Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Neo-Nazi Racist Phantasma

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a part of the continent." There are no autarkies, not even the Communist nightmare idiocy of North Korea. Nothing is alone anymore and without influence and without connection to other X. There is no racial purity, no such possibility, and no sane person thinks there should be. To think otherwise is by definition insane. To think we can "purify" nations of ethnic outsiders is silly and pointless to discuss. Those who take racialist conspiracy theorizing seriously are not our friends and not worth complaining about any more than would be the shouting, filthy guy on the street corner. But it does come up.

There is a concern regarding the native European anti-jihadist movement. Is it composed of neo-Nazis? Is it filled chock-a-block with racists? I find this discussion to be bizarre. Neo-Nazis? That's so far removed from normal living that only the most uninformed or deluded could consider it. But "racists"? Ah, that we can go on about at some length.

":Racism." Boaz, Benedict, Mead, et al have made our conversation nearly taboo. Why, and who really knows these people in the first place? Why bring up names like that? Because without knowing them, who they were, what they thought and wrote, how they came up with our modern understanding of racism and cultural relativism we will forever find ourselves speaking without knowing, taking without understanding. White Guilt didn't begin with the aftermath of the Nazis. It began with the anthropologists of the post war era, post 1918. It began among a small and dedicated group of intellectuals who decided to correct the wrongs of colonialism and social Darwinism by promoting philobarbarism and cultural relativism. "Racism" as we know it, didn't begin with de Gobineau, as it should have; it began with the anthropologists who came out of the anti-slavery movement, women who worked with religious reformers to ensure an end of slavery in America. It came from those same women finding that after the end of slavery, women had fewer rights than Negroes. It came from intelligent, educated, and organized women barred from the traditional professions who found themselves in positions of authority and influence only in the field of baby-sitting on a grand scale, i.e. as social workers. Benedict and Mead were such women, from such milieu. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has," as Margaret Mead wrote. It is sinister, it is in that sense "left." This small gang of Gnostic minders changed the course of our intellectual history far more radically than did the architects of the Holocaust. They are the ones who hijacked the idea of "racism" and turned it into what is used today as a catch-all pejorative to quell dissent, to deny freedom to the masses, to entrench themselves ever further in the ground of povertarianism. There is no "racism" in the sense our screaming Left uses the term. "Ethnic cleansing" so-called in Jugoslavia was no such thing. There are no ethnic "Bosnians." There are no specific Serbs different from Croats. Rubbish. There is no racism involved. No ethnic profiling. Rubbish! Rubbish! They are only different in religions and sects therein. It's the anthropologist echo we find claiming "racism." This canard of racism doesn't fly. It's a manufactured tool of social engineering created by a small group of intellectuals in the 1920s. Racism? This is not de Gobineau. This is aggressive American Gnostic sentimentality browbeating the working class for quiescence and the financial elite for money. When we speak today of "racism" we do not speak of the same thing as the anti-Semitism of the Germans and Europeans generally. "Racism" in the West is meant as anthropology and philobarbarism. The crazies don't think of anti-Semitism as racism because it isn't: it's anti-Semitism. Racism? That's a different story altogether.

