White Guilt and the Western Past
Sir Frederick
White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear
option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam
and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if
admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including,
very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So
clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an
insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged
policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Why this new minimalism in war?
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the
world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had
organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority
of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and
from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself.
And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi
defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is
now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and
imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that
invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when
America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action
from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the
past--two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization
with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations
and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war.
In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying
and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would
scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be
seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.
Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of
going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown
nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social
work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and
women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty--war as the Great
Society.
This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't
ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to
defeat a dangerous enemy.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were
created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must "understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight
him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt
compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated
from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all
the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western
sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need
only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America.
(People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to
be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by
mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage
at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even
to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always
oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in
Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense
against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once
so disregarded.
Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting
immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White
guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing,
almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most
brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all
these things. Just can't do it.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our
worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a
problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are
running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who
ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet
stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the
fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden
to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this
idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who
only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral
authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
Immortalist
This article might have made sense 10 to 20 years ago at the height of
political correctness and issue censorship, but now it is meaningless
with all the noise sounding off about anything in any way. Hard to find
this racial guilt anywhere at the moment except residing in that part
of older generation that ain't been changn' with the times.
Sir Frederick
>
>This article might have made sense 10 to 20 years ago at the height of
>political correctness and issue censorship, but now it is meaningless
>with all the noise sounding off about anything in any way. Hard to find
>this racial guilt anywhere at the moment except residing in that part
>of older generation that ain't been changn' with the times.
>
By "changin'" I am sure you mean "deteriorating".
Thus the present generations are simple atavistic assholes
with no character. Thus in place of "racial guilt" stifling
national will there is simply shallowness. You may be
correct. This article may then be someone trying to
find meaning, in a meaningless situation.
I was impressed by it as Rush Limbaugh read most of it
on the radio today.
sacs...@rsvl.net
Was his speech slurred?
Sir Frederick
To the deteriorated hearing of the present generation, yes.
sacs...@rsvl.net
That is not what I asked. Do you have a mental disability?
kevirwin
Kev
Topaz
The West is the White race.
The goal of America is to destroy the White race. The
multi-culture and pluralism they push is only at the expense of
Whites. No one is trying to push multi-culture in China or Japan or
anyplace but on the Whites. And they promote racial intermarriage.
If things continue as the are the White race is doomed.
And who is doing all of this? It is the USA government and the
media, in other words the Jews.
Many Whites are traitors. They support the USA government and their
own destruction. We should look for allies. And anyone who wants to
remove the Jews from power is our ally. In the past the Japanese were
our allies. Today it is the Muslims.
Osama bin Laden
September 24th statement published in Pakistan
"I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We
are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United
States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic
freedom. This system is totally in control of the American Jews, whose
first priority is Israel, not the United States. It is simply that the
American people are themselves the slaves of the Jews and are forced
to live according to the principles and laws laid by them. So, the
punishment should reach Israel. In fact, it
is Israel, which is giving a blood bath to innocent Muslims and the
U.S. is not uttering a single word."
http://www.nationalvanguard.org http://www.natvan.com
http://www.thebirdman.org http://www.RealNews247.com
--
NewsGuy.Com 30Gb $9.95 Carry Forward and On Demand Bandwidth
sacs...@rsvl.net
kevirwin wrote:
> Interesting perspective; thanks for posting it.
>
> Kev
I had no idea that there were white supremacists in this group although
I should have known about Fred. Such insecurity is pitiful.
kevirwin
"I had no idea that there were white supremacists in this group
although I should have known about Fred. Such insecurity is pitiful."
Are you fucking retarded???? I said "interesting perspective". The
white racist is one post above mine, asshole, so not knowing "topaz" is
racist {inferred from your quote, douche bag}, DOES make you retarded,
since he's been posting shit for awhile now.
I have said ALL ALONG, I'm here for different views. Where the hell
did you interpret "endorsement" from MY post, you fucking moron!!! Do I
have to give a remedial reading comprehension class in this forum, or
is EVERY assumption people make when the understanding isn't clear
assumed to be a negative interpretation, no matter how big the
stretch....
Maybe I should give you the benefit of the doubt.......nah FUCK YOU
putting on my "internet superman hat" again,
Kev
sacs...@rsvl.net
Are you unaware of who you respond to? I did not interpret your post as
an endorsement (well, I did wonder but didn't assume it). Isn't it
clear you are reacting emotionally along the lines you accuse me of? I
agree with an interest in different views but will not tolerate racism
(or any other irrationality for that matter but racism is at the top of
the list). However, I did ignore "topaz" (as a waste of time), I was
just surprised by "Sir Fred".
kevirwin
<quote>
Are you unaware of who you respond to? I did not interpret your post as
<end quote>
To answer your first question above, I responded to you. I responded to
the posted reply directly after mine, which came from you and said:
<quote from previous post by sacscale>
"kevirwin wrote:
> Interesting perspective; thanks for posting it.
> Kev
I had no idea that there were white supremacists in this group although
I should have known about Fred. Such insecurity is pitiful."
<end quote from previous post by sacscale>
Are you saying you weren't labeling me a racist? I find racists to be
among the stupidest people around, it makes NO logical sense at all;
we're individuals. I did find the rationalization process of the
original post to be very intriguing. Hence, my comment. When you read
your reply, can you see why I would assume you put that label on me?
You could ask Brian; I've said about 500 times, I'm here to
understand and learn other people's perspectives, which does NOT
include endorsement of everything (or even ANYTHING) that I read. I
have an "inquiring mind".
And in way of apology, I can say that I react vehemently to anyone that
feels they have a right to put any "label" on me; and if I was wrong in
interpretation or overzealous in response, for that: I apologize.
Kev
sacs...@rsvl.net
Por nada, it was an understandable misunderstanding. But how can your
response be to the post directly after yours? I dislike labels and I do
not label you as a racist. But I would label a person who supported or
agreed with white supremacy as a white supremacist and racist. However,
from what I have read of your posts I have found no disagreement and I
promise to let you know if I ever do. By the way, I didn't respond to
the content of the original post since it was obvious the original
poster was not the author, it seems to be the favored tactic of "Sir
Fred" and "Immortalist" to assume any praise and defer any criticism.