0 comment Tuesday, November 25, 2014 | admin
Rick Sanchez, affirmative-action reporter on CNN, thinks that minorities who work for Fox News are 'sellouts.'
I've wondered about just what Sanchez's ancestry may be, since he appears 100 percent European. I guessed he was probably of (White) Cuban descent, meaning mostly Spanish, and I was correct, according to Wikipedia.
The son of Cuban political exiles who came to the United States in the 1950s from Cuba, Sanchez grew up in the city of Hialeah, Florida. He graduated from Hialeah High School in 1977 and accepted a football scholarship to Minnesota State University Moorhead. He transferred to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on a CBS/WCCO Journalism Scholarship in 1979."
There you go, another one of those arch-conservative Cuban-Americans of whom the Republicans like to brag, like Bob Menendez who is also a liberal son of Cuban immigrants. So much for that myth, right? No, I am sure the Republicans will cling to it, just like they cling to the idea of the precious Hispanic vote on which they are staking their political fortunes.
Sanchez has apparently been taking potshots at Fox News lately, as ''reporters'' on those ultra-left news channels do regularly, and it's rather absurd, really, since Fox is almost, very nearly, as politically correct as CNN, MSNBC, or any of the others. They certainly abide by the rules of PC and slavishly seek 'diversity' in hiring on-air personalities.
I notice they now prominently feature more black faces and minorities in general than in the past, no doubt partly in response to CNN's sniping, and the most popular one on Fox is the FReepers' pinup, replacing the blonde Laurie Dhue, is Julie Banderas.
Miss Banderas does not look like most Hispanics I've met; she looks more like an Anglo-American with a dark tan, and acording to her biography, her birth name was Julie Bidwell, and she is a descendant of John Bidwell, a prominent pioneer.
Went by her birth name Julie Bidwell while at WHSV-TV in Harrisonburg, Virginia and at WBRE-TV in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She is a paternal descendent of John Bidwell. Her father's name is Howard D. Bidwell. She is partially of Colombian descent, henceforth the use of the Spanish name.
The biography of Miss Banderas says she is 'partially' Colombian, so I wonder why she chose to drop her birth name in favor of a Hispanic name. I suppose it certainly does not hurt one's career to claim minority ancestry these days. I suspect we will see a lot more of that, as this country becomes majority nonwhite, and Hispanics become the majority. I expect many White Americans will emphasize any ethnic ancestry they may have so as to escape the stigma of being White-bread, and if they have any Hispanic ancestry, even just Spanish, as Linda Sanchez the 'conservative' has, they will pick that as their identity for practical reasons.
Miss Banderas has replied to Sanchez:
As a wise Latina woman, I have no comment other than to say if I were Rick Sanchez, I wouldn�t look in the mirror, period.''
It does seem an ironclad law that just about anybody with one-quarter or more nonwhite ancestry identifies with their minority side; I see it all the time in real life too. I can't think of any exceptions, offhand.
The mainstream 'conservatives' hold to their faith that ''Democrats are the real racists, and they are keeping the minorities on the plantation. But one day they will wake up and see that Republicans are their real friends!"
Sometimes I think the mainstream conservative types are more lost than the liberals. They come right to the brink of understanding, and pull back every time.
Fox News helps keep them in the dark.
I've wondered about just what Sanchez's ancestry may be, since he appears 100 percent European. I guessed he was probably of (White) Cuban descent, meaning mostly Spanish, and I was correct, according to Wikipedia.
The son of Cuban political exiles who came to the United States in the 1950s from Cuba, Sanchez grew up in the city of Hialeah, Florida. He graduated from Hialeah High School in 1977 and accepted a football scholarship to Minnesota State University Moorhead. He transferred to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on a CBS/WCCO Journalism Scholarship in 1979."
There you go, another one of those arch-conservative Cuban-Americans of whom the Republicans like to brag, like Bob Menendez who is also a liberal son of Cuban immigrants. So much for that myth, right? No, I am sure the Republicans will cling to it, just like they cling to the idea of the precious Hispanic vote on which they are staking their political fortunes.
Sanchez has apparently been taking potshots at Fox News lately, as ''reporters'' on those ultra-left news channels do regularly, and it's rather absurd, really, since Fox is almost, very nearly, as politically correct as CNN, MSNBC, or any of the others. They certainly abide by the rules of PC and slavishly seek 'diversity' in hiring on-air personalities.
I notice they now prominently feature more black faces and minorities in general than in the past, no doubt partly in response to CNN's sniping, and the most popular one on Fox is the FReepers' pinup, replacing the blonde Laurie Dhue, is Julie Banderas.
Miss Banderas does not look like most Hispanics I've met; she looks more like an Anglo-American with a dark tan, and acording to her biography, her birth name was Julie Bidwell, and she is a descendant of John Bidwell, a prominent pioneer.
Went by her birth name Julie Bidwell while at WHSV-TV in Harrisonburg, Virginia and at WBRE-TV in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She is a paternal descendent of John Bidwell. Her father's name is Howard D. Bidwell. She is partially of Colombian descent, henceforth the use of the Spanish name.
The biography of Miss Banderas says she is 'partially' Colombian, so I wonder why she chose to drop her birth name in favor of a Hispanic name. I suppose it certainly does not hurt one's career to claim minority ancestry these days. I suspect we will see a lot more of that, as this country becomes majority nonwhite, and Hispanics become the majority. I expect many White Americans will emphasize any ethnic ancestry they may have so as to escape the stigma of being White-bread, and if they have any Hispanic ancestry, even just Spanish, as Linda Sanchez the 'conservative' has, they will pick that as their identity for practical reasons.
Miss Banderas has replied to Sanchez:
As a wise Latina woman, I have no comment other than to say if I were Rick Sanchez, I wouldn�t look in the mirror, period.''
It does seem an ironclad law that just about anybody with one-quarter or more nonwhite ancestry identifies with their minority side; I see it all the time in real life too. I can't think of any exceptions, offhand.
The mainstream 'conservatives' hold to their faith that ''Democrats are the real racists, and they are keeping the minorities on the plantation. But one day they will wake up and see that Republicans are their real friends!"
Sometimes I think the mainstream conservative types are more lost than the liberals. They come right to the brink of understanding, and pull back every time.
Fox News helps keep them in the dark.
Labels: Affirmative Action, American Diversity, Ethnic Identity, Fox News, Media Bias, Old Media
0 comment Tuesday, September 30, 2014 | admin
Over at TakiMag, Paul Gottfried has a piece about Christianity, specifically Protestant evangelical Christianity and the Obama cult, as manifested in a Northern Michigan election party. He relates how a friend sent him clippings about the behavior of many young Christians in northern Michigan upon Obama's election:
In this heavily Protestant and very Nordic region of the country, the youth had trouble containing their joy on the outcome of this year�s election, according to the Northern Weekly Express. Throngs of young adults gathered at an election day party at the InsideOut Gallery in Traverse City, where the full house "rocked the rafters" as they watched Obama storm to victory. "Some of the biggest cheers that night came when images of African-Americans were shown on the big screen, WEEPING FOR JOY at the election of Barack Obama." The paper hastens to remind the reader that this victory was 'by any measure, one of the MOST SIGNIFICANT events in the history of the United States." Even without the use of caps, the Northern Weekly Express conveyed the ecstasy of the hour by showing the glowing faces of the Northern Michigan young standing beside cardboard images of their black savior. The election party looked more like a revival meeting than a Friday night bash, and it radiated something akin to the joy of being cleansed of one�s sins.
[...]
