The white West and the spirit of Amy Biehl

After pro-black activist Amy Biehl was chased down and stabbed to death by a group of black hoodlums in South Africa in 1993, Biehl’s parents went to South Africa and tearfully forgave her killers. I was reminded of the Biehl family saga by a Times of London story about Tom Rhys Pryce, the 31-year-old soliciter who was attacked and stabbed to death by two black hoodlums in London a couple of weeks ago:

His family have launched a charity in his memory, of which his fiancee, parents and one of the partners at his law firm will be that trustees.

The Tom ap Rhys Pryce Memorial Trust will fund the education of some of society’s poorest children.

What is this about? People need something to lift them above themselves, to give life meaning. And they especially need to do this when a loved one has died. But in modern liberal society, from which all our traditional, religious, and historical values have been removed, the only generally recognized “higher” value is a concern for poor people. So their son is murdered by blacks, and they set up a charitable foundation in his name for poor people, most of whom are probably black.

The correspondent who had sent me the story commented:

Something hit me today—the death of evil. Europe’s post-Christian civilization revels in a rejection of God and an affirmation of their so-called “enlightenment.” One consequence of this has been the destruction of the very idea of evil. Because the idea of evil is fundamentally religious (and even more so Christian), it cannot be entertained.

So it matters little what grotesque acts are committed, they cannot ultimately be tarred as evil on the basis that evil does reside in man and must be overcome by the Good. But that is just too Christian, now isn’t it? And surely we cannot see things in such “simplistic” terms. So we must find all kinds of causes which ultimately bear no connection with the conscious choices made by the offender. And since the offender did not choose to be born poor, his violence which is a “product” of this poverty is also not his fault:

My reply:

Many years ago I first had the thought—it may have come from reading the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago—that people stop believing in evil because they don’t believe in the good, and they don’t believe in the good because they don’t believe in God.

Take the evil of murder. If you don’t believe in the goodness of life, of existence, then you will not be struck by the utter evil of a person taking another person’s life. Without belief in the good, you don’t believe in evil. Furthermore, if you don’t believe in God or something higher than the material, then you can’t believe in the good, because without a higher standard all values are equal to all others.

I don’t think that liberalism, at least at the start, consciously sets out to destroy the idea of evil. Rather, the destruction of the idea of evil is a secondary consequence of the primary experience, which is the loss of any effective belief in God or higher truth. The banishing of evil is the result of the banishing of God. This is the evolution of modern liberalism, centered on the needs and desires of man, who is naturally good.

But there’s a little problem. Evil won’t stay away. Things keep happening—like the murder of Tom Pryce—that are hard to think of as other than evil. But, if evil exists, then good and evil exist, and, with it, the whole traditional Western structure of reality that modern society has gotten rid of, including God and moral judgment. The liberals can’t have that. So they begin actively expunging the idea of evil—except, of course, as it relates to evil whites, evil Republicans, evil Bush and so on, which, in any case, is not evil in the traditional sense, a transgression of the moral law, but evil in the liberal sense, a failure to attain social equality. The idea of evil—with the above noted exceptions—must be stamped out wherever it threatens to appear. And one method of doing this is to attribute the evil act to environmental causes, poverty, hard luck, and, most of all, social and racial injustice, namely the injustice of white society to nonwhites. Evil in the bad-versus-good sense sense is translated into evil in the rich-versus-poor sense. On the savage killing of their son by black thugs, the murdered man’s parents, instead of seeking to punish the killers, set up a charity for poor black people. This is the stereotypical way that today’s Western parents respond to the racial murder of their son.

Mr. Anachronism writes:

But, I must tell you, I dislike to dignify this sort of mindless, savage African crime with portentous words such as “evil.” To me, it is merely the act of wild beasts. The real immorality we can throw at the feet of the businessmen, politicians, and academics, who have worked so tirelessly, apparently from motives of greed or narcissism, with a liberal dollop of sheer cowardice, to introduce and then maintain this bestial violence amidst our Western Civilization. God damn them for opening up the cages of the ape houses of the world and then pointing at us shrieking “Racist!” whenever we flinched at what tumbled out of them.

But you call the killing of Mr. Rhys Pryce a “racial murder,” and this points toward how in a sickly hilarious sort of way, the liberal might even be quite correct when he blames black-against white crime on Society. Because if Society—of which he is one of the mandarins—had not enforced racial mixing, there would be no black-against-white crime (which in any case at this point is more like simmering ethnic warfare of the Balkans type—though entirely one-sided).

Respectfully yours,
Mr. Anachronism

My reply:

Mr. A. is entirely correct. The racial murders of whites by blacks in Western cities are, indeed, to be blamed on white society—not, however, the fictional, racist, conservative white society that oppresses blacks, but the actual, “compassionate,” liberal white society that unleashed the savages on us and took away our ability to defend ourselves.

In thie connection, see my article in the February 1994 American Renaissance, “Murder on the Long Island Rail Road.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 22, 2006 05:52 PM | Send