The Most Unkindest Cut

 

Immortal dead white man

News is that the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust is planning to “de-colonize” Stratford. Apparently “the idea of Shakespeare's 'universal' genius 'benefits the ideology of white European supremacy'.” The Trust must “stop saying Shakespeare was the 'greatest' but part of a community of 'equal and different' writers globally.” Some exhibits will, for example, celebrate Rabindranath Tagore.

Questioned on how Shakespeare promoted “white European supremacy,” one authority issued this challenge: everyone around the world knows Shakespeare. But how many African writers could you name?

There you are. To suggest that Shakespeare is some unique genius promotes white supremacy. Obviously there must have been equally great writers in Africa.

By this logic, however, surely celebrating Shakespeare promotes Stratford supremacy as well. In fairness, they should celebrate as of equal merit some writer from every shire in England.

And let’s explore this rabbit hole further. How many Irish writers can you name? Several, I’ll warrant. Ireland, current population 6 million, has won four Nobel Prizes for Literature. And Joyce didn’t get one. Yet Ireland has been colonized by England far longer than any place in Africa. Britain held Kenya for 60 years. Britain held Ireland for 700 years. And with a deliberate attempt to wipe out Irish education and throw the Irish off the land. 

Demonstrably, if Shakespeare outshines all African writers, it is not because of colonialism. And it is not because Shakespeare has been artificially promoted for nationalistic or propagandistic reasons. These Irish writers certainly weren’t. 

Shakespeare indeed objectively suggests the superiority of English culture; at least when it comes to authoring plays. At least when it comes to crafting language.

Different cultures indeed have different specialties. You can’t beat Russians in the novel. You can’t beat Italy for cuisine. You can’t beat France for painting. You can’t beat America for sports.

Different cultures are better and worse at different things; and, given that a culture is a system for living the best possible life, it is also reasonable to argue that one culture is overall superior to another.

After all, whether it was right or wrong to do, what made it possible for a relatively small island off the coast of Europe to, at one point, control one quarter of the world’s population and one quarter of the world’s resources? 

Malice? 

The claim is ridiculous.

The ideal, of course, is to take the best from each culture, and combine them to create the best possible culture. This is what immigrant nations like the US, Canada, Australia, or Singapore have been able to do: the melting pot. To a lesser extent, this is what trading nations like England, the Netherlands, or ancient Greece, have been able to do. And these have generally become the most successful cultures as a result.

This is what we must return to.  This involves, in the first place, celebrating merit. 

Check Your Apple iWatch--Is It 1619?

 

Got any fire water?

One of Xerxes’s correspondents (Xerxes being my anonymous friend the left-wing commentator) writes: “The British importation of enslaved Africans and the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists embedded racism, White Supremacy, and Christian Nationalism as the unholy trinity in the DNA of the United States of America 150 years or more before such a country existed.”

Welcome to the 1619 project and the nonsense peddled now as history.

Leave aside that tiresome and racist cliche “in the DNA.” What strikes me more is anachronism. It reminds me of Whoopi Goldberg insisting that Hitler could not have been a racist because Jews are not black. The term “white supremacy” popped up in print only about 2016. Nobody uses it except the left, as a term of condemnation. If nobody uses it to describe their own beliefs, and the early English settlers in America would not know what it meant, is it sane to use it to describe their opinions? If you are obsessed with skin colour, it does not follow that everybody else is. They were more concerned with your religion than the depth of your tan.

But as to religion, I’ve only started seeing “Christian nationalism” pop up in the last year. Again, it is used only on the left, to tar people they disagree with. I presume it means wanting a nationally established church, as we see in England. Not something anyone advocates even today, in America. Although it also does not seem an especially troublesome idea.

Since many of the early settlers in the US had come to seek religious freedom, because they dissented from the established church in England, calling them “Christian nationalists” is the opposite of the truth.

You might argue that many of them sought to run their governments in the New World on a religious basis. But why is this a problem for anyone? In the context of this new world, anyone who dissented could simply move on and found their own colony on their own principles beyond the next headland. Which is, historically, what they did.

Were they “racists”? The term “race” only developed its modern meaning with Darwin. Before Darwin in The Descent of Man presented man as just another animal, competing with other animals for survival, race was not a thing. Breeding was, true—that is, being well brought up. That had to do with education.

Why did some of the early settlers at least consider it fair game to enslave Africans in the New World? Even though this was against established Christian principles, and would not be tolerated back in England? Not because they thought them an “inferior race.” It was because they considered them uncivilized—not well brought up. They enslaved one another, for one thing. They ate one another, for another. They knew nothing of God or Christian morality or settled agriculture. Buying them, already enslaved, out of Africa was justified as rescuing them from this toxic culture. 

No doubt there was cynicism involved; but having them continue to work as slaves was justified as a process of civilization, which given the continuing influence of parents and cultural traditions was bound to take several generations, and justified as well as supporting the costs of this vast rescue mission. The logic may have been wrong or self-serving, but nobody spoke of “white supremacy.”

The issues in dealing with Native Americans were similarly not racial; neither the Indian nor the settlers thought of themselves or one another in racial terms. In principle and in practice, anyone could join any Indian tribe, be they black, white, blue, Iroquois or Eskimo. The European settlers did not see themselves as a race, but as a community united by religious values. The two groups often intermarried. The issue was that the Indians travelled in gangs like the tribes in the Mad Max movies. The settlers wanted to establish peace and order. They sought to establish governments to protect rights of property and security of the person. Nobody was thinking in terms of “white supremacy.”

We may disagree with their actions, or their attitudes. But we have no right to fight straw men.

The Growing Menace of Catholicism

 

You may have wondered how the American FBI has decided that traditionalist Catholics are “white supremacists.”

I think I can explain.

In a recent class with a middle school student, the text offered this proposed essay topic:

“Why everyone should be vegetarian.”

“That’s really racist!” he responded.

“Racist? Why?”

“It is forcing everyone to be vegetarian.”

“I don’t see that. It says ‘should,’ not ‘must.’ It could be giving health advice.”

“OK, my bad. It’s not racist.”

This seems to reveal the assumptions children are getting indoctrinated into, either in school or, possibly, on the Internet.

“Racism,” in woke vernacular, no longer has anything to do with race. It is about culture. Or rather, it is about morality. 

Because cultures supposedly have different moralities, any mention of moral issues is racist. Even if the moral stance cannot be identified with a particular culture, let alone a particular race. You are claiming racial superiority the moment you say anything is wrong. 

It is the belief in “cultural relativism” that makes the woke so supportive of multiculturalism. It even leads them to support Islam, a highly moralistic religion. Because its morality is supposedly different from Christian morality; so it helps to undermine morality generally. 

But Satanism is better. Any reference to religion is prohibited in the public square; Super Bowl commercials about Jesus are widely condemned by the woke. But Satanism figures prominently at the Grammies.

