[ED: Listen to a reading of this essay by playing the embedded video above.]
Why have America’s leading organs of influence decided to demonize white, Christian men as the most uniquely evil group in the history of the world? Why is it necessary for students, especially of that ethnic group, to unpack their invisible knapsacks?
The answer is that these men are routinely targeted for politically-empowered looting, usually by their own wives, with the assistance of the state. This looting would not be morally palatable without a pervasive myth of uniquely white male evil. It would otherwise trip the moral alarms that might otherwise come up when dissolving a family for personal gain.
The growth in anti-white-male op-eds in influential magazines makes more sense when you look at the real lives of middle class men, which are often marked by either divorce or threatened divorce, which typically involves an enormous transfer of valuable assets from the man to his ex-wife. This expropriation would have been regarded as execrable even just 50 years ago, but with the assistance of a powerful guilt-myth, it goes down much easier.
The pre-existing myth can be used by lawyers and others to sway judges to the favor of their clients. If white men are assumed to be uniquely wicked, it becomes easier to weave their reported actions (whether true or false) into a legal case against that man, and then to use that case to deprive him of his children, assets, and honor.
The irony here is that men like Teddy Roosevelt, the founder of the Progressive party, were imperialistic white supremacists. However, this was within the framework of the ‘white man’s burden’ of uplifting the other races of the world. This part has stayed within the Progressive platform, and arguably the supremacy plank has stayed also, but in the form of creating a uniquely flagellating class, trained into self-loathing. The tragicomic part of this is that the successful uplift of African-Americans that TR brags about as a unique American success has been reversed by future more aggressively progressive policies.
The flagellating guilt complex is seen as furthering the international-uplift mission, but the Christian aspect has, in large part, been bumped off. The humility before God has become humility before the diversity instructor. The Fall from Eden has become the fall from a murky fall from racial grace. The space in life that would have been allocated towards the worship of God has instead been allocated to the hatred of the White race, although this co-exists simultaneously with a proclamation that race is a social construct that has no bearing on anything temporal.
Without Satan and the demons as scapegoats, White men and their pallor do a great job as stand-ins as the source of the world’s great historical and contemporary evils. The narratives catalog all the purportedly unique historical crimes of the White devil, and then close with some argument to seize the assets of that class, often combined with a demand for the denigration of that entire category of person.
It is not entirely useful to make the comparison to Nazis and their assignment of anti-Jewish math problems and the like in schools, because this program of retaliation is seen as a corrective for those sorts of things, in the same way that the Nuremberg trials were one-sided against the Axis, while ignoring the pervasive and open attacks on civilians by the Allies, in which civilian body counts were seen as success indicators.
It might be funny to bring up the Turks and how they got rid of the Armenians, but most people are unfamiliar with that, and in any case, unlike in the 16th and 17th century, ‘Turk’ is not a byword for ‘bad person’ — ‘White’ is. That is the cultural context in which the educated American classes are operating in. Reforming the image of the Kulak is not easy when every day, all the educated people learn that to hate the Kulak is to get in good with the authorities.
So, what is a Kulak to do? For one, you should take the language denigrating your ethnic group seriously, because calls for asset seizures are always presages to calls of physical liquidation. Once your liquid assets are seized, it is necessary to take your tough-to-move assets, and when you have nothing left to give, you are useful either as a slave or as a dead body.
If the moral trend can be reversed, by openly contradicting the story of [insert group here]’s perfidy, then good on you, but typically, once a state has begun the scapegoating process, it finds itself unable to back down from it — it has to see it to its logical conclusion. Physical resistance usually never occurs, because actors within states only begin these sorts of widespread demonization programs if there is unlikely to be any real physical resistance to it.
Similarly, whining slogans about ‘white genocide’ are meaningless when that sounds like a great idea to the people who want to expropriate you. The guilt-narrative is that White Christians are uniquely responsible for the post-1945 crime of genocide, and that retaliation is more than fair play. That chatter only works if they are actually amenable to that moral argument, and in fact, they think it would be a great thing, and have indeed cheered on such operations in countries like Rhodesia and South Africa.
Memorializing the Communist leader Mandela is practically mandatory in the US, just as veneration of various Communist revolutionaries was mandatory in the USSR.
No one cares — that, in fact, only enhances the support for the policy on the opposing side. In the same way that telling Turks that they are naughty for getting rid of the Armenians, the left just grins and laughs when you tell them that they are doing what they want to do, what they plan to do, what they are openly proud of talking about doing.
The cheeky proposal is to make like previously successful mass-exiles and to negotiate deportation between the state that wishes to get rid of the host population, and a state that could make use of it. The exile of the Huguenots from France to other Protestant countries throughout Europe is a good example of this sort of relatively peaceful ethno-religious cleansing. The more serious proposal is to break up the United States, due to incompatible moral visions of society among the differing members.
