanics, while Hispanics are generally less intelligent than whites, and whites are generally less intelligent than East Asians…”[xxx] So whites, being inferior to Asians, are vulnerable to their superiority. In keeping with the nature and history of Fascism, the contemporary National Socialist Left views its favored group–the white race–as vulnerable, in danger of victimization, and in need of a(n) uniquely white homeland to spare it becoming a minority and a victim. Taylor says: “Whites are making a terrible mistake by setting in motion forces that will reduce them to a minority.”[xxxi]
At the same time, Taylor holds that whites are vastly superior to blacks. Indeed, he claims: “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”[xxxii] One wonders how Taylor and his supporters explain Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Madame C.J. Walker, W.E.B. DuBois, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, and numerous other brilliant black minds.
So, depending on which race the new Nazis use as a contrast, whites are either inferior or superior. Their beliefs constitute a farrago of white inferiority and white supremacy.
What, then, is the essence of this phenomenon?
It is old-school, anti-non-white racism filtered through the philosophic lens of Post-Modernism.
Post-Modernism literally gave the most educated members of the generally ignorant white supremacist movement an au courant philosophy to intellectually bolster their racist beliefs. Is it an accident that Richard Spencer holds a B.A. in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and that he spent two years as a doctoral student at Duke studying modern European intellectual history? Similarly, is it an accident that Jared Taylor holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale and an M.A. in International Economics from the Paris Institute of Political Studies? Is this an accident–or did they study philosophy with professors similar to those who taught members of the Marxist Left?
The defining influence of the new Nazis is the fundamental principle of Post-Modernism: There is no objective truth, based on an independently-existing reality, and identical for members of all races. Rather, there are the competing worldviews of differing collectives, each holding its own truth based in its distinctive race-dominated, subjective experiences. On the principles of Post-Modernism, the racist claims of the new Nazis are logically unanswerable: Whites have their own racially-unique, subjective experiences–and, like all other human collectives, have a right to be heard.
The National Socialist Left is, in the memorable words of Nikos Sotirakopoulos, “Post-Modernism’s monster children.”[xxxiii]
Logic and Post-Modernism’s Monster Children
On Post-Modernist premises, the Marxist Left has no coherent response to the racist claims of the National Socialist Left.
If the Marxists respond, you are the dominant race, you are the oppressor, and your voice has long been the only one heard, the new Nazis have a compelling answer: So what? There are only competing racial subjectivities–and our experience is as valid as that of any other racial collective.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose we accept the claim that a particular race was long and inveterately the oppressor of other races. (World history shows us the falsity of such an assessment…but let’s pretend.[xxxiv]) Let’s then conduct a grisly thought experiment.
On the assumptions of racial subjectivism, if one race believes in genocidal slaughter of a differing, more peaceful race–and the second race deems this not such a great idea–it is not that one belief is right and the other is wrong; it is merely that they are different, results of two differing racial experiences, manifesting two contrasting racial truths.
On the other hand, on the premises of ethical objectivism, there are moral principles that hold true for all human beings. For example, one who believes in objective moral principles (as the current author definitely does) will say: Murdering an innocent human being is morally wrong–and is wrong no matter how many blood-thirsting persons or groups clamor for it. Murder is morally wrong…regardless the subjective experiences of this race or that, irrespective of how intensely the racial experience of a specific tribe favors it.[xxxv] We condemn the Nazis for the Holocaust, after-all, not because we doubt the intensity of their racist experiences–but because we uphold the principle that murdering innocent human beings is morally wrong, objectively wrong…regardless of who, or how many, experience it as pleasurably fulfilling.
From the standpoint of ethical objectivism, the rational response to brutal oppressors is: What you are doing, and have long done, is hideously immoral. Cease and desist–and quit your intellectual defense of it.
However, the Marxist Left, rejecting the principle of objective truths, and holding that truth is relative to racial membership, has no coherent answer to the oppressor. For when they declaim to the conquering race: “You are criminally wrong in the brutal suppression you wreak on weaker races,” the dominant race need only respond: “That is merely your racial truth. Ours is that we possess rightful mastery and dominion. Our racial truth is right for us.”
