The racial guilt that can only be assuaged by our ceasing to exist

Ryan Sager in the blog at Real Clear Politics expresses disdain for the House Republicans for opposing the amnesty and “guest workers” bill:

But if using the issue as a political cudgel without actually doing anything is their plan—well, that just highlights what a nasty little bit of racial pandering and scapegoating this is and has always been.

So, if the Republican House opposes amnesty and a massive increase of legal immigration under the lying rubric of “guest workers,” that is “a nasty little bit of racial pandering and scapegoating.” Let’s think about what this means.

Current U.S. law accepts a million nonwhite immigrants per year, steadily turning America into a nonwhite country. The Republican House is not seeking to eliminate or reduce that nonwhite immigration. Yet their support for a law that is turning America into a nonwhite country doesn’t get the Republicans any credit for being “non-racist.” To the contrary, if, on top of letting in a million nonwhite immigrants a year, it is also demanded of the House Republicans that they legalize 12 million illegal aliens, and increase legal immigration to two or three million a year (under the lying rubric of “guest workers”), and if said Republicans balk at this outrage, then they are engaging in “a nasty little bit of racial pandering and scapegoating.”

See the problem? No matter how liberal you are, no matter how open to nonwhites you are, no matter how lacking in allegiance to America’s historic European majority culture you are, there is no escape from the racism charge. If you oppose any demand by the open borders side, no matter how crazy it is, then you are a racist. If you support a million nonwhite immigrants a year, but balk at two million, you’re a racist. If you allow two million a year, but balk at three million, you’re a racist. If you allow three million a year, but balk at ten million, you’re a racist. The racism charge is and always has been the primary engine of the open borders ideology, an instrument of fear held over the heads of the American people to force us to comply with our own destruction, and we will only be able to defeat that ideology when we begin to identify the charge for what it is and put the Ryan Sagers and the John McCains and the Sam Brownbacks and the George W. Bushes of the world on the defensive.

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Dimitri writes:

It seems that white race, due to God’s will or evolution, has evolved into a race that can only exist when it believes in God, or at least some higher idea or aim. For that, a man must have at least some self-resentment. Oppositely, blacks can probably exist whenever there is enough food. Thus, when the white race became predominantly atheistic and lost all its aims, it started to die out.

LA replies:

I don’t know that what Dimitri says about blacks is true, but the comment is interesting in light of the contemporary concern about “self-esteem.”

People say that blacks perform poorly because white racism has deprived them of self-esteem, whereas in fact blacks have far more self-esteem than whites, and whites are far self-critical than blacks. Further, one could say that this white self-criticism, assuming the form of pathological white guilt, is the reason for white suicide.

Taking the opposite tack, Dimitri is saying that self-criticism is indispensable for white survival; to survive, whites must, in Jesus’ words, “hate themselves” and love something beyond themselves, to give themselves a larger purpose, an aim. In terms of Dimitri’s theory, whites are committing suicide not through an excess of racial guilt but through an excess of self-esteem. Esteeming themselves, they cease to believe in any truth beyond themselves and so become nihilists and proceed to destroy themselves. By contrast, blacks naturally have lots of self-esteem, and they thrive on it.

Where I disagree with Dimitri is that I think blacks like whites require something higher than themselves to have a good life. But where Dimitri is arguably correct is in suggesting that blacks are not as psychologically delicate as whites and do not lapse into suicidal behavior in the absence of a higher ideal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 23, 2006 12:24 PM | Send