Slavery predates Social Darwinism by the entire length of Human history. But when we talk about "racism" today we mean, whether we understand it or not, the theories of the social Darwinists. Ganging up on and enslaving others who are weaker is no news anywhere. The idea that it is OK and right to do so due to "the survival of the fittest" is what we react to today and call racism. That ship hit the sand long ago. It no longer floats. Pretending that anti-Semitism and the "racism" of social Darwinism is the same thing the anthropologist reacted to is to conflate the obviously different for no legitimate reason. Viciousness is ordinary. The only remarkable thing about the Nazis was the efficiency of their genocidal acts. The so-called racism of the colonialist Europeans is not of scale or kind the same. The casual contempt one finds in colonialist memoirs is a natural xenophobia of any sane person who wishes to survive. Anyone who wasn't xenophobic until one hundred years ago in major cities in western Europe must have been insane. Outsiders meant threat, disease, murder, invasion, or the tax-collector. Xenophobia, even today, is smart. So is our moderation in our Modernity, our blessing that we do not have to run to and kill a stranger on sight before he comes to do us harm. But xenophobia is still an integral part of the Human experience, even for those who spend their lives traveling the world solo. One must depend on ones own-- even in the Modern cosmopolitan megalopolis. Even in a hotel in Africa. Even in a parking lot at the supermarket in Kansas. To sentimentalize the "Other" is nothing more than a meal ticket, or more accurately, a meal thesis. Confusing what is natural and right in Human behavior, xenophobia, with the maniac genocide of the Germans against the Jews is not convincing. The Nazis didn't act from xenophobia, nor did they act from a feeling of missionary Modernist evangelism. Boaz and Mead, et al, reacted to the latter, not to the former, when they began their campaigns against "racism." Bringing the light of Modernity to the ignorant masses is not the same as exterminating everyone. It ain't the same. Contempt for other cultures and the people of those cultures is not Nazi-ism. Only an idiot would think so, and only a foolish idiot would say so. Slavery is normal; extermination of ones enemies is normal; fearing those whom one does not know is normal; but in our blessed Modernity those things, those acts, those attitudes are not normal, not permissible, are outright bad. But they are not the same as being a Nazi. Being a xenophobic Swede or Swiss or Dane or Darfuran is not the same as being a neo-Nazi. Slavery of the weak and primitive is the nature of things in a primitive and more visceral world than ours today. Doing good for the benefit of those less fortunate than ourselves, those who are primitive and uncivilized, that's the mind of the Gnostic Left at work, the mind of the Gnostic Right at work, the mind of the minder at work. Those things, if unlikable to us in our Modern time, are still understandable and within the scope of our experience. These are things we can control as mature and civilized affluent beings in a state of economic and social benefit. We can afford to be generous with others, and if we aren't, so much the worse for us. If we don't "do enough" to satisfy the missionaries among us, that is not racism, not evil, not worth discussing. That doesn't make us Nazis. Rampaging across the world murdering Jews is not the nature of things, it is a madness of primitives gone amok. A medical definition of the term might clarify: Amok: A syndrome first reported in the Malay people, usually male, consisting of a period of brooding followed by a sudden outburst of indiscriminate murderous frenzy, sometimes provoked by an insult, jealousy or sense of desperation. The person who runs amok may also die in a form of murder-suicide. Confusing or conflating Nazi genocidal madness with ordinary Human behavior, however repugnant to our Modern sensitivities, is not productive. Bashing others for assumed or supposed "racism" without defining or understanding the term is a failure on our part.

Most groups are uniform, and there's no good point in denying such an obvious reality. Skateboard kids do not hang out with investment bankers. Muslims do not hang out with Baptists. Koreans do not hang out with Japanese. Why? Because they are not the same kind of people. And if millions of skateboard kids invaded our city... wait a minute. If millions of Muslims invaded a small and mono-ethnic nation of centuries of in-breeding, what would be the mistake in thinking the natives won't like it if the invaders are ill behaved? Invaders? Yes, of course. To go into in a harmful and intrusive way. Mom in your bedroom is an intruder. She has invaded your space. Go figure.

To sentimentalize is always dishonest. To force ourselves to pretend we are enthused about strangers is a hopeless exercise in deception. Unless one hopes to have sex with a stranger that stranger is a threat until proven otherwise. And even with the promise of sex it's not always a good hope that two strangers will get along for more than a day. To change quickly and fundamentally is harmful and suspect. To allow millions of strangers into ones homeland is outrageous. To o pretend we like it when strangers some to our places and do odd things is to lie to ourselves and to offend the decency of others who do not so lie. To adulate is to cultivate contempt for oneself in place of the feeling of self-righteousness one expects. To fawn over strangers is to make them hate you. The phoniness is degrading and despicable. If the stranger is not acculturated to city living amongst a variety of strangers as we in our Modernity are, he is likely to want to cut the throats of such pointlessly groveling sycophants. To pretend to like "multi-culturalism" is to lie in the face of others and to oneself. To dislike the different is normal. To wish to improve those one finds less than oneself is normal. To dissociate oneself from strangers who don't get ones jokes is normal. It's not "racism." It's not Nazi-ism. To kill people over inconsequential differences of origins is to be mad. Those who don't get my jokes? Don't get me started.