This belief that the different world religions differ in their moral values is false. Except around the edges. Kant has proven that the basis of morality is universal and self-evident. The woke believe in moral relativism because they want to believe this. They need to out of a guilty conscience. Which goes back to abortion and the sexual revolution. For proof, mention the word “sin,” or phrase “conventional morality,” and they will automatically think of sex.

So, because traditionalist Catholics hold to traditional moral values, they are by this definition white supremacists. No matter what their skin colour, or opinions on race. Anyone who believes in right and wrong is a white supremacist.

Of course, the awkward corollary is that all non-whites are evil. This may, in time, come back to bite. You never know. Funny how conscience leads us into self-condemnations like that.

Now go away and let the woke do whatever their baser instincts tell them to.

The Second Coming

 

Courtesy of the "Toronto Relationship Clinic"

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Current academic articles based on “critical race theory” keep cascading across my desk. They always accuse the US of being a racist society, based on “white supremacy.”

It is not obvious what they mean by this. I think many are confused. 

It is true, of course, that the US once had race-based slavery, and did not abolish it until 1865. But then again, most of the world used to have slavery, it was abolished, and in the US it was abolished over a hundred and fifty years ago. 

It is also true that discriminatory laws based on race were revived and then persisted in the US South until 1965, a hundred years later. But that too is over fifty years ago. Most now alive would have no memory.

What makes the US “white supremacist” today? Merriam-Webster defines “White supremacy” as “the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.” Oxford defines it as: “The belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups, in particular black or Jewish people.”

According to the US Constitution, and American statute law, to act on any such belief in America today would be illegal. The US is almost uniquely a non-racial nation. To be German or Japanese or French is an ethnic, a racial, designation. To be American is not. It is the one country in the world least based on any kind of racial supremacy. In America, by its very founding document, all men are created equal.

There is no constituency to speak of in modern America for such an opinion as “white supremacy.” I doubt any reader of this piece has ever heard or read such an opinion expressed by anyone in the past forty years, in public or in private. I have not. And I read a lot.

So how can the US be said to be based, today, on “white supremacy”?

By a redefinition of the term. “White supremacy” as the term is used by the critical race theorists means any situation in which it is tolerated that people with white skin are statistically doing better on some metric than are people with darker-toned skin. This must be ended, by main force, or the system is “white supremacist.” Pale-skinned people of primarily European ancestry do better than “blacks” on measures of average income and average educational attainment. So long as this is true, apparently, the USA is and will be “white supremacist.”

Yet we have a logical problem. If you factor in all racial groups, instead of an arbitrary two, it turns out that the USA is “Asian supremacist.” Asian Americans do better than either European or African Americans on both those metrics. And, given that the Oxford definition expressly excludes Jews from the category “white,” American is probably even more “Jew supremacist.”

The essential premise of critical race theory is exactly the same premise as Nazi race theory. There and then, it was the Jews running everything; for the Jews in prewar Germany were wealthier and better educated than the average German. So they were supposedly in control of everything, and were to blame for all the sufferings of the Germans. Here and now, it is the “whites” running everything, and responsible for all bad things. Increasingly we hear calls for similar remedies as well.

No cause for panic, of course—many will say. After all, the Jews were only six percent of the German population in 1930. “Whites” in the US are the majority. They really do hold power, so long as the US is a democracy, and so have little to fear, however violent and vile the rhetoric becomes.

Except, to begin with, the rules are changing. The innovation of “intersectionality” allows things to be parsed so that the ethnicity can be expanded or contracted as seems useful. “White” can be read to exclude “Hispanics,” Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Sicilians, or whatever group might be convenient. And you can discount women, homosexuals, and so forth. The remaining core might be entirely vulnerable in a democracy, depending on how the lines are drawn. Only a bigger and better Holocaust.

But it might not go that direction. Instead, there are growing signs that the gun turrets are swinging to Asians and Jews. Street attacks on Jews and Asians seem to be growing. The logic of critical race theory points inexorably in this direction.

It is amazing how history repeats; it is amazing how people seem incapable of learning from history. 

The Real Roots of Racism

 

Scott Adams made a vital and often misunderstood point in his latest YouTube video: he makes the necessary distinction between “white supremacist” and “white racist” by observing that people are never racist because they think they are inferior to the group they hate. Racism comes from thinking you are inferior, or at least threatened.

I think the same may go for hatred and discrimination in general.

Hitler and the Nazis and the Germans who supported them hated the Jews because the Jews seemed to run everything; they did not really think the Jews were inferior, although that might have been their alibi. The South African whites, in the days of apartheid, hated the blacks because they were vastly outnumbered. Moreover, the Zulus were famously fierce and effective warriors, who had not long ago “broken the British square.” 

Black slavery in the US South was probably nothing personal, and not really about racism. It was about money, and cheap labour. The hostility to blacks after the Civil War probably had to do with the fact that freed slaves constituted half the population; and they had, at first, the aggressive support of the federal government. They looked like a constant danger; whites no doubt feared being raped or murdered in their beds.

Canada as a White Supremacist Nation

Japanese-Canadians heading for internment.

My portside pal Xerxes has declared Canada a “white supremacist” nation.

I doubt there can be more than perhaps a few hundred white supremacists in Canada. I suspect “white supremacy” has not been a living ideology anywhere in North America since the 1960s at the latest. Perhaps a little later in parts of Africa. All the sudden talk of “white supremacists” over just the last two years is reminiscent of the McCarthyite “communists in the State Department” scares in the 1950s, but ratcheted up exponentially. Mass hysteria.

Where is it coming from? No doubt, from the impulse to shout “Shut up!” at things you do not want to hear. All expressions of dissent from the general public are suddenly “white supremacy.” In the US, just voting for Trump makes you a “white supremacist.”

To call Canada a “white supremacist nation” is out of contact with objective reality. Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, stand apart as the handful of non-ethnically-based nations in the world. Everywhere else, nationality is based largely on shared genetics. And Canada is not even tarnished, like America, by slavery or Indian Wars or forced relocation of any aboriginal people. If Canada is “supremacist,” there is no such thing as a non-supremacist country. Making the term meaningless.

Xerxes, in making his charge, does cite a few specific examples of “white supremacy.” First, the old head tax on Chinese immigration. It is worth noting that this is the only example in Canadian history of discrimination in immigration based on country of origin.

But this was, in its day, a “progressive” measure. It was Canadian labour, naturally enough, who demanded it. They saw the Chinese as unfair competition for jobs; a Chinese man whose family stayed home could accept a job at what would not be a living wage for a Canadian man with a local family to support. One can understand their concern, and, right or wrong, it was not “racist.”

It should perhaps also be noted that the first restrictions on Chinese immigration were at the insistence of the Chinese government—who saw human capital as their chief resource. And for centuries China of course simply did not allow foreigners to immigrate into China.

Xerxes then cites Canada turning away Jewish refugees before the Second World War.

This seems misplaced as a supposed example of “white supremacy.” When did Jews stop being “white”? When did they become “white” again?