Further, the dominant race can legitimately (on these premises) point out: “There is no oppressor and oppressed. Those concepts are weighted with the belief that it is morally wrong to aggressively conquer and subjugate weaker races. But wrong–by what standard? There is no objective right and wrong. Rather, each race has its own truth, they often differ, and when they do they compete, they struggle–the stronger wins, the weaker loses. There is no oppressed and oppressor, right and wrong, good guys and bad guys. There is only strength and weakness. We are the strong–and we intend to keep it that way.”
Given the internal logic of the Post-Modern philosophy held by each contemporary Leftist camp, there is no moral response to the depredations of a self-identifying “master race.” There is only the subjective whimper: “But we don’t like it.”
The Current Racist Trend Projected Into the Future
When identity politics and racial victimization becomes a dominant cultural trend–and especially when it is maintained that character and identity are determined not by individual choice but by racial membership–it is logically inevitable that members of every tribe and racial sub-group band together into political gangs seeking protection from the other. One need not be a genius to discern the end game of such a trend.
Indeed, we have already seen a microcosm of it in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, 2017. The bloody street battle between rival gangs fighting race/class war should be sufficient to give all thoughtful Americans pause. We must re-think our fundamental philosophic, moral, and political principles. Otherwise, we inexorably stagger toward the horror of race war.
As a devout atheist, I hope and pray that we reverse the current baleful trend. For, if we permit it to continue and to metastasize, it will be merely a matter of decades–perhaps only years–before the National Socialist Left, wielding now a trendy philosophy, can recruit many members from the white majority. Currently, they are a tiny and marginalized minority among white Americans. But philosophy is a powerful force. Hitler and his supporters, Lenin (and Stalin and Mao) and theirs, jihadists whether Sunni or Shiite, were (and are) not common thugs seeking unearned loot. Rather, each group held a systematic philosophy–one of race war, one of class war, one of holy war–that galvanized millions to violent action in quest of racial, class, or religious world dominance. If, as a culture, we continue to espouse a philosophy of racial identity, how long before thousands, perhaps millions, of white Americans, seeking protection from the racial other, band together under the banner of the National Socialist Left? And what then?
Marching, clamoring, waving swastikas and Confederate flags, they will overtly push us toward creation of a white “ethno-state,” while the Marxist Left, fighting the rich, white oppressor, meets them head-on in bloody race/class war. The KKK and the American Nazi Party versus Antifa and Black Lives Matter[xxxvi], in the gutters, replicating in America the Nazi/Communist street battles of the 1920s and ’30s in the Weimar Republic.
If so, in the end, no matter who wins, America loses. Either side, triumphant, will impose full socialism. Either side will utterly crush individual rights.
The Rational Antidote
After the above discussion, the remediating solution becomes manifest: We, the human race, must recognize the truth of–and embrace–the principle of color-blind individualism. We must acknowledge that race does not matter–that melanin amounts, hair texture, facial bone structure, and so forth–signify zero regarding the only human attribute that does matter: Strength of character.
There is only one race–the human race.
In homage to this sacred truth, let us, in our universities eradicate such race-based travesties as Black Studies programs, Latino Studies programs, and so forth, and replace these with Human Studies programs, where we study together the history and the achievements of diverse human beings–individual members of both genders, all races, many tribes–and how such exalted accomplishments benefit(ed) human life on Earth.
Fundamentally and above all, let us sweep aside the arrant subjectivism of Post-Modernism and acknowledge the existence of objective reality, and its cognitive accessibility to the rational human mind…the human mind, regardless of race, tribe, or gender. In so doing, we can acknowledge, for example, that Japanese medical personnel make advances that benefit the health and longevity of Western whites and blacks; related, that Dr. Ben Carson, pioneered brain surgery techniques for children that saved the lives of white kids, as well as blacks and Asians; that Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Pasteur identified laws of nature as true for women and non-whites as they are for males and whites; that Ayn Rand wrote magnificent novels that can be as fully savored by males as by females, by both non-whites and whites; and so forth. What makes such benefits possible? A thinker can identify truths and laws of nature that, because universal, can enlighten and advance all human beings regardless of race or gender.