European "racists"? Who can blame them? And who among us really doesn't get the 'Palestinians' and the rest who hate the Jews in the Middle East? Yes, the Israelis are unobtrusive and confined to an ever shrinking area. Yes, one might understand a few years of antagonism as one group moves in and rubs against the older. Italians and Irish faced it in Manhattan, and they eventually became Americans like any other Americans. But it's only New World nations that can have such multi-ethnic groups becoming one. Jews will never become Arabs, and no one should expect it to be so. Nor should one expect Arabs to obsess for generations like rabid dogs over a group of outsiders living in Jerusalem. No one should expect 300 million Arabs to go berserk over a few Jews, insane to the point of killing their own children over self-created Nazi-esque disproportion. Would a group of investment bankers be expected to murder a skateboard kid in a meeting on the street in a suburb? Even if the damn kid lived there it's not likely. But why should they like him? If the suburb is overrun, then one group must prevail and set its perimeter and defend it against intrusion. That's living la vida loca, folks, and it's real in spite of the sentimental trash one is expected to parrot in pubic, smiling as one does so.

We can't escape strangers in our world. We have to accommodate them. They too have to accommodate us. We don't have to like every one. We do have to get along. And when we can't we have to separate civilly. How do we decide who to separate and who from? What criterion is decisive? "Race"? Language? In-house customs? Religion? "I was here first"?

This particular sentimental episode in history is over. People won't continue buying it. The rule of society by nineteenth century spinster nannies is just about over. Hurling epithets like "racist" is going to earn one a sharp sharp slap. Racist? Get over it. Nazi? That's from outer space. However, reason and sense might not prevail after all. There might be a surge of Reaction among delusional Leftists that could rival the French aristocrats of the Napoleonic era and beyond. In fact, those are the very enemies we've always faced, though they don't recognize themselves as such. The question is "What is to be done?" Are we going to kill a whole lot of people like the Jugoslavs did? If we do we won't find ourselves at rest in our own homelands; we'll find ourselves at war with the primitives of the world, a bifurcated world of those who are Modern and those who are primitive. And that is insoluble. It's not about race. It's about how do we survive our differences without killing the other side in toto. What is to be done?

4 comments:

truepeers said...

Boaz and company slapped us British COlumbians on the wrists for not being good cultural relativists, for not recognizing, e.g., that the natives of British Columbia would become a lost people if the Whites didn't permit them to carry on with the potlatch. Of course, banning the potlatch did greatly disrupt those societies, but it was also true that a society based on potlatch was fundamentally incompatible with any hope of full membership in a free- market oriented society. Once market society was rooted in BC, something had to break somewhere if there was to be any hope of natives being anything other than wards of the state, a lesson I fear we still haven't learned.

But anyway, I'd point out that in the 1920s and 30s in Vancouver, white men could and did dress up in "Indian" outfits and have street "potlatch" festivals to raise money for youth groups, or such. Boaz maybe wanted them to feel guilty, but by and large they didn't.

Where does White Guilt start? Well, your attempt to draw a lineage to interwar intellectuals raises the question of the role of intellectuals vs. events. Sure White Guilt has various intellectual lineages. I mean, today's left is in many respects an inversion of Nietzsche and he was a major influence on the Nazis, so why not give him the credit...?

It's post-WWII that it becomes politically impossible for Whites to hold "potlatches" on the streets of Vancouver, because whatever the role of ideas, there first has to be a transformative *event* to bring in a new cultural paradigm. And, as you suggest, it was the uniqueness of the Holocaust - the industrialization of genocide and the fact that the victims were White, long-settled and contributing much in the heart of European civilization, and yet reduced to mere naked, starved bodies piled and burned on mass so as to deny them of any more substantial identification or story (it is not so much the age-old killing of the Other, as the attempt to remove the Other from reality, from consciousness, that makes this event so remarkable) - that had the makings of an event that could change consciousness on the streets of Vancouver. All of a sudden ordinary xenophobia and/or racism got assimilated to something truly shocking. The left often resent this. The Nazis, they remind us, modelled their genocide on those earlier ones in Namibia and Armenia. THere is nothing special about the killing of the Jews. We should not privilege this memory but give victim status to all the Others who really need it, unlike the Jews who are now the oppressors, yada yada yada. But, the point is, those earlier genocides did not have an immediate transforming effect at the cultural centres of the world-leading societies. The anti-colonial and American civil rights movements would have surely gotten going earlier, in a mainstream way, if they had. It is one of the ironies of White Guilt that it stems from an event within the White heartland. White Guilt remains a fundamentally occidentocentric movement - however much it is destructive to the West - even though it is now practised worldwide by the "colonized" minds of the world.