In any case, although the government’s actions seem callous now that we see what Hitler then did, it should be remembered that Canada was at the time in the middle of the Great Depression. Virtually no immigration was allowed in those conditions; Jews were not singled out. Again, the exclusion was in the interests of labour, not racism.

Xerxes then cites the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War. Here, he does seem to have an example of real racial discrimination. “Enemy aliens” were interned as a matter of course, in Canada as in other countries; but the Japanese interned were often Canadian citizens. Their loyalty was not trusted; German-Canadians and Italian-Canadians were not subject to the same treatment. Still, it all happened in a state of war emergency, when jumping at shadows seems relatively understandable; it might have been safer than leaving them at risk from possible lynch mobs; and in 1988, the Mulroney government issued both an apology and financial compensation.

If that’s the worst that can be said of Canadian racism, it is time Canadians were proud of this heritage.

The San Diego Synagogue Shootings

Anti-semitic cartoon, 1896.

It had to happen sooner or later. It is unwise to come to any conclusions based on first reports—the 48-hour rule is a good one—but it looks as though the Passover attack on a synagogue near San Diego in California was by a genuine white nationalist, white supremacist Nazi who at least identifies as Christian.

Mind, since the left has been declaring loudly that this was happening for years without it being true, I think it is proper to blame them for it now. Speak of the Devil, and he will appear. Someone was bound to be listening. And it seems odd that this killer’s manifesto, making all of his motives plain, was immediately available and linked to on the Internet, whereas the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, making it plain that he was neither a “white supremacist” nor a right-winger, was quickly and generally suppressed.

This killer also takes pains to point out that his actions are no “false flag.” Odd that he would; but then, he is doing exactly what those he claims to oppose would most want him to do, and what most advances their interests against those he claims to be his own. He is, by his acts, throwing white nationalism, white supremacy, and Christianity into disrepute, surely. He is confirming a claim on the left that he himself insists is false. How is that supposed to work? Perhaps he protests too much?

Someone else, apparently familiar with 8chan, where it appeared, in linking to the manifesto, comments that it is full of “s***posting and is not to be taken literally.” 8chan is famous for spoofs and false flags. So who knows?

As a Christian, my challenge is this: assuming the manifesto is for real, how can I reconcile his actions and his expressed thoughts with his claiming to be a Christian? There are, presumably, three possibilities. Either 1. The killer is insane. 2. There is actually something in Christianity that warrants this; or 3. He is aware that he is simply doing evil, and is lying. I think 3 is by far the most plausible thesis.

I resist explanation 1. I may find his manifesto incoherent, but not in the obviously disordered way you would expect from the truly delusional. In any case, I do not buy insanity as an excuse for immorality. There is no connection, statistically speaking. That just comes from a prejudice against the insane.

He declares himself a Christian and quotes Bible verses. He claims to have been inspired by “Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler, …, Ludwig van Beethoven, Moon Man, and Pink Guy.”

But how seriously can we take the faith of someone who lists Jesus as simply parallel among his influences not just with Adolf Hitler but with “Moon Man and Pink Guy”? Does a serious Christian think that way? It seems at least plausible that he is feigning Christianity in order to malign Christianity. He knows the lingo—his father was apparently a prominent member of a local Presbyterian congregation. But that might only have given him the ammunition; and perhaps a desire to rebel.

To begin with, surely, Christianity is antithetical to the racial ideology on which he has based his actions. It is not just that St. Paul wrote “There is no Jew nor Greek in Christ”: the basic concept of the “New Covenant,” aka Christianity, is that God was now offering to all nations, without ethnic distinction, the covenant that had formerly been offered exclusively to the Jews. Racism is therefore fundamentally opposite to the Christian message.

The Bible verses the killer then quotes to justify harming Jews are not attacking Jews at all, but those who claim to be Jews yet are not. Hypocrites, in other words. For example, quoting the actual verses he cites:

“They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham […] Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not” (John 8:37-45).

For the quote to make sense, it must be a good thing, in conformity with God’s will, to be a devout Jew. If you do truly follow Abraham’s example—as either a Jew or, latterly, a Muslim—you are in obedience to God.

“For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins away: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16).

Paul’s point is not that the Jews are especially guilty of persecuting Christians, but the reverse: that Christians everywhere are being persecuted, not by some other racial group, but by their own countrymen. Just as Jesus himself observed: a man’s (or a prophet’s) enemies will come from within his own home, his own family, and his own neighbours. It follows that racism is at best an error. The very error Paul is condemning here among the Jews of Judea.

“I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation 2:9).

This passage is necessarily saying that Judaism is a good thing, and not following its teachings is Satanic.

Even without the Bible passages, the thing is logically and theologically unambiguous: God made a covenant with the Jews. Does God keep his promises, or not? It necessarily follows, for any true Christian, that the covenant with the Jews is still in force, for any Jew who keeps it.

It is possible, I suppose, that the shooter is too stupid to see this, but it seems profoundly unlikely that he could have managed to consistently reverse the meanings of Bible passages by 180 degrees simply by misreading the Bible.

It seems to me too that the killer gives hints he knows he is in the wrong. He, as the Devil is said to commonly do, seems to condemn himself out of his own mouth. He accuses the Jews, for example, of spreading “blood libel,” without evidence, only a few paragraphs after spreading the ancient blood libel against the Jews: that they supposedly killed Christ. This is what the term commonly refers to. He is, in other words, scapegoating the Jews for his own sins; and at some level he must know this. It is one thing to be randomly wrong. But when what you say is exactly and fairly consistently 180 degrees from the truth, it tends to betray an underlying awareness of in what direction truth actually lies.

There is indeed an anti-Christian blood libel that has been going around for long years: that Christianity is anti-Semitic. I myself got fed that as if simple fact when studying religion in university. But this is surely not what the murderer is referring to here, because he believes that very libel himself, according to his own claims, and is doing his best to justify it.

Recent history has demonstrated this is an anti-Christian slander. With greater contact with the Muslim world, people in the West discover that Muslims are at least as prone to antisemitism as Christians ever were. And those who read history—or the Bible—know that antisemitism was familiar in the ancient world, among the Romans, who burned down Jerusalem and dispersed the Jews, among the Greeks, who converted the temple in Jerusalem to pagan worship, the Babylonians, who levelled the temple and dispersed the Jews, or the Egyptians, who enslaved the Jews, then tried to wipe them out. And on it goes.

The Romans under Titus haul away the treasures of Jerusalem.

Far from being anti-semitic, Christianity is at its core irreducibly and uniquely pro-semitic. The Hebrew scriptures are also the Christian scriptures. Christians reading them necessarily self-identify as Jews.

Rather than having anything to do with Christianity in particular, anti-semitism, here as everywhere, is simply a reliable expression and measure of human evil. I do not think it too simplistic to say that bad people are always anti-semitic, and good people invariably identify instead with the Jews.

For the real cause of anti-semitism, here and everywhere, is simply envy. It is the sin that dare not speak its name, and so the one always in need of scapegoats and alibis. The San Diego shooter simply envied the Jews, and used whatever cover he could find rather than admit it was because he felt they were better than him.