We can acknowledge the common humanity of our brothers and sisters, regardless of race. And we can put a definitive end to mankind’s tragically unnecessary, blood-spilling, incessant race war.
Such an unparalleled good is within our power to achieve.
[i] Quoted in Jean-Louis Margolin, “Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes,” 577-635, in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, editors, Stephane Courtois, et. el., translators, Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 597.
[ii] Hitler quoted by Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 191. Scholars believe that Rauschning lied about interviewing Hitler. But this quote attributed to him captures perfectly the essence of National Socialism. Related, there is no doubt that Hitler wrote: “This self-sacrificing will to give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s own life for others is most strongly developed in the Aryan. The Aryan is…greatest…in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community….True idealism is nothing but the subordination of the interests and life of the individual to the community.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 297, 299.
[iii] Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 218.
[iv] Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 219.
[v] Jordan Peterson, “Munk Debate: Jordan Peterson Dismantles Identity Politics,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=NusYLzb-Uho, Accessed on November 7, 2018.
[vi] Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault (Ockham’s Razor Publishing, 2011), 17.
[vii] Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 17.
[viii] Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 6.
[ix]www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/03/tucker_carlson_on_sarah_jeong_left_thinks_racism_against_white_people_impossible.html. Accessed on November 7, 2018.
[x] She did apologize for these comments, and claimed that she merely satirized the white racists who verbally abused her. It is sincerely to be hoped that she realizes the way to combat white racism is not to adopt anti-white racism–but to embrace color-blind individualism.
[xi] Taleeb Starkes, Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry (Middletown, Delaware, 2016), 43. At least, she didn’t ask Allah for strength to kill men and white folks.
[xii]www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/10/30/don_lemon_the_biggest_terror_threat_in_this_country_is_white_men.html. Acccessed on November 7, 2018.
[xiii] Manisha Krishnan, “Dear White People, Please Stop Pretending Reverse Racism Is Real,” October 2, 2016, www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwzjvz/dear-white-people-please-stop-pretending-reverse-racism-is-real. Accessed on November 7, 2018.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. 1, “Our Oriental Heritage” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954 (1935) On p. 459, Durant writes: “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.” Journalist Francois Gautier, writing of the Islamic subjugation of India, quotes an Indian historian to the effect that “the Hindu population decreased by eighty million between the year 1000 and 1525, indeed, probably the biggest holocaust in the world’s history…” Francois Gautier, Rewriting Indian History (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2003), 38.
[xvi] Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States (New York: Anchor Books, 1966 (1940)), 69, 113-114.
[xvii] Andrew Bernstein, “Lessons of the Armenian Genocide,” The Objective Standard, Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer 2015, 48-57. The definitive text on the Armenian genocide is: Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 1996). It is important to recall that, today, more than a century after this massive crime, the Turkish regime still denies culpability.
[xviii] The definitive research on the Holocaust and the annihilation of roughly 5.1 million European Jews is: Raul Hilberg, The Destruction Of The European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985).
[xix] Matthew White, Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 519-522. The United Nations estimated that, in the slaughter of Tutsi tribe members by Hutus, 800,000 Rwandans were murdered in roughly three months, largely with machetes. Later, the Rwandan government adjusted that figure to 937,000 murders. (White, Atrocities, 521.)
[xx] Regarding one aspect of the horrific persecution–the lynching of thousands of innocents under the brutal reign of Jim Crow–see: Philip Dray, At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching Of Black America (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), vii-viii and passim.
[xxi] Brazil imported six times as many slaves as did the United States but, because of its high death rate and low birth rate, by 1825 had a much smaller slave population. Severely brutal conditions for Brazilian slaves accounted for much of this. Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 186. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, the last nation in the western hemisphere to do so. “Slavery in Brazil,” https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil. Accessed on November 19, 2018.