I think this hysteria that I�ve been observing is religious in nature. It is not confined to the atheist, social engineering Left; it is also very much alive and well among religious Protestants, and particularly among the Evangelicals and Mennonites of my acquaintance. These people are anything but non-believers. Nonetheless they entirely agree with Obama�s remark, made to Pastor Rick Warren, indicating that sin means "sexism, racism, and homophobia." A neighbor, who is a very orthodox Mennonite minister and who has the Nicene Creed on his wall, was campaigning for Obama, as an act of overcoming the ingrained racism of his community.
[...]
The exaltation of the supposedly downtrodden, as an act of group atonement for social sins and for thinking bigoted thoughts, and as the prelude to building a truly egalitarian society, have become characteristic of those seeking righteousness. Religious fervor has now been turned toward the task of validating designated minorities, including illegals streaming across our Southern borders. Such behavior is no longer specific to professional atheists, raging at the Christian Right. It is now to all appearances an epidemic spreading through the American religious community and one that is likely to continue to spread. And unlike its manifestations in non-Protestant America, in Protestant America, the advocacy of multiculturalism is definitely aimed at the displacement of traditional ethnic-cultural communities�or of what remains of them.''
I am not sure that I understand that last sentence, and from what I read it to mean, I don't agree. How is 'non-Protestant' America less guilty of promoting the displacement of traditional communities when it supports mass immigration?
The PC Christian phenomenon he is describing is not something that began with the Obama campaign, although Obama provided a figure around which these multicult 'Christians' might rally. The present-day trend in mainstream Christianity, towards embracing leftist positions on all social matters, has been going on for some time. Rick Warren gets a passing mention in the article, though he should be front and center; he has been a big influence in this trend among formerly conservative Christians towards leftist, politically correct values, and away from the Biblically-based faith of their fathers. Warren, with his emphasis on pop psychology and the 'self', along with a warmed-over social gospel, has brought many Christians into line with mainstream liberal ideology. It's no coincidence that Warren is rubbing elbows with the Bono types, and with globalists.
The brand of Christianity that Warren and his followers promote is the kind of thing which causes many outside the Christian sphere to denounce Christianity as being detrimental to Western peoples and their survival.
It's no secret that the mainstream Christian denominations have been heavily infiltrated by leftists since at least the 1940s, if not sooner. The WCC has long been known to be sympathetic to leftist radical causes. The left, as we know, has been fairly open about its longstanding effort to infiltrate and subvert from within all the institutions of our society, and the churches are not exempt; far from it. Influencing Christians away from the Word of God and towards the leftist/socialist/globalist worldview is a strategy aimed at removing one of the last obstacles to the remaking of the world, the erasure of borders, and the breakdown of family and extended kin loyalties.
The fact is, however, this is not just something that can be blamed on Protestantism or those dreaded 'WASPs' again. All branches of Christianity are to some extent affected by the new politically-corrected counterfeit Christianity.
I don't think that it is peculiar to Protestantism, although the TakiMag commentariat might be likely to suggest that, at least those with an open Catholic or Orthodox bias. Obviously the Catholic hierarchy has been in the forefront of activism in favor of open borders, especially when the borders being erased separate us from Latino Catholics, who are now being eagerly welcomed by the Church hierarchy. I've been told by some that the Church rank and file are not as fervently open-borders as the leadership, but I am not sure about that.
However, Protestant churches have been moving towards globalist politically correct ideology, too. Personally, I think it's all a part of a larger trend in Christianity, in which Christians of all denominations seemingly believe that to be a good Christian, one has to embrace one's exact opposite. To champion the rights of those who are not only extremely 'Other' in relation to us is seen as a virtue, and embracing those who are openly hostile to us, even our avowed enemies, is seen as the highest virtue, as saintliness.
We could see the recent events in the Castro District of San Francisco in the light of this. A group of Christians have been going into the Castro to pray and witness to the ''gay community.' However, in the aftermath of the recent furor over Proposition 8 in California, many of the local 'gays' were enraged by the presence of the Christians and by their public singing and praying. So they set upon the Christians, shouting obscenities and threats, and apparently even attempting to molest some of the Christians.
The Christians in question mostly reiterated how they loved their attackers, and forgave them, refusing to press charges for molestation or sexual assault.
I am certain many Christians will say this is exemplary, highly Christian behavior, and that all good Christians might hope to show such character in a similar situation.
I won't try to argue that point; it deserves another post to itself. But it exemplifies the seeming value today's Christians seem to attach to those who are the most hostile towards us. This is how you prove your mettle as a Christian: to lay down and passively accept abuse by others, or to sacrifice yourself so as to benefit some 'Other' who is either indifferent or hostile towards you. I wonder if our forefathers would have interpreted Christianity this way. They certainly did not embrace self-destruction as peoples in the name of Christianity.
Again, I know those who despise Christianity will say that this is exactly why they despise Christianity: because it makes us the doormats of the world. It makes us self-abasing and self-abnegating, and downright masochistic in some cases. I hate to use Freudian jargon but the term masochistic seems to be the only term available to describe those who find some kind of gratification in being mistreated or abused by others. And that sums up much of the Western world's behavior these days, as our leaders avidly seek people to come and loot our countries.
There may be an element of seeking redemption for our supposed collective 'sins' of xenophobia and 'racism'. We have collectively been seized by an apology mania, in which we are desperately seeking someone to whom we can apologize and make restitution for our past 'sins' or the transgressions of our fathers. In Catholic terms this is a seeking of absolution from another human being. But this is not Biblical Christianity; Christians know that we can only be redeemed by Christ, not by another human being or group of human beings.
The comments following are the usual mixed bag, with the usual axes being ground. There is usually at least one in the TakiMag comment box who has to blame the Protestant Reformation for all the evils in the world. But there are a couple of good comments, one by Condor.
Another commenter later in the discussion turns the discussion to the usual condemnation of 'WASPs', saying that the Kennedys, for example, were merely emulating WASP culture, assimilating to WASP 'Boston Brahmin' norms. That argument never dies. It's usually resorted to by those of later immigrant stock, who are still resentful generations after their families immigrated here, resentful of the WASPs -- who gave them the opportunity to become Americans. It shows that no good deed goes unpunished.
The same anti-WASP commenter cites David Hackett Fischer and his work 'Albion's Seed.' I've read Albion's Seed, and it's an interesting book, a sizeable, hefty book, with a lot of information, but it is not Gospel. Fischer is not the last word, and it's really getting very old to hear people citing him in support of their pet theories. The anti-WASP faction really love Fischer. It's too bad he has gained this cult status, and his interpretation seems to go unchallenged.
Gottfried seems to imply in his article that WASPs somehow deserve the animus the various ethnic groups direct towards them, because they ''excluded" the various ethnic immigrants of the Ellis Island wave. Well, there is another side to that story. I might easily say that the various ethnic immigrant groups who have this monumental, generations-long grudge against WASPs are people who suffer from inferiority feelings, and who felt envy towards the WASPs who built the country to which their ancestors sought admission. It seems to be human nature to resent someone to whom you are beholden. We see this with all the minority 'victim' groups, and in fact their cult of victimology, which has done so much harm in our day, could be said to have been pioneered by the various ethnic immigrants. It is they who, to this day, bemoan the supposed 'discrimination' their ancestors suffered when they landed here from the Old Country. The Irish have their centuries-old vendetta against the English for having 'stolen' their country and their culture and their language. That anti-English tradition must have colored their perceptions of the Anglo-Protestants they met here. The rhetoric is exactly the same as that of Third World peoples, American Indians, and others. It might be argued that all the opportunistic 'huddled masses' of today are following the template established by the Ellis Islanders and their descendants.