Their moral and historical status as God’s original chosen people might well be enough to provoke such envy: it is exactly the thing that caused Cain, in envy, to kill Abel. That makes such murderous envy only one generation removed from original sin. It is as wrong, of course, as wrong could be: it is automatically also an open rebellion against God himself.

Of course, many these days will not take that claim literally. That makes no difference. It is a scientific fact, as measurable by IQ tests, that Jews as an identifiable group are more intelligent than the rest of us. As a result of this, if not directly because of God’s favour, or for whatever reason, it is also a demonstrable fact that, demographically, wherever they settle, and despite frequent discrimination against them, Jews tend to become richer and better educated as a group than those around them. They become overrepresented at the top of the professions, and of business.

This makes them, wherever they go, inevitable targets for this deadly sin of envy, wherever and to whatever extent it is present: that is, whenever they are among bad people.

It must now be said that it has long been the left, not the right, that has endorsed and promoted the sin of envy: of looking on anyone richer then oneself as having stolen something, and deserving punishment. Socialism naturally segues, as with Nazism and Stalinism alike, into anti-semitism.

Certainly the present killer would not identify himself as a typical “Commifornian,” to use his term. But he is no doubt a product of that milieu, and has accepted some of its basic premises.

More than he has been influenced by anything in the Bible.

The Liberal Strategy Revealed

Justin Trudeau seems to have declared his line of attack for the next election. Every time now, in the Commons, he is asked anything about the SNC-Lavalin scandal, he responds by demanding that Andrew Scheer denounce white supremacy. At last Friday’s Liberal Party convention in Mississauga, he accused the Conservatives of planning to cut the federal budget, abandon the fight against global warming, and embrace white nationalism.

I expect that the Conservatives would have little quibble with Trudeau’s claims that they want to cut government costs and kill the carbon tax. Fair enough. Here Liberals and Conservatives disagree.

But Trudeau’s attribution to the Conservative Party of white nationalism and white supremacy is dishonest.

Are there any white supremacists in North America? No doubt; but no more than might fit in a clubhouse up some backyard tree. To denounce them is therefore counter-productive, if your intent is to oppose white supremacy. You are giving the position publicity and respectability. You are forcing it to the public’s attention. Some will want to know what all the fuss is about. If it is immediately and self-evidently false, then no harm done. And nothing useful done. In any other case, you are promoting it.

This Trudeau is blatantly doing for short-term political gain—to distract from scandal. Scheer would be irresponsible to do likewise.

There is another fundamental problem with denouncing “white supremacy.” It is the inclusion of that modifier, “white.” To denounce “white supremacy” as a stand-alone item is to imply that other forms of racial supremacy are fine: black supremacy, Asian supremacy, Muslim supremacy, aboriginal supremacy. The problem is not with supremacy, then; it is with whites. That is extreme racism. And should be called out as such.

There is a vital distinction to be made here, between white supremacist and white nationalists. Not the same thing.

Are there any white nationalists in North America? That’s a more interesting question: it illustrates the likely effects of Trudeau’s strategy. Just a few years ago, say 2015, there was apparently also no “white nationalist” movement to speak of in Canada, or for that matter in the US. When the term “alt-right” was first coined and aggressively promoted on the left, the people it was referring to and demonizing were only geeky kids on the Internet playing with memes, just yanking legs. But the aggressive promotion of the term―on the left―seems to have now summoned up such a movement for real. Faith Goldy, for example, seems to be a genuine white nationalist; as was the guy who shot up mosques in Christchurch. Before the left invented the “alt-right,” they probably would not have come out with their views, even if they entertained them in private. It may well have been the left that suggested to them that others apparently felt the same way. All I can say about that is that I followed conventional right-wing news sites and aggregators throughout the relevant period, and heard for months not a peep about the alt-right, nor any views endorsing anything like white nationalism. For months, all the noise about it was coming exclusively from left-wing sources. Only eventually did right-wing sources begin to be heard—all either dismissing the alt-right, or condemning it. 

An early "alt-right" meme: the flag of Kekistan.

Nice job, lefties. White nationalism is your baby, not Scheer’s.

Now Trudeau and his like are hell-bent to up the ante to promoting white supremacy. And, by declaring any view on any issue and any person with which they disagree “white supremacist” and “alt-right,” the left suggests real white supremacy is equally reasonable. If everyone is Hitler, including really nice people, what’s wrong with Hitler?

And the white nationalists are creatures of the left, of the Trudeaus of the world, in yet a third and more direct sense. Nationalism of all kinds, or, more accurately, tribalism rather than nationalism, has been aggressively promoted by the left over the past forty years. They call it “multiculturalism,” and even make it legally mandatory. They have long insisted on black tribalism, and Cree tribalism, and Inuit tribalism, and Iroquois tribalism, and Innu tribalism, and Muslim tribalism, and Quebec tribalism, and Irish tribalism, and Greek tribalism, and Ukrainian tribalism, and Sikh tribalism, and Hispanic tribalism, and Portuguese tribalism. Even gay tribalism, and transgender tribalism. It is obviously arbitrary, discriminatory, and dishonest for them to object only to white tribalism. They have been promoting it all along, the only distinction being the substitution of the word “white” for more specific ethnic categories.

It’s Trudeau’s tarbaby. Scheer and the Conservatives have nothing to do with it, and they have no call to sully their hands with it. It is up to Trudeau to denounce tribalism in all forms.

Nor is this playing this “white supremacy” or “white nationalism” card hard likely to work for Trudeau. To begin with, it seems unlikely that the public are gullible enough to be distracted by this from the SNC-Lavalin scandal. But even if they are: is it even by itself a winning issue? The Liberal government has suddenly reversed its policy on accepting refugees. From open borders and an open invitation, now they are proposing to deport everybody. Their own opinion polls are apparently telling them something. Apparently unhindered by principles, they are pandering to “white nationalism” themselves.

Hard to do that while scapegoating the Conservatives for hypothetically wanting to do the same. And it looks as though, arrogant and utterly out of touch, they are trying just like Hillary Clinton to insult as “white nationalists” and racists the very average voters they are expecting to vote for them.

White Supremacist Spotted in the Wild

Rep. Steve King

After much desperate searching and sounding of alarms, an actual white supremacist seems to have been located in the US.

Or, actually, no, not quite. It’s Rep. Steve King of Iowa, and what he actually said was that he did not see why the terms “white nationalist,” “white supremacist,” and “Western civilization” have become a problem. It does not follow that he would use them to describe himself. And he has since specifically denounced these attitudes on the floor of the House, and said they do not describe his own views.

But it seems to be the best we have.

So he has been publicly denounced now by Jeb Bush, Ben Shapiro, the National Review, Paul Ryan, the House Republican Whip, the Republican National Committee Chairman, Tim Scott, and on and on—all Republican or right-wing voices.

This reaction does seem over the top; on the other hand, I can understand it. Republicans and the right do not want to be associated with such views, even tangentially. Even if nobody actually holds them.

