Why anti-racism is anti-civilization

Yesterday I began watching Craig Bodeker’s DVD, A Conversation about Race (previously discussed here), but had to stop half way through due to technical problems. I had never heard of Bodeker before the DVD came out. It is exceptional, and exactly what’s needed. It takes us into the heart of the contemporary liberal psychology like nothing I’ve seen. The moment that most strikes me so far is when a young, pretty white woman is asked to give an example of the racism that according to her is everywhere in our society. She says that sometimes when she is around black people who are being loud, she thinks to herself that black people are loud. But then she realizes that her objection to loudness is just a part of the “white culture,” the white racist culture in which she has grown up and which she must battle against.

When she said this, I felt I was hearing something new, or at least understanding something familiar in a new light. It is of course a staple of modern liberalism that we must overcome our “stereotypes” about black people and other minorities. For example, if we think that blacks are generally less intelligent or more disorderly or more loud, those are racist “stereotypes” that we must identify and root out of our mind. But what this young woman was saying went beyond that. She was saying that the objection to loudness is itself a racist idea that she needs to root out of her mind. Her underlying reasoning goes like this: because she objects to loudness, and because blacks tend to be loud, the dislike of loudness is a racist feeling and must be eliminated. Which further means that any common standard of white people, any normal criterion of goodness or excellence in our society in which blacks on average happen to be deficient, is by that very fact racist and to be spurned.

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Paul Gottfried writes:

Why does this madness surprise you? Multiculturalism, as I’ve argued in several books of mine, is a political religion. It is a post-Christian bastardization of the Christian notions of love and brother (sister)hood combined with totalitarian managerial politics. This young psychologist is not saying something that is strange to the conversation of college faculty and administrators. I hear things equally bizarre coming from the same groups every day of my life. They express the multicultural version of the Christian heresy of Montanism, which consists of belief in things precisely because they are absurd.

LA replies:

I’m always trying to understand things, so new insights keep coming to me. You think you already understand everything you need to understand, so that any new insights, or any new articulations of old insights, automaticaly appear old hat to you. You subsume them under things that you’ve already written, not realizing that something new is being said.

Paul Gottfried replies:

This is only a differently worded expression of the same lunacy that I encounter daily in the academic world. Would you have been struck by a Nazi who stated his hatred for Jews and Slavs in a slightly more original way than his fellow-party members? Characteristic of all multiculturalism are a masochistic loathing for white, bourgeois, Christian or Judeo-Christian civilization and a corresponding celebration of anti-Western forces and of violent people with low IQs who are not white.

LA replies:

It is a truism on the right that liberals loathe and seek to destroy our civilization. But is that all we need to understand? What the young woman in the film showed was liberals’ inner logic that leads them to loathe and seek to destroy our civilization. I’ve written about the same thing many times before, but the way she put it struck me as new and created new thoughts in me.

LA continues:

However, it could also be the case that I have poor memory and forget the things I already know, so that when I see them again, I think they’re new and get excited about them and write them down, when in fact they’re really old and I’ve written the same thing before. This is an occupational hazard when you spend many years thinking and writing about the same subjects. I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know.

FD writes:

The comment from the young woman was remarkable. Exactly like the character Parsons in 1984. He did not realize he was an enemy agent until his daughter turned him in. Orwell saw this behavior coming, but saw it only in political terms. This is remarkable and reveals 1) the depth of harm done by liberal society to ours, 2) how the significance of political theory gives way to race and ethnicity (Orwell did not foresee this and was probably blind to it, and 3) the intractable nature of this mindset.

In discussing the Ricci decision with a liberal colleague, I asked him about his own 22 year old son’s job prospects and whether or not he would favor race preferences if his own son could not be employed. He replied with the worst sort of petty vitriol AGAINST THE FIREFIGHTERS! His comments were so disturbing, I find it impossible to trust his judgment anymore. He is brilliant, educated, cultured and lacking in basic wisdom. Needless to say, he is a child of sixties.

As for Maureen Dowd’s anti-white afflatus, another literary character came to mind-Lady Macbeth:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.

We have Maureen Dowd—Lady Macbeth without a Macbeth—who writes columns about evil white men without apparently having any normal feelings or relationships of her own. Another child of the sixties-seventies who believed feminist dogma and is surprised to discover later in life that men don’t like her and now staring at sixty, she is alone and unloved. Sad.

Thanks for the ongoing infusion of wisdom.

LA replies:

Thank you.

“… the intractable nature of this mindset…”

That was the other thing about the Bodeker film I wanted to mention. It made me realize more than ever how absolutely entrenched the liberal mindset is, with its beliefs that add up to nothing less than the demand that our civilization be dismantled. As for what is to be done about that … at the moment, I don’t know. I just see the scale of the problem we face. But I actually had the passing thought—and it’s an ugly thought, which I saw at some white nationalist website recently—that the only value that white liberals now have for our civilization is their genes.

Also, what did your colleague say against the firemen?

July 21

FD replies:

Sorry for the delay. He said that there would be no progress in this country until people realized that racism had to be addressed this way. And that the firefighters victory would not establish new case law and that the firefighters would probably be laid off anyway so the case did not matter.

I’m sorry, but my paraphrase cannot convey the sneering condescension and bitterness. He saw Ricci as a setback in a larger struggle. It was an awful moment for me. He is a mentor and trusted friend. It was like hearing the Pope start to talk about UFO’s.

It made me realize that there is NO COMMON GROUND to seek out with these people because their perceptions of the world are so distorted.

LA replies:

Thanks for this.

I feel what you’re saying.

As I also noted, in watching the documentary, I felt more strongly than ever that white liberals who have these views about race are on some other planet and that they are not reformable. Takuan Seiyo’s metaphor from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” referring to liberals as Pod People, is all too horribly true.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 20, 2009 11:21 AM | Send