The whole cult of anti-White or anti-Western resentment might be seen as being based, ultimately, in the 'undeveloped' world's resentment and envy of European man's accomplishments and successes. Look at the Anglo-Saxon as being sort of the epitome of Western strength and dominance (think of the British Empire at its height, or American dominance during its heyday) and success. The most successful are always regarded with a mix of envy and resentment. Sometimes the resentment escalates to hatred and desire for revenge, the desire to pull down the most successful and destroy his accomplishments, which are seen as an affront to the less successful peoples.
The Anglo-Saxon male is the target mostly because he inspired so much envy and resentment by his successes -- and also by his generosity. Sometimes generosity is despised as weakness, even by those who are the recipients of that generosity.
''Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides." - Pliny
So, again, we have the usual blaming of Christians, and the blaming specifically of Anglo-Saxon Protestants for the perils we are facing now.
How long will this continue? I could blame the later waves of immigrants for their grudges and resentments, and their tendency to champion The Other out of spite towards WASP America.
It is not just the nonwhite victim groups that have fostered this White Protestant guilt syndrome, but all the other immigrant victimhood-cultists. Many White Protestants who are not identified with some ethnic victim group end up absorbing some of the blame and guilt directed at old-stock Anglo-Americans.
We could see that we are all in this together, and that what happened in the mid-19th century should be put aside in the name of saving what remains of our heritage. Can we do that, or will we continue to snipe and one another and undercut one another?
In this heavily Protestant and very Nordic region of the country, the youth had trouble containing their joy on the outcome of this year�s election, according to the Northern Weekly Express. Throngs of young adults gathered at an election day party at the InsideOut Gallery in Traverse City, where the full house "rocked the rafters" as they watched Obama storm to victory. "Some of the biggest cheers that night came when images of African-Americans were shown on the big screen, WEEPING FOR JOY at the election of Barack Obama." The paper hastens to remind the reader that this victory was 'by any measure, one of the MOST SIGNIFICANT events in the history of the United States." Even without the use of caps, the Northern Weekly Express conveyed the ecstasy of the hour by showing the glowing faces of the Northern Michigan young standing beside cardboard images of their black savior. The election party looked more like a revival meeting than a Friday night bash, and it radiated something akin to the joy of being cleansed of one�s sins.
[...]
I think this hysteria that I�ve been observing is religious in nature. It is not confined to the atheist, social engineering Left; it is also very much alive and well among religious Protestants, and particularly among the Evangelicals and Mennonites of my acquaintance. These people are anything but non-believers. Nonetheless they entirely agree with Obama�s remark, made to Pastor Rick Warren, indicating that sin means "sexism, racism, and homophobia." A neighbor, who is a very orthodox Mennonite minister and who has the Nicene Creed on his wall, was campaigning for Obama, as an act of overcoming the ingrained racism of his community.
[...]
The exaltation of the supposedly downtrodden, as an act of group atonement for social sins and for thinking bigoted thoughts, and as the prelude to building a truly egalitarian society, have become characteristic of those seeking righteousness. Religious fervor has now been turned toward the task of validating designated minorities, including illegals streaming across our Southern borders. Such behavior is no longer specific to professional atheists, raging at the Christian Right. It is now to all appearances an epidemic spreading through the American religious community and one that is likely to continue to spread. And unlike its manifestations in non-Protestant America, in Protestant America, the advocacy of multiculturalism is definitely aimed at the displacement of traditional ethnic-cultural communities�or of what remains of them.''
I am not sure that I understand that last sentence, and from what I read it to mean, I don't agree. How is 'non-Protestant' America less guilty of promoting the displacement of traditional communities when it supports mass immigration?
The PC Christian phenomenon he is describing is not something that began with the Obama campaign, although Obama provided a figure around which these multicult 'Christians' might rally. The present-day trend in mainstream Christianity, towards embracing leftist positions on all social matters, has been going on for some time. Rick Warren gets a passing mention in the article, though he should be front and center; he has been a big influence in this trend among formerly conservative Christians towards leftist, politically correct values, and away from the Biblically-based faith of their fathers. Warren, with his emphasis on pop psychology and the 'self', along with a warmed-over social gospel, has brought many Christians into line with mainstream liberal ideology. It's no coincidence that Warren is rubbing elbows with the Bono types, and with globalists.
The brand of Christianity that Warren and his followers promote is the kind of thing which causes many outside the Christian sphere to denounce Christianity as being detrimental to Western peoples and their survival.
It's no secret that the mainstream Christian denominations have been heavily infiltrated by leftists since at least the 1940s, if not sooner. The WCC has long been known to be sympathetic to leftist radical causes. The left, as we know, has been fairly open about its longstanding effort to infiltrate and subvert from within all the institutions of our society, and the churches are not exempt; far from it. Influencing Christians away from the Word of God and towards the leftist/socialist/globalist worldview is a strategy aimed at removing one of the last obstacles to the remaking of the world, the erasure of borders, and the breakdown of family and extended kin loyalties.
The fact is, however, this is not just something that can be blamed on Protestantism or those dreaded 'WASPs' again. All branches of Christianity are to some extent affected by the new politically-corrected counterfeit Christianity.
I don't think that it is peculiar to Protestantism, although the TakiMag commentariat might be likely to suggest that, at least those with an open Catholic or Orthodox bias. Obviously the Catholic hierarchy has been in the forefront of activism in favor of open borders, especially when the borders being erased separate us from Latino Catholics, who are now being eagerly welcomed by the Church hierarchy. I've been told by some that the Church rank and file are not as fervently open-borders as the leadership, but I am not sure about that.
However, Protestant churches have been moving towards globalist politically correct ideology, too. Personally, I think it's all a part of a larger trend in Christianity, in which Christians of all denominations seemingly believe that to be a good Christian, one has to embrace one's exact opposite. To champion the rights of those who are not only extremely 'Other' in relation to us is seen as a virtue, and embracing those who are openly hostile to us, even our avowed enemies, is seen as the highest virtue, as saintliness.
We could see the recent events in the Castro District of San Francisco in the light of this. A group of Christians have been going into the Castro to pray and witness to the ''gay community.' However, in the aftermath of the recent furor over Proposition 8 in California, many of the local 'gays' were enraged by the presence of the Christians and by their public singing and praying. So they set upon the Christians, shouting obscenities and threats, and apparently even attempting to molest some of the Christians.
The Christians in question mostly reiterated how they loved their attackers, and forgave them, refusing to press charges for molestation or sexual assault.
I am certain many Christians will say this is exemplary, highly Christian behavior, and that all good Christians might hope to show such character in a similar situation.
I won't try to argue that point; it deserves another post to itself. But it exemplifies the seeming value today's Christians seem to attach to those who are the most hostile towards us. This is how you prove your mettle as a Christian: to lay down and passively accept abuse by others, or to sacrifice yourself so as to benefit some 'Other' who is either indifferent or hostile towards you. I wonder if our forefathers would have interpreted Christianity this way. They certainly did not embrace self-destruction as peoples in the name of Christianity.
Again, I know those who despise Christianity will say that this is exactly why they despise Christianity: because it makes us the doormats of the world. It makes us self-abasing and self-abnegating, and downright masochistic in some cases. I hate to use Freudian jargon but the term masochistic seems to be the only term available to describe those who find some kind of gratification in being mistreated or abused by others. And that sums up much of the Western world's behavior these days, as our leaders avidly seek people to come and loot our countries.
There may be an element of seeking redemption for our supposed collective 'sins' of xenophobia and 'racism'. We have collectively been seized by an apology mania, in which we are desperately seeking someone to whom we can apologize and make restitution for our past 'sins' or the transgressions of our fathers. In Catholic terms this is a seeking of absolution from another human being. But this is not Biblical Christianity; Christians know that we can only be redeemed by Christ, not by another human being or group of human beings.
The comments following are the usual mixed bag, with the usual axes being ground. There is usually at least one in the TakiMag comment box who has to blame the Protestant Reformation for all the evils in the world. But there are a couple of good comments, one by Condor.