Neither do I.

Let’s look at them.

“White nationalist.”

Nationalism is always immoral. One has a right to feel attachment to the polity in which you were nurtured and raised, and you have some obligation to it for this. If it works well, you have a duty to protect it, for the sake of mankind. But beyond this, nationalism violates the basic moral principle of human equality.

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to glorify nationalism in certain contexts: we like and celebrate Cree nationalism, or Inuit nationalism, or perhaps Quebec nationalism, or Scottish nationalism, or Chinese nationalism, or black nationalism; or the many nationalisms implicitly celebrated by multiculturalism. It too often seems that our problem is with “whites,” rather than with nationalism. This is a vital concern; but it obviously is not helped by promoting white nationalism along with the others.

Secondly, there is no “white nation.” There is no “white” ethnicity. To be a nation in the ethnic sense implies a shared language, history, perhaps religion. In North America, where King lives, there is no distinction among Americans on any of these grounds that also corresponds to their skin colour. In Europe, those who share the skin colour, conversely, can have quite different languages and histories. Mostly Irish by ancestry, why would I want to identify as “white,” and consider myself ethnically the same as an Englishman? My ancestors fought against that for centuries.

“White supremacy”

This is a term that has no accepted definition. On these grounds alone, it should not be used.

If it means special rights for some based on their skin colour, it is of course immoral. It violates the principle of human equality. Unfortunately, we violate human equality all the time now by giving a variety of groups special rights based on their skin colour: affirmative action in all its forms. So again, it looks as though our objection is not to discrimination, but to “whites.” But advocating special rights for “whites” does not fix the problem. It makes it worse.

Some of those opposing Steve King have not helped the case at all, by making the argument that he is wrong on the grounds that non-whites have actually contributed a great deal to civilization. The problem is that, no, objectively, the contribution by people with “white” skin really has been disproportionate. Those arguing against the claim on these grounds have to resort to verbal tricks like defining Italians, Greeks, Slavs, or Middle Easterners as “non-white,” in order to then show that non-whites have been holding up their side. Define “white” as cognate to the scientific racial category “Caucasian,” and their arguments collapse. Some impressive stuff from China and Japan, but on the whole, Caucasians have indeed produced more than their numbers warrant.

But that is to get lost in the weeds. The doctrine of human equality does not imply that all humans are equal in all their abilities. To suggest so is transparently wrong. And just as humans can vary in individual abilities, they can certainly vary by group. For example, Caucasian Europeans really do have higher average IQs than sub-Saharan Africans.

This is not relevant. Human equality is founded on the fundamental premise that we are all children of God, created by him, and he must therefore love us equally. We are all equal in our intrinsic moral worth, but (of course) not in our abilities. We must all therefore treat one another respectfully and strictly as our individual merits warrant.

“Western civilization”

Seems innocuous, but again, I think it is a harmful concept. The proper distinction is between civilization and barbarism. And the path to civilization is simple: civilization is, broadly, technology for living. To become civilized, you select the best option available for whatever you need to accomplish, from whatever the source. Not to do so is to willfully remain less civilized. To speak of “Western civilization” is implicitly to violate this principle, and so to advocate barbarism.

Because of natural geographical barriers, civilization has over past centuries developed largely independently, and so differently, in different parts of the world. It has been somewhat different in Europe, China, India, or the Middle East. But now that we are all in communication, it makes no sense to preserve the distinction. Why would you refuse a better product because it is made in China?

I also believe that, as far as technologies for living go, the Judeo-Christian-Hellenic foundation on which European civilization has been built is more solid and seems to have been more productive over the long term than Confucianism and Buddhism, in the Far East, Hinduism in India, or Islam in the Middle East. I think that recommends it as a technology to be embraced everywhere.

Many in China and Africa are currently coming to that same conclusion. Just as many in Northern Europe or the Americas have in the past.

Conquering White Supremacy: What Whitey Can Do

Fighting racism since 1922

Here is a helpful article by a black writer advising “Five Ways White People Can Fight White Supremacy.”

It makes clear that when those on the left say “white supremacy,” what they mean is the current situation, the stuff in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, for example, in which, nominally, all are equal before the law, regardless of race; and despite that, there are specific laws favouring people whose skin colour is of a darker hue, such as “affirmative action” programmes. This is all “white supremacy.”

In other words, like so many terms on the left, “white supremacy” does not mean white supremacy. It is a euphemism. It means not being racist in favour of blacks. War is peace, freedom is slavery, and equality is supremacy.

The author goes on to say: “Black people cannot cure racism. It is a contagion carried and spread by white people among white people.” So only white people can be racist. What could be more racist than such an assertion? He goes on to point out that white people can be racists even if they have never had a racist thought in their lives. So it is not just that white people can be racist, and black people cannot. It is that being white makes you racist. “Racist,” it seems, now means being white.

The writer also says that, in order not to be racist, you must always treat people differently on the basis of their skin color. He objects to the assumption that “everyone is the same.” Human equality? A racist idea!

“After your uncle has had a few glasses of Wild Turkey at Thanksgiving, or your homeboy has had a few too many shots of ... ummm ... Wild Turkey, and says something that sounds like an excerpt from an “alt-right” speech, you should say something.”

He has a remarkable insight into the true dynamics of a typical “white” family, does he not? What gives him this insight? I’m sure everyone in America of European ancestry sees themselves here.

Or not. Sounds pretty racist, actually. All white people, or at least one person in every white family, drinks Wild Turkey, drinks too much of it, and says racist things when he is drunk? The writer is self-conscious enough to “apologize for the stereotype,” but not really—he is actually apologizing for it being true. It is okay to stereotype “white” people, however outrageously.

He then goes on to insist that one’s culture is a part of one’s race: “What if they understood that African Americans, Mexicans, Muslims and others deserve freedom and equality without having their heritage and culture separated from their humanity?” Here we see why measures like Canada’s recent M-103 resolution are so dangerous. It is now commonly asserted on the left, as here, that culture is genetic.

People now belong to their particular culture, and it is part of their “humanity,” their essential being.

This is the fundamental assertion on which Fascism was based. Not an obvious model of anti-racism.

It also argues strongly against immigration, doesn’t it? People coming from another culture are not going to fit in. Indeed, it seems obviously impractical to expect “whites” to live cheek-by-jowl with these culturally different blacks. Of course they are not going to want to eat in the same restaurants, watch the same movies in the same theatres, or drink from the same water fountains. Segregation forever?

And how dare you, then, protest what Hitler did to the Jews? It was just a part of the Nazi culture, after all. Jews were cultural pollutants. The did not belong.

How dare you object if this or that group refuses to treat outsiders equally, rejects freedom and equality for others? It is a part of their culture!

How dare you object to slavery? It was a part of antebellum Southern culture.

The author then writes, bizarrely:

“There is no need for safety pins or self-congratulatory pats on the back if you are truly “about that life,” because the truth is, there is not a “that life.” It is just a life. Your life. Our lives.”