[xxii] See Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), passim. The Islamic slave trade of black Africans began some eight centuries before the European slave trade, continued in full-force during the European era, continued after the Europeans ended their involvement, was curtailed solely by European (British) intervention, and, to this day, continues in Sudan and Mauritania, where likely hundreds of thousands of black Africans are still enslaved. The Islamic version enslaved an estimated 18 million black Africans, compared to 16 million by the Europeans, under conditions equally horrendous and in some cases worse; for example, some slave caravans crossing the Sahara lost 3-4 human lives from exhaustion, disease, thirst, and heat stroke for every slave delivered to market alive; some caravans with hundreds of slaves simply disappeared in the desert. (Matthew White, Atrocities, 80-87.)
[xxiii] Stephane Courtois, et. al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass, 1999: Harvard University Press), 4. Historian, Martin Malia, writes that “the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history.” Malia, “Foreword” to Courtois, The Black Book of Communism, x. R. J. Rummel, the political scientist who devoted his career to studying “democide,” murder of the people by their own governments, argues the Communist murder total is substantially higher than 100 million, claiming that the Soviet regime alone annihilated some 61 million of its own civilians. R. J. Rummel, Death By Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 79-89.
[xxiv] Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 14-18.
[xxv] Courtois, The Black Book of Communism, 8.
[xxvi] Younge, Gary “Gary Younge interviews Richard Spencer: ‘Africans have benefited from white supremacy’”, The Guardian, video, November 6, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/nov/06/gary-younge-interviews-richard-spencer-africans-have-benefited-from-white-supremacy. Accessed on November 7, 2018.
[xxvii] Alt Right leader, Richard Spencer, interviewed by Dinesh D’Souza in the film, Death of a Nation, 2018.
[xxviii] Dr. Nikos Sotirakopoulos, author of The Rise of Lifestyle Activism: From the New Left to Occupy, in email correspondence with the author.
[xxix] The sociologist, Dr. Nikos Sotirakopolous, in email correspondence with the author.
[xxx] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Taylor. Accessed on November 16, 2018.
[xxxi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Taylor. Accessed on November 16, 2018.
[xxxii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Taylor. Accessed on November 16, 2018.
[xxxiii] Nikos Sotirakopoulos, in private email correspondence to the author.
[xxxiv] Regarding white Europeans, for example, the claim is unhistorical and egregiously inaccurate. The Greeks, let us remember, in the 5th century B.C., fought desperately to protect their independence from incursions by the mighty Persian Empire. Later, in the 5th century A.D., Attila and a horde of Huns–warriors of Central Asian origin, related to the Mongols–swept into Europe, destroying, killing, pillaging across swathes of present-day Germany, France, and Italy. Much later, North African Islamic warriors conquered Spain in 711 A.D., held much of the country for centuries, and invaded France in 732. Muslim Moors conquered Sicily in the 9th century A.D. and held it for better than 150 years. In 1453, Ottoman Turks conquered the Greek city of Constantinople, founded by the Emperor Constantine more than a millennium previously, thereby completing the collapse of the ancient Byzantine Empire, largely Greek, and thereafter Islamic. Ottoman armies invaded and conquered generous swathes of Eastern and Central Europe, holding extensive portions for centuries, and twice besieging Vienna, the final time in 1683. For hundreds of years, the Mediterranean was accurately referred to as “an Ottoman lake,” in which Islamic warships preyed repeatedly on Christian shipping and conducted endless slaving raids on European coastal towns. Untold thousands of white European Christians, perhaps as many as 1.25 million, were cruelly enslaved by the Turks and the Barbary Pirates, their North African satraps–and so-called “white slavery” became a commonplace. In its dying gasp, the Ottoman Empire slaughtered at minimum one million innocent Armenian Christians, all of whom were white. And we have not even yet mentioned the extraordinarily blood-thirsty Mongol conqueror, Genghis Khan. In the early 13th century, Genghis Khan’s generals fought their way across the Caucasus, pillaging and killing as they went, into European Russia, where the death count is estimated at 500,000. Several decades later, in the 1240s, descendants of Genghis Khan conquered and devastated extensive portions of Eastern and Central Europe, always perpetrating mass slaughter as they went. And so on and so forth. On widespread white slavery in North Africa, see: Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellew and Islam’s One Million White Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). See also: Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On Attila the Hun, see Matthew White, Atrocities, 66-67.On Genghis Khan, see: White, Atrocities, 115-126; on invasion of Europe and European losses, 123. On the 1240s Mongol invasion of Eastern and Central Europe, see: “Mongol Invasion of Europe,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe. Accessed on January 12, 2019.
