Children of Men and the (temporary) white liberal superiority toward nonwhites

Mark E. writes:

I recommend that you and your readers see the movie Children of Men. It is an evil piece of open borders propaganda. I hated it and I still feel sick from seeing it. Yet I think that all those in favor of immigration reform and national identity should see it, because it should be a clarion call to them.

I do not even think it is a good movie in the story sense. But I think that you have to see what it is putting out there, what people are seeing. This movie presents itself as a serious science fiction kind of film, one that imagines the possible future, like 1984.

The setting of the movie is the not-distant future in which Great Britain is rounding up all illegal aliens and putting them in cages (like at Guantanamo) and on trucks and trains (as to Auschwitz) and the white Brit cops/military are Nazis. This is what is shown relentlessly, repeatedly, throughout the whole movie. There is a putative story that you can read about from the movie reviewers, but it is in my opinion just a makeweight pretext for the anti-national, open borders propaganda equating all immigration reform with Nazis. It is practically the movie version of your recent posts about Great Britain.

Again I apologize in advance for what is sure to be an unpleasant and truly enraging viewing experience, but I do think you have to see it, purely as part of your VFR job and not as an entertainment.

There is also a little documentary on the DVD, with intellectualoids Explaining It All. The third worlders of whom they speak so pitifully are depicted as a blob of no particular culture. Global warming is now integral to the leftist unified field theory of white supremacy.

I have a different theory than you—perhaps I should say, an additional theory. I think the left-libs are the true white supremacists. They really think that the “wogs” are subrational subhumans who could not possibly dethrone the White Man—i.e., them. Nietzsche turned on a huge light bulb in my understanding when he made me see that the opposite of pity is not pitilessness but respect, and that pity is a psychological/valuative weapon of domination. He who pities makes himself superior to the pitied. This is also the answer to your VFR thread on “Christianity and Liberalism”: so-called “liberalism” today is pure pity religion—weakness as virtue and strength as evil, non-whites are small and weak, women are small and weak, “gays” are small and weak, the handicapped are small and weak, those without “health care” are small and weak, “the planet” is small and weak, etc. It is a living breathing parody of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity—it shows him to have been a true prophet and diagnostician of humanity.

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LA replies:

I think there is a great deal of truth to Mark E.’s idea that liberal whites see nonwhites as inferior to them and thus as posing no threat to them, though I think there are other ways than “pity toward the inferior” of not seeing nonwhites as a threat, e.g., validating one’s own liberal morality by practicing non-discrimination toward the Other, or enjoying the presence of non-Westerners as Noble Savages/Exotics enriching society. But how could whites go on believing that nonwhites pose no threat to them, in light of the prospective demographic dominance and cultural transformation of more and more parts of Britain and the West by nonwhites? It seems to me that this is where the “liberal white superiority by pity” of which Mark speaks morphs into something like “liberal white compulsion toward national and cultural suicide.” I’ve discussed the same psychological shift in white European attitudes when it comes to Islam. Yes, in the early stages, the Europeans think that Muslims are just the recipient of their white generosity and tolerance, and pose no conceivable threat; but as the power of Islam grows and becomes openly threatening, the whites will, I have argued, readily submit to it, because their ultimate desire is to go out of existence as the dominant group, as I have previously discussed here and here.

My underlying point is that the various types of white liberal openness to nonwhites, which may seem very different from each other, are all ultimately the same. Whether we are speaking of the right-liberal, neoconservative type of openness to nonwhites (we will open the border to nonwhites but they are no threat to us because they will all assimilate into our universal democratic belief system), or the left-liberal type of openness to nonwhites (we will open the border to nonwhites and they will keep their culture and we will even subsidize their culture but they cannot possibly threaten us because they are really just exotic objects of our pity, generosity, and tolerance), or the explicitly suicidal type of openness to nonwhites (we whites are guilty and repulsive and don’t deserve to go on having our own society, so it’s better for us to be taken over by Muslims and other non-Europeans), all these types of openness to nonwhites are simply different stages of white suicide. Once whites, in the manner of right-liberals, define their society as an abstract universal idea which all men can join by subscribing to the idea, or, in the manner of left-liberals, define their society as simply unqualified openness to everyone, at that moment they have already committed suicide, they just haven’t realized it yet. Indeed, they are still glorying in their liberal idealism and superiority. But when the consequences of their liberal beliefs start to become manifest in the real world, in the form of growing nonwhite demographic and cultural dominance, the whites will not have the will to turn things around, because they are still committed to the liberal beliefs that started the suicidal process in the first place.

Just as Seraphim Rose’s four successive stages of Nihilism—Liberalism, Realism, Vitalism, and the Nihilism of Destruction—are all ultimately the same in that they share the common root of denying objective moral truth and so lead man to the abyss, in the same way, the three stages of liberalism I’ve described—right-liberalism, left-liberalism, and the “liberalism of destruction”—are all ultimately the same in that they share the common root of denying the objective and transcendent value of one’s nation, and so they all lead to the destruction of one’s nation.