Anyway, I would say that the use of the concept "neo-Nazi" is legitimate where you can show that the "racists" have the similar Utopian desire not simply to contest one or another Other over resources, power, etc, but to dream of building a society and world in which there will be no Other and no need for resentment, as if that could ever be achieved. Pure fantasy. In this sense, some of the multiculti left are closer to the Nazis than they would like to think. But so too are some of those on the "right" (read left) who dream of Nazi efficiency as some kind of society-purifying, and market-transcendins solution, oblivious to the fact that even if you do kill all the "Jews", "Americans", whomever, that won't do anything to solve the anxieties and resentments that living in a modern, global, economy create. All forms of socialist "solutions" to the problem of market society that are cut with systematic racism might earn the phrase neo-Nazi, in my opinion.

The present Jihadists are, by and large, not quite in the same category because, officially, they don't so much want to transcend modern capitalism in some yet more "modern" socialism. They want to destroy the present world so as to permit a revival of the medieval Sharia order. But to the extent that there are Muslims who want it both ways: a renewed Caliphate and the fruits of modern society - another fantasy - we might call them neo-Nazi, don't you think?

truepeers said...

Did I say how much i like this post? Reflecting a little more on it, it seems you're obvioulsy right about from whence the struggle over "racism" comes. My point about the Holocaust was simply that there needed to be a memorable and shocking scene to combine with a certain intellectual critique in a new kind of world view, White Guilt. It reminds me, Dag, that you often like to criticize those who say "just wait for the next big terrorist attack", then our culture will change and know its enemy. You rightly see that as a kind of desire for evil. Yet the desire is keyed in on a truth about the necessity of events to human scenic consciousness. Our task is to take a lead in shaping events that can help transfrom our society's mainstream worldview, to obviate the need for these events to be somehow apocalyptic. That's why I like this post. It's putting a truly post-White Guilt spin on events in Europe, even if, in recognizing the need to engage adn not shun European nationalists in forging useful events, it is something of a leap of faith in regard to those who have marched, holding rats, calling to rid their towns of the vermin French. This post should help those who see a Nazi in every closet see that they are themselves not so far from the Nazis in their desire to clean the closets of the fearsome other within.

Dag said...

We in the Modern West aren't going to lose this struggle, and I think that's never been the real issue; the problem we face is how we win. That absorbs my concerns. And thus, this issue is one of the seminal debates in our coming orthodoxy. This doctrinal dispute will make or break us, and we can't rush in and make absurd truistic claims without knowing where we come from and where we go. We have to work this one out properly. It's an issue that requires the finest minds we have, not the emotionalists we seem to be giving this issue to for resolution so far.

I look forward to more input, mine not being one of the finest minds we have. I'm one of those emotionalists I mistrust. I leave it to others for now, though I'm never short of opinions.

Pastorius said...

I like much of what is in your post as well. I agree with about 75-80% of it. Hopefully, you will post it on IBA.

One thing I want to point out. You say, " Xenophobia, even today, is smart."

Sorry, I don't think so. Xenophobia is an instinctual reaction. Therefore, it is the opposite of smart.

Making distinctions about one's culture (which is different from race) is smart. Making disctinction about the cultures of various non-indigenous citizes is smart. Understanding that they will behave in a certain generalized manner, and understanding where that behavior comes from is smart. Expecting odd behaviors from different cultures is smart. Making distinction between good, or decent odd behaviors and bad or dangerous odd behaviors is smart. Trying to elimate the bad and the dangerous from ones society, or culture is smart. If that means that one MUST eliminate a certain "other" culture from ones land that is smart (understand that by the word, "Must" I mean that there is no possibility of a reasonable agreement with the "other" culture.

Thing is, I think you will agree with the distinctions I am making here. I don't think you and I are that far apart on this issue, Dag.

The other thing that I found to be a bit inaccurate (as you were, presumably, trying to characterize the opinions of people at IBA) is the insistence that we are calling everyone who disagrees with us on this issue by the name of "neo-Nazi."

ONe or two of us may have slipped and used sloppy language on occastion, but clearly there is a difference between xenophobia and Nazism.

However, when xenophobia is enshrined as the ideology of a political party, and when xenophobia threatens to be made into policy, then we run up against the possibility of another Nazi-like party.

Do you understand what I mean, or do I need to explain more fully?

I would hope you would feel free to put this up at IBA.