Contra racial Marxism: did blacks create America’s wealth?

A reader sends this excerpt from Jared’s Taylor’s 2007 review of the updated version of Gedaliah Braun’s Racism, Guilt, and Self-Deceit:

Another idea that has been accepted among liberal whites is that South Africa’s wealth was created by the hard work of blacks and that whites have profited from it illegitimately. This is similar to saying that America is rich because of black slavery, and Dr. Braun is amazed that anyone can swallow such nonsense:

To argue that it was black labor that “really” created this wealth is like saying that the riveters are the ones who “really” built the space shuttle! If blacks “really” created the wealth of South Africa, why don”t they create it anywhere else? Whites can create wealth without black labor, but blacks on their own create no such wealth.

- end of initial entry -

Dimitri K. writes:

I have a feeling that the attribution of wealth creation to blacks is part of the general tendency to substitute modern mythology for the Holy Scripture. Blacks in modern mythology substitute for ancient Israel. Abolition of slavery and colonialism is the modern analog of the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Modern wealth creation is the analog of the Egyptian pyramids built by the Hebrew slaves. Global Warming is the punishment for sins (of capitalism), thus the analog of the Ten Plagues inflicted on Egypt.

Western culture is largely based on the biblical tradition, that’s why any alternative ideology needs to mirror it.

March 31

After I complimented Dimitri on his idea, he continued:

The idea first came to me when I watched “Star Wars.” I was struck by how its essentially leftist message was produced by heavily using classical and religious associations. For example, the town in the desert in the first part looks like Jerusalem, the second part is very much like Romeo and Juliet, the old movie, and third part resembles Doctor Faustus.

That may be one of the reasons why the cultural left is so succesful: it heavily uses the classical heritage. Whereas the “right” is so silly to repel it, proclaims itself secular, etc. The result is that the argument of the right cannot impress. If so, the only way for the Right to recover is to learn to rely again on classical and Biblical tradition. Because it is impressive.

James P. writes:

At the same time, the Left has worked assiduously to undermine and destroy the classical and Biblical tradition, so the effort to employ this heritage to transmit Leftist messages will sooner or later come to an end because the target audience will no longer understand it. How many young people today would instantly recognize a visual reference to the Bible, Shakespeare, or Mann? If the Right wants to employ classical and Biblical tradition to convey its messages, first it will have to ensure that enough people recognize classical and Biblical images. Otherwise, those images will utterly fail to impress and thus will fail to convey the desired message.

LA replies:

I don’t think the audience has to know the work being referenced to be affected by the reference to that work. The emotive power lies in the material itself, not in the cultural literacy of the audience.

April 1

Ken Hechtman writes:

If you teach the Bible to slaves, which story did you think they were going to identify with? Exodus has always been the black political myth, from Grandma Moses in the 1850s to Bob Moses in the 1960s.

We’ve talked about this before in other threads. The left’s tradition comes out of the medieval and classical Christian heresies. We don’t like to admit it in public but the Bible is part of our cultural DNA just as much as it is part of yours.

Ken Hechtman continues:

Dimitri K. writes:

The idea first came to me when I watched “Star Wars.” I was struck by how its essentially leftist message was produced by heavily using classical and religious associations. For example, the town in the desert in the first part looks like Jerusalem, the second part is very much like Romeo and Juliet, the old movie, and third part resembles Doctor Faustus.

Tell Dimitri K. to look up “Star Wars” and “Joseph Campbell.” He’s more right about this than he knows.

From Wikipedia:

Campbell’s influence on popular culture [LA adds: I’ve slightly edited the Wikipedia passage.]

George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker openly to credit Campbell’s influence. Lucas stated following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977 that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell’s. The linkage between Star Wars and Campbell was further reinforced when later reprints of Campbell’s book used the image of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the cover.[20] Lucas discusses this influence at great length in the authorized biography of Joseph Campbell, A Fire in the Mind:

I [Lucas] came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what’s valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is … around the period of this realization … it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology … was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into … so that’s when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe’s books. Before that I hadn’t read any of Joe’s books … It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs … so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I’d been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent … I went on to read “The Masks of God” and many other books.[21]

It was not until after the completion of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1983, however, that Lucas met Campbell or heard any of his lectures.[22] The 1988 documentary The Power of Myth was filmed at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. During his interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell discusses the way in which Lucas used The Hero’s Journey in the Star Wars films (IV, V, and VI) to re-invent the mythology for the contemporary viewer. Moyers and Lucas filmed an interview 12 years later in 1999 called the Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas & Bill Moyers to discuss further the impact of Campbell’s work on Lucas’ films.[23] In addition, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored an exhibit during the late 1990s called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which discussed the ways in which Campbell’s work shaped the Star Wars films.[24] A companion guide of the same name was published in 1997.

Dimitri K. writes:

Mr. Hechtman writes: “If you teach the Bible to slaves, which story did you think they were going to identify with?”

That’s a good observation. However, the problem as I see it is not that blacks associated themselves with Israel, but that whites started to associate themselves with Egypt.

LA replies:

Touche.

(Though it’s Ken Hechtman who should say that, not I.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2009 10:16 AM | Send