In this way, you could separate the states between those that believe Whites are demons whose sin requires punishment on this Earth, and those who believe that Whites are men to be judged by God and perhaps by other men when the time calls for it.
Much like Stalin rewarded journalists and minor authors with high prizes for authoring tracts against the Kulaks, our contemporary authorities award such prizes for demonizing our Kulaks. None of this will make much sense without a good understanding of the greatest, most terrible man of the 20th century, and this biography is a wonderful place to start.
Being able to credibly threaten this would be the only thing that could even begin to derail the de-Kulakization program in place. Once the authorities can no longer promise worthwhile prizes and status in return for mouthing words of hatred towards the White devil, the words will stop being spoken with nearly as much authentic fervor.
We should learn from history that negotiation with the terror is not possible — that is the road to the fate of men like the Girondists, moderates exterminated by the Jacobins. Taking the symbolic meaning of language seriously is important, because people must use strong symbols to arrange any project, either great or terrible.
When the left says that they want to expropriate you (and later kill you) in increasingly less subtle terms, they are being entirely serious, and the dumbest mistake to make is to treat it as idle talk. They mean what they say. They will do what they say as soon as they have the political will and the numbers to execute it. That could be a long time, but it might not be, either.
Also, to think that you can deflect the hatred towards some other subclass of Kulak is folly, because you’re next, even if that succeeds.
In the contemporary sense, just as historically, the way to avoid the de-Kulakization is to re-align yourself with the state and against the Kulaks. If you could credibly be mistaken for a Kulak, you instead loudly proclaim how much you hate Kulaks, and how willing you are to assist in their expropriation.
A defense can be mounted in a secure state, but it can’t be mounted within a state that is entirely oriented against you. Finland withstood the Soviet invasion, but the states which were already in the Soviet orbit left the gates unlocked, and gladly accepted absorption. During the civil war in Spain, towns purged and counter-purged one another until the borders were clear — the secular Bolsheviks versus the Catholic Francoists.
Even then, people caught on the wrong side of the internal border were killed by their friends and neighbors, often with crude farm tools in barbaric rituals.
This even of course has occurred in recent times under American supervision — similar mass-killing of civilians is going on as I write this in Ukraine and New Russia. Ethnic cleansing famously occurred under hapless US supervision in Iraq, amassing an enormous body count. The American press is uniform in either glossing over these murders of civilians or in lauding them as necessary.
It is not so much of a jump to say that the same governing class that did not bat an eye in those wars would not bat an eye to do the same domestically, at least following a crisis of significant magnitude.
It’s not wise to trust in moderate political parties to brake the success of the neo-Jacobin left, because moderate parties are the first ones to go in crisis, under pressure from both sides.
Of course, none of this will make any sense if you are totally unfamiliar with the history of the left, especially in the 20th century. The rhetoric will seem benign because the symbols that they use for certain things are going to appear benign, rather than containing murderous intent. The normalcy that you have experienced for most of your life will be what you expect to experience for the foreseeable future, because you don’t have the records of others stored in your head, warning of such things.
In the same way, when people talk about ‘socialized medicine,’ you are going to have an entirely different emotional reaction to it if you know that Soviet doctors dumped dying patients out in front of hospitals to make their statistics look better than if you are wholly ignorant of that anecdote.
This is why it is often so difficult to make what should be an alarming historical parallel argument with regards to the bloody history of the left — contemporary people have been trained into fearing the ‘Brown scare,’ but not the far more dangerous ‘Red scare.’ They feel calm when they should feel alarm. They dismiss language that they should take seriously until precisely the moment before language commands action.
sullenday says
I thought I only needed to gaurd my dignity, but this is convincing.
Butch Leghorn says
This is why I own and practice with firearms, and train my teenage sons with them. Right-wingers should engage in hunting and firearms practice to be proficient with the implements of violence. We do not live in an age beyond violence. If you live in an area with gun restrictions, then you should move. If the government passes firearms confiscation laws, then you should die fighting rather than be disarmed. You’re going to die anyway at some point, why not die with some honor?
Help to perpetuate and expand the gun culture. There are plenty of shooting clubs and other gun enthusiast type groups around. Join them. Make friends with other gun owners. Democracy sucks, but I support groups that fight for gun ownership. Go to gun shows. Take every friend that you can shooting and get them into it. Take your girlfriend shooting, if she doesn’t like guns then drop her. Guns are cool and a lot of fun.
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Exfernal says
Finland lost most of Karelia anyway, reflecting the power imbalance with Russia.