Another commenter later in the discussion turns the discussion to the usual condemnation of 'WASPs', saying that the Kennedys, for example, were merely emulating WASP culture, assimilating to WASP 'Boston Brahmin' norms. That argument never dies. It's usually resorted to by those of later immigrant stock, who are still resentful generations after their families immigrated here, resentful of the WASPs -- who gave them the opportunity to become Americans. It shows that no good deed goes unpunished.
The same anti-WASP commenter cites David Hackett Fischer and his work 'Albion's Seed.' I've read Albion's Seed, and it's an interesting book, a sizeable, hefty book, with a lot of information, but it is not Gospel. Fischer is not the last word, and it's really getting very old to hear people citing him in support of their pet theories. The anti-WASP faction really love Fischer. It's too bad he has gained this cult status, and his interpretation seems to go unchallenged.
Gottfried seems to imply in his article that WASPs somehow deserve the animus the various ethnic groups direct towards them, because they ''excluded" the various ethnic immigrants of the Ellis Island wave. Well, there is another side to that story. I might easily say that the various ethnic immigrant groups who have this monumental, generations-long grudge against WASPs are people who suffer from inferiority feelings, and who felt envy towards the WASPs who built the country to which their ancestors sought admission. It seems to be human nature to resent someone to whom you are beholden. We see this with all the minority 'victim' groups, and in fact their cult of victimology, which has done so much harm in our day, could be said to have been pioneered by the various ethnic immigrants. It is they who, to this day, bemoan the supposed 'discrimination' their ancestors suffered when they landed here from the Old Country. The Irish have their centuries-old vendetta against the English for having 'stolen' their country and their culture and their language. That anti-English tradition must have colored their perceptions of the Anglo-Protestants they met here. The rhetoric is exactly the same as that of Third World peoples, American Indians, and others. It might be argued that all the opportunistic 'huddled masses' of today are following the template established by the Ellis Islanders and their descendants.
The whole cult of anti-White or anti-Western resentment might be seen as being based, ultimately, in the 'undeveloped' world's resentment and envy of European man's accomplishments and successes. Look at the Anglo-Saxon as being sort of the epitome of Western strength and dominance (think of the British Empire at its height, or American dominance during its heyday) and success. The most successful are always regarded with a mix of envy and resentment. Sometimes the resentment escalates to hatred and desire for revenge, the desire to pull down the most successful and destroy his accomplishments, which are seen as an affront to the less successful peoples.
The Anglo-Saxon male is the target mostly because he inspired so much envy and resentment by his successes -- and also by his generosity. Sometimes generosity is despised as weakness, even by those who are the recipients of that generosity.
''Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides." - Pliny
So, again, we have the usual blaming of Christians, and the blaming specifically of Anglo-Saxon Protestants for the perils we are facing now.
How long will this continue? I could blame the later waves of immigrants for their grudges and resentments, and their tendency to champion The Other out of spite towards WASP America.
It is not just the nonwhite victim groups that have fostered this White Protestant guilt syndrome, but all the other immigrant victimhood-cultists. Many White Protestants who are not identified with some ethnic victim group end up absorbing some of the blame and guilt directed at old-stock Anglo-Americans.
We could see that we are all in this together, and that what happened in the mid-19th century should be put aside in the name of saving what remains of our heritage. Can we do that, or will we continue to snipe and one another and undercut one another?
Labels: Christianity, Ethnic Division, Ethnic Identity, Globalism, Liberalism, Old America, Political Correctness, Wasps
0 comment Wednesday, September 17, 2014 | admin
Via Steve Sailer's blog, a post from the Stuff White People Like blog, called Being Offended:
To be offended is usually a rather unpleasant experience, one that can expose a person to intolerance, cultural misunderstandings, and even evoke the scars of the past. This is such an unpleasant experience that many people develop a thick skin and try to only be offended in the most egregious and awful situations. In many circumstances, they can allow smaller offenses to slip by as fighting them is a waste of time and energy. But white people, blessed with both time and energy, are not these kind of people. In fact there are few things white people love more than being offended.
Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people. In fact, they don�t even have a problem making offensive statements about other white people (ask a white person about "flyover states"). As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.
It is also valuable to know that white people spend a significant portion of their time preparing for the moment when they will be offended. They read magazines, books, and watch documentaries all in hopes that one day they will encounter a person who will say something offensive. When this happens, they can leap into action with quotes, statistics, and historical examples. Once they have finished lecturing another white person about how it�s wrong to use the term "black" instead of "African-American," they can sit back and relax in the knowledge that they have made a difference.''
I originally found the Stuff White People Like blog via Steve Sailer, and I blogged about it then. As I said then of the blog:
Is it all in good fun, or does it contribute further to the disparaging of white people which is so popular today? And assuredly this kind of self-ridicule (I am going on the assumption that the blogger is in fact white) is hardly fresh or new; I've (unwillingly) watched parts of movies of the last ten years or so in which caricatures of white people were a central basis of the 'humor', movies like 'White Chicks' or 'Undercover Brother'.
Reading the many, many comments following, I am still left asking myself who the target audience of the blog is. Is it the upper-middle-class or affluent liberal whites who seem to be the subject of much of the ambiguous 'humor'? I suppose such people would greatly enjoy laughing at themselves, or at somewhat grotesque caricatures of themselves; after all, their lives are centered around guilt and self-examination, and seeing themselves satirized or lampooned feeds into their sense that they are flawed, morally inadequate people, and also at the same time very important people. They like being the center of attention, even if the attention is unflattering to some degree or another.
Am I stereotyping white people? I hope not, because the stereotyping is one of the things I find unenjoyable about the blog, SWPL. One segment of white people, mainly liberal, PC, urban or suburban, affluent, educated, (probably over-educated) and mostly young, is made to represent all white people, and that is grossly inaccurate. White people are so much more varied than the blog implies, and the people described therein simply as 'white people' or 'whiter people' (whatever that means) are a small and unrepresentative segment. Yet they are made to stand for all white people. What is the message behind that? It could be that the blogger is himself part of that group, and feels more comfortable aiming barbs at his own group, or it may be that the blogger is part of that group and, having had contact mostly with that rather ingrown group, really considers them to be representative of the white race.
Is the blogger secretly pro-white and politically incorrect? Some claim this to be so, but I'm not convinced. The commenters (and there are many) all seem to see something different in the blog: some see it as an indictment of liberal political correctness, while others think, seemingly, that the satire of liberal young whites is meant to discredit them, deservedly. Some seem to think that the blog is rather anti-white, and therefore hip, since anti-whiteness is hip these days. Most of the young (white) people in my vicinity seem to think that anything which humiliates or caricatures whites is high hilarity, and well-deserved by whites.
The approach of the blog is successful, certainly, in terms of the traffic it draws, and the attention it has gotten. The blogger has also obtained a sweet book deal. However, I think the quality of the comments leaves much to be desired; I don't enjoy reading the comment threads at all.
Nevertheless, despite the uneasy feeling the blog evokes in me, the post in question makes some good points about white people (I would say liberal, PC white people) and their exasperating habit of taking offense on the behalf of their non-white 'wards'. Or should I say their non-white charges? Clients? My previous blog entry about 'The White liberals' burden' relates to this habit of theirs. They are so caught up in being the advocates or self-designated protectors or champions of minorities that they react as if they themselves are wounded when they perceive any slight or slur against their dependent clients, non-whites.
For some whites, specifically liberal/leftist PC whites, their protectiveness of nonwhites extends as far as wanting to adopt them, literally, and thus make non-whites part of their literal family, under their tutelage and protection. Is this a God complex? A desire to be the Savior or saint? For many liberals, their political and social belief system is a substitute for a non-existent religious faith, and in the cases where the liberal is actually a churchgoer, they affiliate with a church which serves their liberal agenda, so their social gospel beliefs are the center of their religious practices.