Does he realize that he is speaking here directly against the “Black Lives Matter” movement? This is the very assertion that they have been regularly shouting down. So obviously they are racist, right?

But no, they cannot be, because they are black. The writer shows no awareness of this contradiction, in any case.

Indeed, he is speaking against what he himself has just said, only a few paragraphs up: that you have to make a distinction at all times among people on the basis of their race and their culture. So which is it? Even if there are always different rules and standards based on your skin colour, who is he talking to? He seems in both cases to be talking to “whites,” and the piece is addressed to them.

He writes, in a moving summation:

“It is remarkable to witness how children don’t care about race, color, religion or nationality when they are young. But at some point, it seeps into their souls and they inherit the generational curse of racism.”

“Every single prejudice and fear we have was acquired from someone else.”

This is the opposite of the truth, and the truth is pretty obvious. As anyone knows who has lived in a foreign country visibly ethnically distinct from their own, children are instinctively racist. They will always be afraid at first, or cry at, the scary-looking foreigner. A little older, and they may run after him in groups and taunt him.

It is the herd instinct. People are herd animals. It is almost self-evident that this should be so, in evolutionary terms. A child is vulnerable, and has good reason to cling to familiar-looking folks.

It is this that has to be educated, or familiarized, out. Educating people out of it is one of the great triumphs of civilization.

But I think this writer is on the other side. Civilization is “white supremacy.”

White Privilege

Evidence of white privilege on display at Auschwitz

The dogma of “white privilege” seems to have fixed now hard as cement on the left. It can be used, of course, to justify any sort of discrimination against someone with white skin.

Are we all aware that this tactic has been used before, many times?

It is, in fact, the alibi for most historical genocides. They are usually represented as a matter of “getting our own back,” of evening the score for supposed past harm or discrimination. This almost has to be so, for some such alibi is needed to quiet the human conscience. No massacre is ever presented as unprovoked.

Here are a few notes on the Jews from a Nazi party monthly for propagandists, circa 1936:

“There are still Jewish lackeys today who attempt to disrupt our storm attack on the Jewish world rulers, trying to stop us or even cause us to fall. The following hints show how one can reply to these arguments by our opponents, or even turn their arguments against them.”

Note the Nazi claim that the Jews ruled the world. Just as “whites” are claimed to today. This is what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were all about: the supposed Jewish hegemony. The system had been rigged in their favour, and to oppress poor ordinary Germans.

“Even if a few hundred Jewish families in Germany really did have to go hungry, what is that against the many millions of German families that the Jew murdered over the course of centuries through wars, revolutions, and civil strife, not to mention those ruined through usury and fraud.”

Reparations were due. Yeah. What about slavery? What about European colonialism? You know the drill. “White” people are responsible for all of history’s wars, not to mention raping the world through capitalism, through “usury and fraud.”

(Quotes from Kurt Hilmar Eitzen, “Zehn Knüppel wider die Judenknechte,” Unser Wille und Weg 6, 1936, pp. 309-310).

Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi chief of ideology, wrote,

“It is almost a miracle that absolutely nothing has happened to Jews in Germany, but rather that only gradually the rights they stole from the Germans in politics and culture have been restored.”

Nothing sinister here. Just poor exploited Aryans finally getting their own back.

The same dynamic gave us the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s. The Tutsis had been dominant in Rwandan politics before and during the colonial period. And so, the Rwandan Patriotic Front spread the notion that the Tutsis were oppressors.

In the end, when they came to power, 70 percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda were massacred.

The same claim of “getting our own back,” if not “reverse racism” specifically, is of course always behind the Communist genocides: in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia. Collectively, these are probably the worst the world has ever seen. The bourgeois have, according to Marxist doctrine, been exploiting the workers. And so they ought to all be put to death. Just evening the score.

This is the road down which we travel. This is the ideology Antifa is attempting to enforce by violence in the streets.

Don’t pretend it isn’t.

Nazis at the Gates

Life in the 20-teens? Fifties? Or Thirties?

Psst—wanna read an actual white supremacist tract? A declaration of Fascist doctrine? Want to know what the neo-Nazis are really thinking?

You will be appalled.

Apparently, just such a piece was recently published by the Philadelphia Inquirer, written by two U of Pennsylvania law profs. We are talking Ivy League here; the enemy is at the gates.

A group of their colleagues, thankfully, sprang into action, and quickly published a rebuttal, actually several rebuttals, with a call that they at least be prevented from teaching first-year law courses.

“Professor Wax’s statements amount to an explicit and implicit endorsement of white supremacy,” they write. “Silence in the face of such dangerous ideas is unacceptable.” “Professor Wax’s rants are also a textbook example of how white supremacy and cultural elitism are used to denigrate the poor and sustain and justify the gross wealth inequality that defines American capitalism.” Her views are “morally toxic” and “intellectually bankrupt.”

Odd that, in something so explicit (their word), I cannot see any actual reference to “whites,” let alone to the idea that they are “supreme.”

Yet this, apparently, is as explicit as “white supremacy” ever gets. We have their word on it.

Draw your own conclusions.

Wax and her colleague Larry Alexander are advocating a return to the “bourgeois” values that were dominant in America in the 1940s and 50s.

Yes, they are aware that there were awful things in the fifties too:

“Was everything perfect during the period of bourgeois cultural hegemony? Of course not. There was racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism.”

The authors further disassociate themselves from any racial implications: “They (these values) could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities.”

As of course they could. This was the essential premise on which the American system, the American nationality, and these American values were founded: the melting pot.

Accordingly, we must necessarily conclude that the position of the left now is that one’s culture is genetically determined. And this is an indisputable fact; it is “racist” and “intellectually bankrupt” to question it. You are born with a genetic imprint to speak English, drink tea, or enjoy salsa. This is not something you could, or should ever want, to change.

What could be more profoundly racist than that? You may indeed, then, be judged by the colour of your skin. It supposedly reveals the content of your character.

So what are the genetic traits that the profs who objected to Wax’s editorial—not, please note, Wax—believe are inbred in people by white, Anglo-Saxon genetics?

From her essay—this is what she advocates:

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

It follows that anyone who is not a “white supremacist” must believe that all non-whites are genetically programmed to:

• have children before they get married, 
• avoid education, 
• avoid hard work, 
• prefer idleness, 
• not work hard for an employer or client, 
• have no feeling for their country, 
• be bad neighbours, 
• be selfish, 
• use coarse language in public, 
• disrespect authority, 
• abuse substances and 
• commit crimes.

And how is this not racism in its extreme form?

Among other things, it would mean that people have good reason if they redline neighbourhoods to keep out non-whites, refuse to hire African-Americans, or want to deport all Hispanic immigrants. They would be crazy not to.

Obviously, the Penn NLG claim that Wax’s views are “white supremacist” is a dodge. That is not their problem. They are the white supremacists. If they are serious, their claims are plainly hysterical. They have lost all contact with reality.

Something that seems to be seen on the left increasingly in recent days. As if a bubble is about to pop.