[xxxv] Ayn Rand provided a brilliant argument that the factual requirements of human life form a proper, objective standard of moral value. See her essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964), 13-35.
[xxxvi] Make no mistake, there are serious questions to be raised regarding Black Lives Matter (BLM), as Taleeb Starkes does in his courageous book, Black Lies Matter. For example, Starkes quotes journalist, John Fountain: “The national tally of black males 14 or older murdered in America over a 30-year period from 1976 to 2005, according to the Bureau of Justice statistics: 214,661.” Murdered overwhelmingly by black criminals–94% of black murder victims are killed by blacks. (Taleeb Starkes, quoting Department of Justice statistics, Black Lies Matter, 41.) “Yet a group that calls itself Black Lives Matter somehow didn’t care to exist until Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman” [and most likely in self-defense]. (Taleeb Starkes, Black Lies Matter, 29,30.)
Further, in Detroit in 2014, a black criminal walked up onto the porch of a house and deliberately shot 2-year-old Kamiya French, killing her execution-style to make her father watch and suffer. In Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed while assaulting a police officer. BLM protested the death of Michael Brown but not Kamiya French. Why? In Chicago in 2015, a thug lured 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee into an alley and then killed him execution-style–and wrote a rap song to commemorate the murder, including the lines, “Shorty couldn’t take it no more, Shorty couldn’t take it no more.” In Baltimore in 2015, Freddie Gray, a drug dealer and career criminal, died while in police custody. BLM protested the death of Freddie Gray but not Tyshawn Lee. Why? And on the horror goes: Thousands of blacks killed every year–including numerous innocents, a significant portion of them children–but there are no protests from BLM. Why? Why are many innocent black victims, including children, not a public issue for BLM? Because of the skin color of the perpetrators. Why are the black victims that BLM protests a public issue for them, regardless whether or not they were killed in self-defense? Because of the skin color of the killer. Color-blind justice, for Black Lives Matter, is not a public issue. After-all, as their professors taught them: There is us–and there is the racial other. There is no truth but racial truth. What matters is: white and black…nothing else.
One thing that all honest persons can do, including BLM if it legitimately cares about saving innocent black lives, is to campaign for the legalization of drugs. One good result, of many, would be to bring down the rate of homicide dramatically in this country. When honest business persons can traffic in drugs, like they can in alcohol, criminal gangs are deprived a large source of income and are thereby severely undermined. The horrendous violence surrounding the illegal drug trafficking in our cities will be significantly curtailed. Indeed, one economist estimates that eliminating drug prohibition would lower the U.S. homicide rate by a staggering 25-75%. Jeffrey Miron, Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition (Oakland, California: Independent Institute, 2004,) 51. A war on drugs could then transform into an exclusively educational/moral form, reasoning with individuals–not forcing them–appealing to the best within them–their rational minds and their desire to live. This would be an educational war on drugs, showing human beings that a rich, fulfilled life is open to them via education, productive career, romantic love, and so forth; and that toxic drugs will kill them…young.
Another thing BLM can do is to work with responsible black leaders in the high-crime neighborhoods–the ministers, the teachers, the business persons, and necessarily, the police department–because the police must be part of the solution; engaging in the dangerous job of outreach to the criminal gangs–the “urban terrorists,” as Taleeb Starkes calls them–that terrorize the neighborhood. Former NFL great, Jim Brown, has had success working with members of urban crime gangs–and other great athletes in our large cities, if they can be convinced, might be able to do the same. Chip Johnson, “Jim Brown still has the power/NFL great takes on gang violence, drugs,” August 30, 2001, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/johnson/article/Jim-Brown-still-has-the-power-NFL-great-takes-2883963.php. Accessed on November 24,2018. This would be a worthy, if hazardous, undertaking for anyone concerned to protect black lives. Such an activity would make Black Lives Matter worthy of its name.