But just as with all the other manifestations of this attitude, this taking of offense on behalf of others is condescension, and it should be seen as somewhat of an affront to the one who is supposedly the target of the offense, real or imagined.
Taking offense for somebody else assumes that the person supposedly being defended cannot judge for himself when offense has been given, or that he is unable to speak up for himself, being either too ignorant or inarticulate -- too childlike.
I suppose a more generous assessment of these self-righteous liberals is that they have so fully identified with the minority groups that they truly do take offense at some careless word or phrase, feeling personally wounded by it. Even if that is the case, however, it's still unnatural and rather weird. There is a significant sub-group of (mostly young) white people who seem to have convinced themselves that they are non-white, adopting the styles, speech habits, and tastes of non-whites, usually blacks. I have always found that behavior somewhat embarrassing; I feel embarrassed for the whites who try their best to appear non-white. There are many manifestations of this; we see a lot of it on college campuses with young liberals sporting dreadlocks, piercings, and tribal tattoos, who get involved in drumming or other multiculti 'arts'. And there are those who dress in thug style and listen only to rap or other black styles of music. There are those who wear kaffiyehs, in solidarity with Palestinians.
It's not a new phenomenon; back when I was in college, however, whites who wanted to be non-white usually chose to be 'Native American' but apparently that has fallen from popularity somewhat, although Ward Churchill has stayed true to his calling to white Indianhood all these years.
In the 1970s there was a comedy movie, 'Made For Each Other,' in which actor Joseph Bologna, playing a confused young Italian-American man, goes to college and takes up black militancy, and harangues his baffled Italian-American parents about the wrongs done by 'whitey.'
I found that scene especially laughable in the context of today, wherein such attitudes among liberal young people are not as incredible as they appeared when the movie was first shown. There are plenty of young liberal whites who have been convinced by years of indoctrination at school, by the media, and by their deluded peers, that whiteness is a mark of Cain. It's these young people who are out marching alongside illegal Latinos, throwing projectiles at their white elders and calling them names. It's these who are trying to assuage their guilt and attain redemption from the stain of whiteness by swooning over Obama, listening to rap music, dating interracially -- and excoriating anybody who utters a politically incorrect word.
These people are not so much something to be laughed at or about; they are the scourge of anyone who wishes to practice free speech and to utter truth. We all complain about the controlled, PC media, and about our one-world, globalist ideologue politicians, but a bigger part of our problem is that the professional offense-takers, those who have made it their personal crusade to censure and vilify those they disagree with. This 'democratic censorship' only makes the job of the thought police that much easier. At this point, people are more or less being kept in line by these PC vigilantes who will make a citizen's arrest, as it were, of those who utter heresies. The result is a much more cautious conversation among people in general; many of us have to censor our speech closely or risk having someone publicly condemn any forbidden thought we express out loud.
The offense-takers are a plague in our society.
Yet they are our own people -- aren't they? Or by their willful choice to side with everybody but their own, have they in effect renounced their citizenship among whites? These days I am inclined to say the latter. They won't own any connection with people like me because they see us as the enemy; so be it.
Maybe interracial adoption isn't such a bad thing; those who have chosen to identify with others, and only with others, should be adopted into their chosen group and make their home there, instead of staying behind to antagonize and work against their biological kin.
To be offended is usually a rather unpleasant experience, one that can expose a person to intolerance, cultural misunderstandings, and even evoke the scars of the past. This is such an unpleasant experience that many people develop a thick skin and try to only be offended in the most egregious and awful situations. In many circumstances, they can allow smaller offenses to slip by as fighting them is a waste of time and energy. But white people, blessed with both time and energy, are not these kind of people. In fact there are few things white people love more than being offended.
Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people. In fact, they don�t even have a problem making offensive statements about other white people (ask a white person about "flyover states"). As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.
It is also valuable to know that white people spend a significant portion of their time preparing for the moment when they will be offended. They read magazines, books, and watch documentaries all in hopes that one day they will encounter a person who will say something offensive. When this happens, they can leap into action with quotes, statistics, and historical examples. Once they have finished lecturing another white person about how it�s wrong to use the term "black" instead of "African-American," they can sit back and relax in the knowledge that they have made a difference.''
I originally found the Stuff White People Like blog via Steve Sailer, and I blogged about it then. As I said then of the blog:
Is it all in good fun, or does it contribute further to the disparaging of white people which is so popular today? And assuredly this kind of self-ridicule (I am going on the assumption that the blogger is in fact white) is hardly fresh or new; I've (unwillingly) watched parts of movies of the last ten years or so in which caricatures of white people were a central basis of the 'humor', movies like 'White Chicks' or 'Undercover Brother'.
Reading the many, many comments following, I am still left asking myself who the target audience of the blog is. Is it the upper-middle-class or affluent liberal whites who seem to be the subject of much of the ambiguous 'humor'? I suppose such people would greatly enjoy laughing at themselves, or at somewhat grotesque caricatures of themselves; after all, their lives are centered around guilt and self-examination, and seeing themselves satirized or lampooned feeds into their sense that they are flawed, morally inadequate people, and also at the same time very important people. They like being the center of attention, even if the attention is unflattering to some degree or another.
Am I stereotyping white people? I hope not, because the stereotyping is one of the things I find unenjoyable about the blog, SWPL. One segment of white people, mainly liberal, PC, urban or suburban, affluent, educated, (probably over-educated) and mostly young, is made to represent all white people, and that is grossly inaccurate. White people are so much more varied than the blog implies, and the people described therein simply as 'white people' or 'whiter people' (whatever that means) are a small and unrepresentative segment. Yet they are made to stand for all white people. What is the message behind that? It could be that the blogger is himself part of that group, and feels more comfortable aiming barbs at his own group, or it may be that the blogger is part of that group and, having had contact mostly with that rather ingrown group, really considers them to be representative of the white race.
Is the blogger secretly pro-white and politically incorrect? Some claim this to be so, but I'm not convinced. The commenters (and there are many) all seem to see something different in the blog: some see it as an indictment of liberal political correctness, while others think, seemingly, that the satire of liberal young whites is meant to discredit them, deservedly. Some seem to think that the blog is rather anti-white, and therefore hip, since anti-whiteness is hip these days. Most of the young (white) people in my vicinity seem to think that anything which humiliates or caricatures whites is high hilarity, and well-deserved by whites.
The approach of the blog is successful, certainly, in terms of the traffic it draws, and the attention it has gotten. The blogger has also obtained a sweet book deal. However, I think the quality of the comments leaves much to be desired; I don't enjoy reading the comment threads at all.
Nevertheless, despite the uneasy feeling the blog evokes in me, the post in question makes some good points about white people (I would say liberal, PC white people) and their exasperating habit of taking offense on the behalf of their non-white 'wards'. Or should I say their non-white charges? Clients? My previous blog entry about 'The White liberals' burden' relates to this habit of theirs. They are so caught up in being the advocates or self-designated protectors or champions of minorities that they react as if they themselves are wounded when they perceive any slight or slur against their dependent clients, non-whites.
For some whites, specifically liberal/leftist PC whites, their protectiveness of nonwhites extends as far as wanting to adopt them, literally, and thus make non-whites part of their literal family, under their tutelage and protection. Is this a God complex? A desire to be the Savior or saint? For many liberals, their political and social belief system is a substitute for a non-existent religious faith, and in the cases where the liberal is actually a churchgoer, they affiliate with a church which serves their liberal agenda, so their social gospel beliefs are the center of their religious practices.