But their claims also presuppose something else—and this is their real problem with Wax’s views.

The problem is that they hate “conventional morality.” Any port in a storm: call it “racist” and hope that will make it go away.

They want for themselves the right, if they so choose, to have children without getting married ,and then divorce if the marriage no longer suits them. They do not want to feel any obligation to put out at their job or for their clients—students, in their case. They do not want to be constrained to not swear in public, to being polite and well-mannered, to avoiding drugs.

It is a neat smokescreen to pretend that their concerns are for others, and supposedly the oppressed, of some other race. It is for their own highly privileged selves.

If you are spoiled badly enough, you will see even the slightest constraint on your own conduct, even the constraints of morality, as Fascism.

And that is where all the Fascists and Nazis are suddenly coming from. Anyone who suggests there might actually be a smidgeon of difference between right and wrong is now a Nazi.

Ironically, because real Fascism was just such a free-for-all in which the constraints of morality were thrown off.

In just this fashion.

These are the racists. These are the white supremacists. These are the Nazis.

They are on the left.

I hope and suspect that the general public will see through their current hysteria, and we will not have to go through again the sort of thing we went through in the 30s. Or at other times in other places: the Cultural Revolution of the 70s in China, and so forth.

Reactions to Charlottesville

Desecration of the corpse of Mussolini

Everybody’s talking about the Charlottesville riots.

Many, even most, claim that Trump was wrong to blame both sides. I think the arguments I have heard for this claim are not tenable.

When Ted Nugent repeated the obvious point that both sides were being violent, and both deserved condemnation, he was interrupted with the question, “Would you have said that had the driver of the car that rammed the crowd been a Muslim terrorist?”

I would. Here’s the comparable scenario: Muslims gather for a rally somewhere—say Charlottesville. Somewhere they are a minority. Perhaps they chant anti-”Infidel” slogans; perhaps not. They carry bats and so forth, no doubt; that is ominous. A group of anti-Muslim protesters quickly gather in the same place, armed and determined to break up that rally. Fighting breaks out.

Some Muslim rams the opposing crowd with a car.

This is very different from a terrorist attack, and I would just as readily say there was blame on both sides, about equally – apart from one specific act of apparent murder, for which one individual is presumably responsible.

Chris Cuomo on CNN asks, “but can’t you see that these statues are deeply upsetting to a group of your fellow citizens”? Paul Krugman asks, “Would we feel okay about statues in Germany celebrating Rommel?”

Answer: there actually are statues of Rommel in Germany, I am told, and nobody has seen a problem. Why not? There are carefully tended grave sites throughout northern France commemorating German war dead from WWII. A man who risks or sacrifices his life deserves respect, regardless of which side he fought for. It is disgusting and cowardly to kick an opponent after he is down, defeated and dead. As Churchill himself said publicly when he heard of the murder of Mussolini; and he used that word, “cowardly.” There is nothing admirable in it.

But then too, even the initial premise is false. It is a false moral equivalence to compare the Confederacy to Nazi Germany. For a number of reasons:

First, Hitler invaded and sought to conquer foreign lands who had not declared war on him: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, the USSR. The Confederacy invaded no one, and sought only to achieve self-government. They were the invaded party.

Second, slavery is not comparable to genocide. Both are moral evils, but the one is vastly more evil than the other. It was entirely possible for good men to believe that slavery was actually of benefit to the enslaved Africans; that they had it better than their compatriots back in Africa, and were learning from the supposed tutelage. Nobody in good conscience could believe that genocide was in the interests of the Jews.

Third, Nazi Germany was relatively unique in its policy of racial genocide. There are other historical examples, but probably none so systematic and obvious as Nazi Germany. By contrast, the Confederacy was one of many states, in its day, that practiced slavery. Slavery was still legal throughout South and Central America, throughout Africa, throughout the Muslim world, and throughout the Far East. It was its abolition in the US North that was the exception. So it is discriminatory to single out the Confederacy for special condemnation here. They were worse than the Northerners; they were better than most others. If we are going to wipe out all traces of the history of the Confederacy for this, we are going to have to wipe out most of the world’s history. This would be a true crime against humanity.

Am I not promoting hate groups here? Weren't these guys white supremacists?

Perhaps. The problem is, we will never know. They have been so characterized by others. But the counter-protesters managed to prevent them from being allowed to speak for themselves. So all we have to go on is the word of their enemies. Given the circumstances, it is only sane and proper to give them the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, even if they were white supremacists or neo-Nazis, they have the same right as anyone to assemble and to speak, and that right was denied them.

Some American blacks are quite upset over the issue. But they are responsible for their own feelings. Nobody else owes something to them for this reason. Fair comparison: I am myself of mostly Irish ancestry. I surely have a similar reason to get upset at any references to Churchill, Peel, Wellington, the Union Jack, the Queen, or the British connection in Canada.

Do I? Good lord, no. Doesn’t it obviously seem absurd?

To do so would be, in the first place, grotesquely self-centred and self-important. In the second, it would be racist—it would be the sort of “blood guilt” that long justified pogroms against the Jews. It would be ignoring the many good deeds of the British—such as ending the worldwide slave trade, or opening up Canada and Australia to Irish settlement.

And it would above all be utterly childish. To react in such a way is to say as much as that you cannot handle adult life and adult responsibility. You need to be taken care of—by someone, anyone.

Great message to be promoting, guys. Be careful what you wish.

Ignorance is Strength

On the face of it, the official objections to the actions of the Halifax “Proud Boys” on Canada Day-- appearing to peacefully watch an anti-Canadian protest in a Canadian public park and ask questions—are insane. But then, so are the objections one hears to Donald Trump’s recent speech in Warsaw. How can it even be controversial to express support for either Canada or Western civilization?

Yet this is now called “racism.” You are now a “white supremacist” if you believe in and promote either Canada or Western civilization. The fact that you also believe in racial equality, as both Canada and Western civilization do at their core, simply does not matter. Believing in racial equality is now racist.

A recent Atlantic article lays it out. According to the left, your culture is determined by your skin colour and your genetics.

They then attribute this belief to the right, but this is completely illegitimate. It is a core assertion of the left. And it is racism, classically defined.

Consider what this means. One is “racist,” then, for asserting that Michelangelo is the greatest fresco painter ever. You are racist, because Michelangelo was “white”―and worse, male. (But there is no problem with praising Toni Morrison, or Susan Aglukark.)

Surely you have to admit he was fairly good.

In other words, we have just reversed the polarities. Now not being racist is racist, and being racist is not being racist. Freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength.

The Atlantic also objects because “Western civilization” is a religion-based concept. So it discriminates against Muslims, I suppose.

Here, they have more of a case. Race is no part of culture; America demonstrates that; but religion is at any culture’s core. You bet that Western civilization is based on Christianity and Judaism. Not just Christianity, mind you—I think any objective evaluation would have to say that Jews and Judaism have had an influence far greater than their actual numbers. And the pagan Greek philosophers are also an essential foundation. But yes, it is absolutely true that Judaism and Christianity have shaped our civilization, and given us its core values: separation of church and state, human equality, the brotherhood of man, democracy, science, the common law, freedom of speech, the equality of the sexes, and so on.

