I wish to dedicate this post to the grumpiest vegetable I know! Very very grumpy!
Theme Song
Wizard wrote: There's a phenomenon lately in the US of liberals accusing Black or Hispanic people of being "white nationalists" for supporting Conservative policies. It's pretty funny. To me, it proves the hypocrisy. Only far-left liberals can be 'racist', but nobody else is allowed to, and especially not their political rivals. When I remark on this, Sculptor flips out, fearing that his stranglehold on social justice is waning. It's humorous, I laugh. And as you recently pointed-out, different races have different blocs of crime associated with them. Stating the facts does not make somebody "a racist", despite flash and sculptor's hyperventilations.
As with most of the strange exchange going on in this thread, what is observed here only glancingly gets to the real point of what is going on in the US. If I name it I think it will make everything that follows far more clear. The cause of a great deal of civil strife, and certainly all that we witness that involves *race*, has come to the fore because of a dramatic demographic shift in the racial composition of the US.
If one wishes to understand the so-called Far Right's views and arguments about this, and to understand the Left-Progressive opposition, one has to read the Far Right's arguments. One can refer to Wilmot Robertson and
The Dispossessed Majority (1973) and, for example, this quote:
Is it not incredible that the largest American population group, the group with the deepest roots, the most orderly and most technically proficient group, the nuclear population group of American culture and of the American gene pool, should have lost its preeminence to weaker, less established, less numerous, culturally heterogeneous, and often mutually hostile minorities?
With all due allowance for minority dynamism ... this miraculous shift of power could never have taken place without a Majority "split in the ranks" - without the active assistance and participation of Majority members themselves. It has already been pointed out that race consciousness is one of mankind's greatest binding forces. From this it follows that when the racial gravitational pull slackens people tend to spin off from the group nucleus. Some drift aimlessly through life as human isolates. Others look for a substitute nucleus in an intensified religious or political life, or in an expanded class consciousness. Still others, out of idealism, romanticism, inertia, or perversity, attach themselves to another race in an attempt to find the solidarity they miss in their own.
In all the Far-Right or Fringe Right material that I have read -- and there is a great deal of it -- the
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is referred to disapprovingly.
One of the main components of the act was aimed to abolish the national-origins quota. This meant that it eliminated national origin, race, and ancestry as a basis for immigration, making discriminating against obtaining visas illegal. It created a seven-category preference system.
The 1965 Act was a major shift from a former policy: the
Immigration Act of 1924:
The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act (Pub. L. 68–139, 43 Stat. 153, enacted May 26, 1924), was a federal law designed to uphold white supremacy and the dominance of Protestantism in the United States. It prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. It also authorized the creation of the country's first formal border control service, the U.S. Border Patrol, and established a "consular control system" that allowed entry only to those who first obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad.
The term 'white supremacy' in that paragraph (Wiki is always slanted toward Left-Progressive rhetorical terms) means the demographic dominance of people of European descent. Note that prior to 1965, when it began to shift, those of European stock comprised about 90% of the US demographic. Now I think it is somewhere around 63%.
Now, both the American Progressive Left and the American Right (including Far Right or Dissident Right) is acutely aware that demographic shift is occurring, and indeed one can watch
this video of Vice-President Biden as he explains, in thoroughly clear terms, just what has been engineered to happen (through policy shift) and that it is a good thing, a necessary thing, that must be encouraged.
What does this mean? In the context of a formerly chauvinistic America that could define itself in racial or cultural terms ("We are a country of predominantly European immigrants") what it means is that the very definition of what America is, is being reengineered. That is to say that if you choose to be on the right side of the moral question, today you must say that "American is a propositional nation" and not a nation composed of a specific people, of a specific background, and certainly of a specific race or a general race-grouping such as European (which is in reality extremely diverse even in its 'whiteness').
Therefore, today, and going on every day and directly in front of all of us, is the playing-out of the civil, cultural and demographic struggles related to this unprecedented demographic shift. If you refuse to see that this issue is predominant, or if you are ideologically incapable of recognizing what is actually going on, then it seems to me that you have your head in the sand.
Race-politics, therefore, very certainly comes to the fore among Left-Progressives. Beyond any doubt it is a central issue for them. But it -- the racial and cultural composition issue, and the remaking of the definition of what America is (and isn't) -- is an extremely potent tool for them to fight against their enemies. Just examine the issue closely:
Who could, and how would they, describe and defend a social policy of a) strengthening the white demographic of America through a limitation on immigration, and b) how could they gain or be given an legitimizing platform within the media and communication structure of America today?
Now there is a very curious thing: one of the strangest political flip-flops that could ever have been conceived: the Republican Party is now incorporating into itself a great deal of the ideological positions of the former Left-Progressives such as being anti-war, anti-state police (federal police), anti-corporate in the sense of complaining about the Military/Industrial Complex. And it is also redefining itself as uncommitted to those former race-conscious (or race-concerned) attitudes that formerly defined the Republican mind-set.
This is where Wizard's really strange *position* becomes almost absurd: he obviously has a 'racialist' position (which is not the same as being *racist* though for the Progressive Left it most certainly is) but he cannot and he will not come out and state his position directly and honestly. Instead, he pretends that the American Left and Progressive faction are
really the racists.
My view is that this is in essence a false-narrative. What the Conservative/Republican faction seems to say is "Don't play so hard". That is, do not use the language of *systemic racism* and do not rile people up with charged rhetoric about inequality, racial prejudice, and reminders of the history of the American definition of itself as white and European (of the sort that Teddy Roosevelt et al would have held and believed in with all his being). Formerrly, these were attitudes that Wizard's parents or grandparents would have held without any self-doubt and without a moral twinge of guilt. They were allowed self-identity, they were allowed to identify with themselves culturally and also racially. That is, when to speak of one's *race* was not a
thoughtcrime.
But today it is definitely a
thoughtcrime and most especially if you are White and European. You are no longer allowed to have that *identity* and *identification*. In any case it is extremely suspect.
Note that Sculptor has made the position very clear indeed: if you identify your race as *important*; if you have a race-identity (which is always bound up with cultural and civilizational categories) that is *racism*. Really, when you examine it without prejudice it is pretty easy to see that the anti-racialist position is extremely ideologically-determined. But to dissect that ideology and lay it out so it can be seen and understood (even if one is in pro of the erasure of all race-distinction) has been made thoughtcrime and illegal. Not only might you be 'banned' for life but there are any number of other consequences. This is not theoretical it is actual.
Therefore the interesting thing -- if one is capable of gaining a position outside of the dangerous immediacy of the issue -- is to examine the
function of extreme ideological tools and all that is connoted by the Orwellian term
thoughtcrime. There are
determined ways to think and perceive and if you do not toe those lines you are placed in the category of the Hitlerian immoral. It is really that simple.
For this reason even those who are mildly self-identifying in the former senses (Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan come to mind) are vilified as being of the Far Right and are excluded from *civil discourse*.