But just as with all the other manifestations of this attitude, this taking of offense on behalf of others is condescension, and it should be seen as somewhat of an affront to the one who is supposedly the target of the offense, real or imagined.
Taking offense for somebody else assumes that the person supposedly being defended cannot judge for himself when offense has been given, or that he is unable to speak up for himself, being either too ignorant or inarticulate -- too childlike.
I suppose a more generous assessment of these self-righteous liberals is that they have so fully identified with the minority groups that they truly do take offense at some careless word or phrase, feeling personally wounded by it. Even if that is the case, however, it's still unnatural and rather weird. There is a significant sub-group of (mostly young) white people who seem to have convinced themselves that they are non-white, adopting the styles, speech habits, and tastes of non-whites, usually blacks. I have always found that behavior somewhat embarrassing; I feel embarrassed for the whites who try their best to appear non-white. There are many manifestations of this; we see a lot of it on college campuses with young liberals sporting dreadlocks, piercings, and tribal tattoos, who get involved in drumming or other multiculti 'arts'. And there are those who dress in thug style and listen only to rap or other black styles of music. There are those who wear kaffiyehs, in solidarity with Palestinians.
It's not a new phenomenon; back when I was in college, however, whites who wanted to be non-white usually chose to be 'Native American' but apparently that has fallen from popularity somewhat, although Ward Churchill has stayed true to his calling to white Indianhood all these years.
In the 1970s there was a comedy movie, 'Made For Each Other,' in which actor Joseph Bologna, playing a confused young Italian-American man, goes to college and takes up black militancy, and harangues his baffled Italian-American parents about the wrongs done by 'whitey.'
I found that scene especially laughable in the context of today, wherein such attitudes among liberal young people are not as incredible as they appeared when the movie was first shown. There are plenty of young liberal whites who have been convinced by years of indoctrination at school, by the media, and by their deluded peers, that whiteness is a mark of Cain. It's these young people who are out marching alongside illegal Latinos, throwing projectiles at their white elders and calling them names. It's these who are trying to assuage their guilt and attain redemption from the stain of whiteness by swooning over Obama, listening to rap music, dating interracially -- and excoriating anybody who utters a politically incorrect word.
These people are not so much something to be laughed at or about; they are the scourge of anyone who wishes to practice free speech and to utter truth. We all complain about the controlled, PC media, and about our one-world, globalist ideologue politicians, but a bigger part of our problem is that the professional offense-takers, those who have made it their personal crusade to censure and vilify those they disagree with. This 'democratic censorship' only makes the job of the thought police that much easier. At this point, people are more or less being kept in line by these PC vigilantes who will make a citizen's arrest, as it were, of those who utter heresies. The result is a much more cautious conversation among people in general; many of us have to censor our speech closely or risk having someone publicly condemn any forbidden thought we express out loud.
The offense-takers are a plague in our society.
Yet they are our own people -- aren't they? Or by their willful choice to side with everybody but their own, have they in effect renounced their citizenship among whites? These days I am inclined to say the latter. They won't own any connection with people like me because they see us as the enemy; so be it.
Maybe interracial adoption isn't such a bad thing; those who have chosen to identify with others, and only with others, should be adopted into their chosen group and make their home there, instead of staying behind to antagonize and work against their biological kin.
Labels: Cultural Marxism, Ethnic Identity, Ethnic Solidarity, Free Speech, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Treason
0 comment Wednesday, September 3, 2014 | admin
Blogger ''Jetbrane'' at the Iron Ink blog muses on the coming demographic turning point, the predicted loss of our majority status in 2042. He quotes a line of dialogue from the movie 'Braveheart':
The trouble with Scotland is that it�s full of Scots�.If we can�t get them out, we�ll breed them out."
apparently spoken by King Edward 'Longshanks' in the movie. Whether he actually said such a thing in real life I don't know; I do know Hollywood, and even 'conservative' Mel Gibson sometimes puts words in the mouths of historical personages that may or may not be established as words they actually spoke.
Assuming Edward said this, or harbored sentiments along those lines, it is certain that our present-day rulers, who have the temerity to pretend that 'representative government' still exists, do in fact harbor the intent to replace us or 'breed us out'.
So Jetbrane's analogy is an apt one. He continues:
Part of the theme of Braveheart was the will of the Scottish people to retain their own unique ethnic identity over against the attempt by the English to destroy Scottish culture and ethnicity. This is a theme that is likewise picked up in the film "Rob Roy." I�ll venture to guess that when most people viewed these films they were outraged by the attempt of the English to squash Scottish identity, ethnicity and culture as it was depicted in the film.
The attempted destruction of a set people and culture may raise the ire of movie goers but it seemingly barely raises the blood pressure of Americans as life imitates art in America.''
He makes reference to the recent report of the dwindling numbers among the White majority, and our looming loss of majority status in 2042. As he says, this coming change is not an accident or the result of some freak occurrence, but is an engineered, deliberate transformation of America, produced by collusion between government and the schools (government-run) and lately, by our mainline churches -- and even now, by some formerly conservative churches which have become infatuated with the liberal 'emergent' church movement.
And of course the faceless 'globalist' manipulators are the force at the center of it all.
It�s an odd thing that many Christians can watch Braveheart and cheer like wild when the Scots defeat the English attempt to crush their ethnicity and culture, and yet they get all contemptuous when some Americans desire to keep their ethnic and cultural identity accusing them of silly things like racism. Similarly, people would have understood that any ending of Braveheart where the Scots lose their ethnic, cultural and national identity would have been unsatisfactory but yet they have no problem with the prospect of America losing its ethnic, cultural and national identity.''
Amen to that. I also find it passing odd; I cannot understand how people can have become so utterly captured by this PC, one-world ideology in such a short time.
In the time of William Wallace, of course it was not some kind of sinister, worldwide plan as it appears to be now; it was simply the usual struggles over territory and power.
But as to why the many Americans wildly cheer on Braveheart and the Scots defeating the stereotypically-evil 'Saxons' while obtusely remaining blind to the obvious parallels with what is happening to us today, I can't quite explain.
Maybe some of you who have seen the movie Braveheart can clarify this for me: in the movie, was it made clear that 'Braveheart' Wallace was actually fighting to preserve his kin, his heritage, his birthright? Or was it shown as simply a battle for an abstract ideal like 'freedom'?
I have seen many promos for the movie, with Braveheart, face painted blue, bellowing ''Freedom!!!' The impression I got from that image is that maybe the movie soft-pedals the angle of fighting for one's people, hearth and home and heritage, while emphasizing that Braveheart was willing to fight or die for 'Freedom!' rather than blood and soil.
If I am wrong, I am confident some of you will correct me.
Even if the movie did not present the struggle between the Scots and the English this way, I have a suspicion than many historically illiterate Americans would read it this way nonetheless. We have been fed so much of this abstract proposition stuff that we seem to think that our country came into existence solely on that basis, and that all of our forefathers shed their blood and died in past wars solely for abstract ideas like 'Freedom!' or, (perish the thought) 'democracy' rather than for kin, home, hearth, and posterity.
I truly think that the idea of a nation consisting of a people tied mostly by blood and birth, and only incidentally by ideas and ideals, is a foreign one to many Americans today, especially those born after the P.C. reign began.
So now we have a populace who can bristle with indignation over the plight of Braveheart's Scots, threatened with loss of their land and possibly their very existence as a people, yet somehow these Americans cannot perceive any analogy to their own situation.
One more side note about how Americans seem to have embraced the Braveheart movie, cheering on the Scots against the 'villainous' Sassenachs: maybe because of our own Revolutionary struggle against the British, many Americans are inclined to see the British as villains in these historical movies. And the fact that most such movies portray the English as foppish, effete scoundrels does not help much, either.