Richard Davis writes:

One of the central characters in Children of Men is Kee, the first female to become pregnant in nearly 20 years and thus possibly the last hope for a suddenly infertile mankind. She’s a black west African. The last hope certainly wouldn’t be white, not with Hollywood telling the story.

Yet in the PD James novel the pregnant woman is white. She’s an Englishwoman named Julian. The character also appears in the movie but there she’s made barren, the beneficiary of a cultural abortion performed by filmmakers. The black Kee, who is featured prominently in movie posters and advertising, is a multicultural character, a figment of the director’s liberal (rather than his creative) imagination. Every movie, TV program, advertisement, etc., must have at least one multicultural (preferably black) character these days. So goes the racial gerrymandering of our culture.

Mark P. writes:

This is in reference to what Mark E. wrote about Children of Men, particularly this:

“The setting of the movie is the not-distant future in which Great Britain is rounding up all illegal aliens and putting them in cages (like at Guantanamo) and on trucks and trains (as to Auschwitz) and the white Brit cops/military are Nazis.”

I disagree. The police were rounding people up, checking papers and engaging in deportation, but there was nothing sadistic, cruel or Nazi-like about their behavior. The police were firm, but polite and professional. No one was being beaten or tortured or otherwise cruelly treated, and the cages where people were being held were in public. I took the whole immigration scene as Britain belated and reluctantly dealing with its open border crisis. It was actually quite heartening. Furthermore, the movie does a good job portraying some of the chaos VFR predicts. As the pregnant woman is being transported to a safe location, we see how much of Great Britain has devolved. Whole sections of London have come under Muslim control, with pitch battles between British soldiers and Muslim “insurgents”. It is horrifying to see the streets of places like Cairo, with its filth, duplicated in a modern, Western city. I wouldn’t recommend seeing it because it is a boring, uneven, pretentious movie with little to offer, although the cinematography is beautiful. I would, however, say that it is not quite as liberal as people portray it.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Re: Children of Men (the movie) is a textbook case of Hollywood’s taking, twisting and distorting almost beyond recognition the story line of a good novel. If you haven’t read the real Children of Men, I think you would find the novel well worth it. P.D. James is a religious Anglican, and Christian themes are important in her work—very important in Children of Men. My wife had read the novel when it was published in England, and did not see the book in the film. So I read the book afterwards, and she is right.

The novel features a world-wide birth dearth, but it is an English story. The movie is tendentious globalism, excoriating the British (the representative whites) for their inhospitable treatment of the liberating, life-giving Others. Alfonso Cuaron changes the life-bearing almost-Madonna figure from an attractive Englishwoman to a black African—whose first words in the movie, if I remember, are “What tha f-ck you lookin’ at?” to the male protagonist delivered in an equally unpleasant accent.

P.D. James puts the reader into a twilight country largely given over to end-of-the-world anomie, as her remaining Englishmen really believe all is ending and most have lost hope. Her book is about the faint stirrings of a rebirth of hope as people realize they may yet have a future; that the Abomination of Desolation of extinction through sterility is not inevitable. To a Christian reader its Christian themes are evident. I don’t think Cuaron caught that at all; probably didn’t want to. If Cuarón has a message for us First Worlders with his movie, it is that Third World squalor is what life is really all about, we are no better (morally worse) than the Third Worlders, and we had better Just Get Used To It.

Michael Caine is disappointing as a pot-head academic (the book’s equivalent character is more nuanced and has some nobility of spirit). Julianne Moore never has a chance to do anything but act tough until she gets shot early in the movie. The movie mother is totally unsympathetic, bearing no resemblance to the book’s mother physically or spiritually. The character who in the book actually is an admirable African or West Indian (I don’t remember which) is a midwife; Cuarón replaces her with a New Age-addled old hippie Englishwoman, while making the mother black. I thought Clive Owen did well with the limited character he was given (again, James’s narrator is a more nuanced man who comes to accept and then embrace a role he never sought, as he and the mother gradually fall in love), but his performance is a lost effort in a bad, gratuitously violent movie. There is violence in James’s book, but never surplus to what her tale needs.

The most consistent thread in Cuaron’s confused abusing of James’s novel is how mean we whites are to “immigrants.” Is it altogether coincidental, then, that Alfonso Cuaron is a Mexican, who moved to Los Angeles for a movie job and never went home?

Cuaron quote: I believe that human beings are born first and given passports later.

Mark P. writes:

In response to Howard Sutherland:

No…no…no…

You are giving a lot of credit to a very bad movie. Children of Men is a movie of no real significance, with nothing important to say, directed by a hack with no real talent. It bombed at the box office, not even earning enough to cover its production budget.

The observed liberal elements in this movie have about as much of a political message as television commercials with their rainbow assortment of minorities in every frame. Stop talking about C of M. It’s not worth the time and energy of this august group.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 29, 2007 08:31 AM | Send