This is exactly why mass non-Christian and non-Jewish immigration are a concern. Do we value such matters? Are they not our core values? Do we not realize that they are based on Judeo-Christian presuppositions? Do we not realize that people coming from other cultures do not spontaneously agree? That, indeed, while these core values are the core values of Christianity and Judaism, some other religious traditions may actually directly oppose them? And what do we do then? In the name of human equality, we reject human equality? In the name of freedom of speech, we oppose freedom of speech?

Apparently many of us do not understand this. The Atlantic does not understand this. This is why legislation like the recent M-103 in the Canadian Parliament is so dangerous: in calling for a prohibition on “Islamophobia,” it, like the Atlantic, understands no distinction between objecting to elements of Islam and objecting to Muslims.

Rep. Steve King and White Supremacy

Golly. I am beginning to suspect I might be a white supremacist.

It comes as a bit of a shock to me. After all, I have spent my life in non-Western cultures, and studying them has been my great interest. I have been married twice, first to a Pakistani woman, now to a Filipina, and my two children are half-Filipino. Politically, I have always been a liberal, condisering it self-evident that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain rights. In religion, as a Catholic, I believe that all men are brothers, of equal worth in the eyes of God.

But no—somehow the word “white supremacist” has changed definition. It apparently no longer requires believing, as I do not, that there is any such thing as a “white race.” And it no longer requires believing that people with pale skin should be given some special rights—i.e., supremacy.

I suppose this should not surprise me. I had, in earlier days, supposed that being a liberal put me on the left of the political spectrum. But that ground got shifted decades ago.

I am jolted into this realization by the current controversy over US representative Steve King.

The Washington Post writes:

King told CNN that he is merely “a champion for Western civilization,” which he called “a superior civilization.” Which means, of course, that he considers other civilizations inferior. But we knew that.

… We should pay attention to his lexicon, however, because today’s white supremacism tends to shy away from overtly racial terminology. Listen instead for words such as “culture” and “civilization.”

The idea is that the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave because its “civilization” is “European” or “Western” — euphemisms, basically, for “white.”

I face an obvious problem here. It is conceivable, I suppose, that some people use “European civilization” as a euphemism for “white race.” Maybe King is doing this, although I think we owe it to people generally to take their words at face value, and not put new words in their mouth.

But what about people like me who are simply using “European civilization” to mean “European civilization,” and are making the point that it is the most advanced civilization in the world?

For we would naturally say exactly the same thing. How does the Washington Post, or anyone, tell the difference?

It seems the answer is that racism no longer requires believing in race. It is this very opinion, that Western civilization is superior, that is intolerable. The WaPo apparently has a problem with the mere statement that “other civilizations are inferior.” “But we knew that.”

To be fair, King also said something more controversial. He tweeted, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

If American culture is not race-based, and it obviously is not, then yes, of course, they can. But King has explained that this is not what he meant: he was referring not to the children’s genetic makeup, but to the values instilled by their parents. Which seems a perfectly fair point. If race does not matter, in a country like the US or Canada, values matter that much more.

It ought also to be pointed out that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a country being race-based. Some countries are: Japan, Korea, other Asian countries. If we really suddenly have a problem with this, we are going to have to re-think a lot of things. Is Japan Japanese-supremacist because they do not take in immigrants? Are they morally obliged to do so? Are the Falklands morally obliged to take in Argentine immigrants?

Rep. John Lewis tweeted,

“Rep. King’s statement is bigoted and racist. It suggests there is one cultural tradition and one appearance that all of humanity should conform to. These ideas have given rise to some of the worst atrocities in human history, and they must be condemned.”

Actually, King did not say this. He was speaking of America, not the world. He was saying there is one cultural tradition all Americans should adhere to. Nigerians are presumably free to conform to theirs, and Koreans to theirs. But now simply claiming that there is a distinct American culture, and it is worth preserving, is “bigoted and racist.” Why would this be so? What about claiming there is a distinct Korean culture, or a distinct Jamaican one?

But I would go father than King here. I actually think there is indeed one cultural tradition all of humanity should conform to. You could call it the emerging world culture. I have been in Korea, the Philippines, China, and the Middle East for most of the past twenty-five years. And I tell you, it is artificial any longer to speak of different cultures. Everybody now listens to the same music, eats the same fast food, plays the same games on the Internet.

And I believe this is a good thing. As I have said before in this space, there is no such thing as “Western civilization.” There is only civilization and lack of it. The great task of human existence is to take the best wherever we find it, and build human civilization.

As it happens, that is more or less what America already is.

Anyone who is against that, and who insists instead on preserving their little cultural ghetto, is doing the devil’s work.

King is not doing that. King wants more melting pot. Lewis and the Washington Post and cultural relativism are doing that.

The Quebec Mosque Shooting

There’s been a lot of controversy and doubt about the mosque shooting in Quebec. Because the early reporting was botched. Or not really botched—it is par for the course that first reports are often wrong. But the atmosphere is overheated right now.

The right suspects, or wants to believe, Islamism and immigration was involved, and that the authorities are whitewashing it out. What about the early eyewitness reports that there were several gunmen, shouting “Allahu Akhbar”? Why have we not seen the closed circuit coverage?

The left, on the other hand, are pushing hard the idea that it was the work of a “far-right” “white supremacist” “Christian” killer. They are accusing Fox News, in turn, of false news for reporting one of the suspects was a Moroccan immigrant named Mohammed.

Here’s what I think really happened. I’m guessing, sure, but fog of war is a better explanation to me than conspiracy. There was just one shooter. The idea there was two may have been because he left and returned with a new gun. He might have yelled “Allahu Akhbar.” Everyone knows the phrase: he could have meant it sarcastically.

But Bissonnette was not a white supremacist or far right or a militant Christian. It was not about Donald Trump.

It was a Quebec thing. Bissonnette may have “liked” Trump on Facebook, lots of people do. He also “liked” John McCain, Jack Layton, the NDP, and the PQ. That just about covers the spectrum, politically. Quebec society is xenophobic, and has been xenophobic for centuries. That’s how they have survived as a Francophone society: by shutting all the windows. The Francophone majority see themselves as an oppressed group with historical grievances--”les negres blancs”--and so entitled to resent outsiders.

Nothing right wing about this. This nationalism has been, more often, associated with left-wing politics there. They are hostile to immigrants. Immigrants are not “pure laine.” They refuse to vote for separatism, want to teach their kids English. Big flare up only a couple of years ago with the PQ’s “Quebec Charter of Values.”

It all shows where such sentiments might lead. It might be a cautionary tale against “whites” or “Christians” as a group taking the same attitude. But it is not an example of it.

In the end, it still seems as though “whites” or “Christians” are still the one group not acting out in this way. To their great credit.