I think it fairly likely that, of an average Braveheart audience, most of the people watching (who were probably nearly all White, I would wager) who were cheering the defeat of the English were themselves likely to be of more English ancestry than Scots. But somehow the English end up being the side we cheer against. It's ironic. Is this just part of our somewhat knee-jerk sympathies for the 'underdog'? I think it's a dangerous tendency to automatically assume that the 'underdog' is the good guy, and that sympathy of ours is no small part of our suffering millions of immigrants to overrun us. We see them as the poor underdogs, and maybe we feel it would be ungallant of us to treat them sternly. It might appear much like beating up on a weakling, so we try to be magnanimous and treat them as unthreatening objects of charity.
I am descended from people on both sides of the conflict shown in Braveheart; I am not anti-Scots in any way. I love Scottish culture and the Scots people I have met. I just wish that we needn't villainize the English in the process of showing these historical struggles. The Scots and the English are really near cousins, as recent DNA studies have shown. We should not have to pick a side; they are all our kin.
But back to the blog entry. In the comments following, the usual arguments about how 'White' is not an ethnicity, unlike Scots, are made. And also the argument about 'cultural adoption' by immigrants: if the brown-skinned folk who are coming to take our places can adopt our culture, where's the problem?
The discussion never reaches the conclusion, as I have, that race or ethnicity and culture are intertwined, but it's a somewhat interesting discussion nonetheless.
One commenter somewhat grudgingly says 'American' may be an ethnicity but that we are too young to be a 'race'. At least the commenter does not say that 'race' is only a social construct, but that's rather faint praise.
We have to somehow surmount this common notion that it's somehow abhorrent or radical to assert that Americans are an ethnicity or that any mention of the White race being somehow part of American identity is verboten. There is no escaping the fact that the founding stock of this country was White and that they were conscious of that fact, and that they were predominantly of English, or more broadly, British descent.
The truth is never 'racist'. It just is.
It should not have to be so difficult to get more Americans to see what is glaringly obvious about our demographic jeopardy, but the indoctrination has been so thorough and so characterized by propaganda overkill, that it will be an uphill struggle, to say the least.
The trouble with Scotland is that it�s full of Scots�.If we can�t get them out, we�ll breed them out."
apparently spoken by King Edward 'Longshanks' in the movie. Whether he actually said such a thing in real life I don't know; I do know Hollywood, and even 'conservative' Mel Gibson sometimes puts words in the mouths of historical personages that may or may not be established as words they actually spoke.
Assuming Edward said this, or harbored sentiments along those lines, it is certain that our present-day rulers, who have the temerity to pretend that 'representative government' still exists, do in fact harbor the intent to replace us or 'breed us out'.
So Jetbrane's analogy is an apt one. He continues:
Part of the theme of Braveheart was the will of the Scottish people to retain their own unique ethnic identity over against the attempt by the English to destroy Scottish culture and ethnicity. This is a theme that is likewise picked up in the film "Rob Roy." I�ll venture to guess that when most people viewed these films they were outraged by the attempt of the English to squash Scottish identity, ethnicity and culture as it was depicted in the film.
The attempted destruction of a set people and culture may raise the ire of movie goers but it seemingly barely raises the blood pressure of Americans as life imitates art in America.''
He makes reference to the recent report of the dwindling numbers among the White majority, and our looming loss of majority status in 2042. As he says, this coming change is not an accident or the result of some freak occurrence, but is an engineered, deliberate transformation of America, produced by collusion between government and the schools (government-run) and lately, by our mainline churches -- and even now, by some formerly conservative churches which have become infatuated with the liberal 'emergent' church movement.
And of course the faceless 'globalist' manipulators are the force at the center of it all.
It�s an odd thing that many Christians can watch Braveheart and cheer like wild when the Scots defeat the English attempt to crush their ethnicity and culture, and yet they get all contemptuous when some Americans desire to keep their ethnic and cultural identity accusing them of silly things like racism. Similarly, people would have understood that any ending of Braveheart where the Scots lose their ethnic, cultural and national identity would have been unsatisfactory but yet they have no problem with the prospect of America losing its ethnic, cultural and national identity.''
Amen to that. I also find it passing odd; I cannot understand how people can have become so utterly captured by this PC, one-world ideology in such a short time.
In the time of William Wallace, of course it was not some kind of sinister, worldwide plan as it appears to be now; it was simply the usual struggles over territory and power.
But as to why the many Americans wildly cheer on Braveheart and the Scots defeating the stereotypically-evil 'Saxons' while obtusely remaining blind to the obvious parallels with what is happening to us today, I can't quite explain.
Maybe some of you who have seen the movie Braveheart can clarify this for me: in the movie, was it made clear that 'Braveheart' Wallace was actually fighting to preserve his kin, his heritage, his birthright? Or was it shown as simply a battle for an abstract ideal like 'freedom'?
I have seen many promos for the movie, with Braveheart, face painted blue, bellowing ''Freedom!!!' The impression I got from that image is that maybe the movie soft-pedals the angle of fighting for one's people, hearth and home and heritage, while emphasizing that Braveheart was willing to fight or die for 'Freedom!' rather than blood and soil.
If I am wrong, I am confident some of you will correct me.
Even if the movie did not present the struggle between the Scots and the English this way, I have a suspicion than many historically illiterate Americans would read it this way nonetheless. We have been fed so much of this abstract proposition stuff that we seem to think that our country came into existence solely on that basis, and that all of our forefathers shed their blood and died in past wars solely for abstract ideas like 'Freedom!' or, (perish the thought) 'democracy' rather than for kin, home, hearth, and posterity.
I truly think that the idea of a nation consisting of a people tied mostly by blood and birth, and only incidentally by ideas and ideals, is a foreign one to many Americans today, especially those born after the P.C. reign began.
So now we have a populace who can bristle with indignation over the plight of Braveheart's Scots, threatened with loss of their land and possibly their very existence as a people, yet somehow these Americans cannot perceive any analogy to their own situation.
One more side note about how Americans seem to have embraced the Braveheart movie, cheering on the Scots against the 'villainous' Sassenachs: maybe because of our own Revolutionary struggle against the British, many Americans are inclined to see the British as villains in these historical movies. And the fact that most such movies portray the English as foppish, effete scoundrels does not help much, either.
I think it fairly likely that, of an average Braveheart audience, most of the people watching (who were probably nearly all White, I would wager) who were cheering the defeat of the English were themselves likely to be of more English ancestry than Scots. But somehow the English end up being the side we cheer against. It's ironic. Is this just part of our somewhat knee-jerk sympathies for the 'underdog'? I think it's a dangerous tendency to automatically assume that the 'underdog' is the good guy, and that sympathy of ours is no small part of our suffering millions of immigrants to overrun us. We see them as the poor underdogs, and maybe we feel it would be ungallant of us to treat them sternly. It might appear much like beating up on a weakling, so we try to be magnanimous and treat them as unthreatening objects of charity.
I am descended from people on both sides of the conflict shown in Braveheart; I am not anti-Scots in any way. I love Scottish culture and the Scots people I have met. I just wish that we needn't villainize the English in the process of showing these historical struggles. The Scots and the English are really near cousins, as recent DNA studies have shown. We should not have to pick a side; they are all our kin.
But back to the blog entry. In the comments following, the usual arguments about how 'White' is not an ethnicity, unlike Scots, are made. And also the argument about 'cultural adoption' by immigrants: if the brown-skinned folk who are coming to take our places can adopt our culture, where's the problem?
The discussion never reaches the conclusion, as I have, that race or ethnicity and culture are intertwined, but it's a somewhat interesting discussion nonetheless.
One commenter somewhat grudgingly says 'American' may be an ethnicity but that we are too young to be a 'race'. At least the commenter does not say that 'race' is only a social construct, but that's rather faint praise.