Toddy Cat says
History as a series of “lessons” is probably not the best way to examine the past, but there do seem to be some constants with regard to human behavior, and one of them is this; when someone says the he is going to kill you, believe him. Millions of dead Jews, Kulaks, “Class Enemies”, “Capitalist Roaders”, sub-humans, and other interested parties will back me up on this. Or at least they would, if they weren’t dead…
So when someone in a semi-official position (a state journalist) starts talking about “the cancer of the white race”, it’s probably time to start checking your ammunition supply.
henrydampier says
Well, it’s one thing when it’s some random lunatic, but another when people can publish magazine features saying they’re going to take all your stuff and otherwise persecute you, and then getting prizes/praise for it. That means that it’s time to pack up, lock & load, or both.
Derfel says
The Kulak is dangerous because he is free, that’s what makes him an enemy of progress whenever he appears in history. Intellectuals, these apologists for increasing the power of the State cannot tolerate an population that is too independent, over which the State (ie the intellectual themselves) hold fewer power.
The solution is either subjugation through forced collectivization, then intellectuals can be appointed chiefs of “Sovkhozes” and control every single aspect of life of his subject, or elimination through the Gulag.
Max says
When the left says that they want to expropriate you (and later kill you) IN increasingly less subtle terms
henrydampier says
Fixed & fixed
Max says
forEseeable
1irradiatedwatson says
The public doesn’t understand the power of language. The right phrase or word may seem impotent but carry with it the memetic baggage of radical leftism. The summation of the incorporation of innocuous memes moves the country closer and closer to disaster. The murder of our great (or great great etc) grand children is written in our textbooks today the left has all the time and means to build it’s memetic guillotine piece by piece without opposition. Our suicide note is written with the acceptance that there are reasonable things on which we can agree.
aramaxima says
Dampier, this is a powerful piece. I’m making some changes to my expectations of the future, and my preparation for it.
henrydampier says
Honestly, I made my decision to hop out of a blue state when I read Jim’s Civil War 2 post. I was already on my way out, but it was an extra push.
Gordon says
Aww, geez. At least give us a link to the Civil War 2 post!
henrydampier says
http://blog.jim.com/war/preparing-for-civil-war-two/
David Bullis says
Marxists know that ownership of the means of production provides independence and freedom of conscience. They can’t have that. The Soviet Socialists have always persecuted yeomen more than serfs. Serfs already now to submit.
By the way, ‘Kulak’ is not a legitimate word; it is an insult derived from the Russian for fist and implying greed to hold on to that which they have. Much like ‘scab’, it is an unpleasant word designed to impute more unpleasantness than is conveyed by an honest label.
vxxc2014 says
Brilliant.
What do we do about this?
vxxc2014 says
‘A defense can be mounted in a secure state, but it can’t be mounted within a state that is entirely oriented against you.’- but the state isn’t 1 entity but many thousands due to Jeffersonian Administrative legacy. Also State breaks down internally along Red/Blue lines-sharply at National level, blurred as you go down.
gene marsh says
Not a credible threat. There are 80 million gunowners in America. This is either an emotionally gratifying persecution fantasy, false flagging, working the refs, or chronic cowardice.
CoffeesForClosers says
As a black individualist, I fully and enthusiastically support the 2nd amendment and the right of a person to defend his land.
You don’t have to like me or be my buddy, but you should recognize that you and I (and others like me) have a common interest in defending the Constitution and preventing the ruin that socialist authoritarianism brings.
Joe says
CfC, any man with a common interest in fighting for the Constitution and all it stands for is my unreserved friend.
Readers of the blog should also consider that the strategy being used against you is in Ostrog strategy. Henry’s call for a secure center of resistance implicitly acknowledges this. The corollary is that people like CfC are an important second line of strategy, precisely because they undermine the strategy being used against us.
It is possible to both acknowledge Henry’s point here, and also seek to find a better future for and with friends like coffees for closers. Indeed,it may be necessary. A mature NRx must have the intellectual and practical foundations for both, without diluting itself. Tricky, but I think it’s possible.
henrydampier says
I try to avoid alienating potential allies and fellow travelers when I can.
thebillyc says
Mr. Dampier, thank you for this wakeup piece: hopefully it will bring more in the neorx area to realize the dangers inherent in the gun-grabbing intent of the bolsheviks. If not for our guns, they would have already done for us they way they did for the ‘kulaks’. Take a look at a county map of “red” vs “blue” in this country sometime- little blue dots in a sea of red. Secession is coming with the first round of shots fired by, or against, those who will try to take our guns. We will not comply, and they will lose this war.
henrydampier says
Ideally, they’ll try to pull on strings and discover that they’re not connected to anything.
kreitzer says
To paraphrase Sailer from memory, a good movie is one which keeps you in its world well after it’s over and you drive out of the parking lot. A post like this makes you want to read all the comments to try and keep walking that plane where the author took you.
Wendy Stringer says
Working (for now) link here: http://www.deanza.edu/faculty/lewisjulie/White%20Priviledge%20Unpacking%20the%20Invisible%20Knapsack.pdf