We have to somehow surmount this common notion that it's somehow abhorrent or radical to assert that Americans are an ethnicity or that any mention of the White race being somehow part of American identity is verboten. There is no escaping the fact that the founding stock of this country was White and that they were conscious of that fact, and that they were predominantly of English, or more broadly, British descent.
The truth is never 'racist'. It just is.
It should not have to be so difficult to get more Americans to see what is glaringly obvious about our demographic jeopardy, but the indoctrination has been so thorough and so characterized by propaganda overkill, that it will be an uphill struggle, to say the least.
Labels: American Identity, Demographics, Displacement, Ethnic Differences, Ethnic Identity, History, Political Correctness
0 comment Thursday, July 24, 2014 | admin
It seems the liberals have belatedly discovered that race does matter.
On a recent thread here, the subject of interracial adoptions came up, and coincidentally, foreign, interracial adoptions are in the spotlight. And as usual, whitey is the guilty party in any problems associated with this practice:
Halted foreign adoptions leave would-be parents in limbo
...Guatemala announced this month that it would conduct a case-by-case review of every pending foreign adoption case. That put on hold the adoption plans of about 2,000 American families.
The crackdown comes amid reports that some in Guatemala coerce mothers to relinquish their children for adoption -- or steal the children outright and present them as orphans.
Similar accusations have arisen in Vietnam.
After the United States accused adoption agencies there of corruption and baby-selling, Vietnam said in April that it would no longer allow adoptions to the United States.
"My husband and I were absolutely devastated," Teresinski said. "Adoptive parents have put a lot of emotional energy and a lot of financial resources in the process."
Vietnam's decision affects several hundred families.
Families in the United States adopted 4,728 children from Guatemala and 828 from Vietnam last year.
The halt in adoptions from those two nations unfolds against the backdrop of a dramatic rise in international adoptions in the United States.
The number of foreign-born children adopted by U.S. families more than tripled from 1990 to 2004, when it reached a high of 22,884, though the figure has declined slightly each year since.
In 2007, the U.S. granted visas to 19,613 children so they could join an adoptive family in the United States, according to U.S. State Department figures. About 70 percent of those children came from four countries: China, Guatemala, Russia and Ethiopia.''
I live in a (to date) non-diverse small town. Foreign adoptions, mostly from the countries mentioned above, seem to be quite the trend among the conspicuously altruistic. Adopting a child from a Third World country is the thing to do in certain sets, and the more exotic, the better.
It seems there is little consideration given to the question of how the children will adapt, or fit in, and how they will identify among a group of people unlike themselves.
And then there's the matter of how the demographics of a small town will be affected by growing numbers of people of different races. Will there be conflicts as they reach adulthood, or will the kumbaya spirit prevail? Given our trend these days toward ethnic splintering, the presence of many adoptees of various races will only contribute to the confusion and the division.
This news story has to do with the question: Do whites need training before parenting black children?
NEW YORK (AP) -- Several leading child welfare groups Tuesday urged an overhaul of federal laws dealing with transracial adoption, arguing that black children in foster care are ill-served by a "colorblind" approach meant to encourage their adoption by white families.
[...]
Of the black children adopted out of foster care, about 20 percent are adopted by white families. The Donaldson report said current federal law, by stressing color blindness, deters child welfare agencies from assessing families' readiness to adopt transracially or preparing them for the distinctive challenges they might face.
"There is a higher rate of problems in minority foster children adopted transracially than in-race," said the report. "All children deserve to be raised in families that respect their cultural heritage."
For once, I actually agree with the 'experts' in the article, although I suspect my reasons are different. It is not that inept, clueless Whitey is too innately racist and insensitive to properly 'respect the cultural heritage' of any black or other non-white children they adopt or foster. It's simply that people are not interchangeable, and babies and children probably fare best with people like themselves, ideally.
Children in cross-racial adoptions tend to have identity issues, and those who are biracial have further problems, as witness this adoptee's account.
Because I felt that I did not belong to any group, my confidence eroded. I was ashamed and embarrassed when people discussed race or when they wanted to know about my family. I was confused because I did not understand my biracial background and did not have the support of my natural parents to help me understand my heritage. Instead of believing in myself, my abilities and my intelligence, as I had in high school, I became withdrawn. I did not readily participate in class or take part in extra-curricular activities because of my insecurity and confusion about my racial identity. Although I learned that we simply do not live in a "color blind" world, I felt that I had no one to turn to in order to help me understand what it meant to be an African-American man in our society.''
This webpage gives a history of transracial adoptions in America. Interestingly, blacks have been opposed in many cases to whites adopting blacks:
The debate about transracial adoption changed course in 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a statement that took "a vehement stand against the placements of black children in white homes for any reason," calling transracial adoption "unnatural," "artificial," "unnecessary," and proof that African-Americans continued to be assigned to "chattel status." The organization was so committed to the position that black children�s healthy development depended on having black parents that its President, Cenie J. Williams, argued that temporary foster and even institutional placements were preferable to adoption by white families. This opposition slowed black-white adoptions to a trickle. In 1973, the Child Welfare League of America adoption standards, which had been revised in 1968 to make them slightly friendlier to transracial adoption, were rewritten to clarify that same-race placements were always better. The child welfare establishment never supported transracial adoptions.
A number of new agencies, staffed almost entirely by African Americans, such as Homes for Black Children in Detroit and Harlem-Dowling Children�s Service in New York, renewed the effort that had started in the late 1940s and 1950s to find black homes for black children. In spite of successful efforts to boost the numbers of black adoptive families, objections to whites adopting African-American children were never translated into law. Minority group rights to children were legally enforceable only in the case of Native American children, and only after the 1978 passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Since 1972, the numbers of black-white adoptions have declined, but this may have as much to do with stubborn private preferences and prejudices among white adopters as with organized opposition or public policies that created new barriers to transracial placements.''
This piece depicts the popular celebrity trend of adopting Third World children as just another manifestation of -- as usual, racism. And colonialism.
The white Madonna's burden
In the May issue of Vanity Fair, there was a telling exchange between its cover star Madonna �- resplendent in leotard and black knee�length boots �- and her interviewer, Rich Cohen.
They were talking about David Banda, the child adopted by Madonna in Malawi in 2006. Understandably, Madonna is gushing about her adopted son and everything that he "represents". And what is that, exactly? Cohen explains: baby David is a "living totem of life as it was lived before machines".
In other words, he�s a simple, wide�eyed, primitive being who helps to remind Madonna about what is really important in life as she jets from one photo�shoot and session recording to another. Cohen compares David to Pocahontas, "the beautiful Indian girl found in wild America", and says that for "bringing this boy into her house and giving him everything", Madonna has got "something in return": a child who symbolises a wilder, more earthy, gritty way of life, who comes from a time "before machines".
[...]
Madonna does not only want her own little black baby to remind her of the simplicity of life -� she also seems keen to save the whole of Africa. As one British commentator put it, she is treating the entire continent as "a little orphan that needs adopting".
[...]
There is something creepily colonialist in Madonna�s attitude to Africa. First we had the White Man�s Burden -� now we have the White Madonna�s Burden. More and more celebrities are treating Africa as a wide-eyed child that needs a Hollywood hug -� or as a wicked devil that needs a Hollywood hammering.
[...]
There is something Kiplingesque in this celebrity swarming of Africa. Kipling branded colonial subjects on the dark continent as "half�devil and half�child" �- and today that old poisonous prejudice finds expression in the celebrity view of Africa as a child that must be adopted (Malawi) or as a devil that must be punished (Sudan). Africans once resisted the armies of colonialism; now they should consider resisting the armies of celebrities, camera crews, make-up artists and hairstylists who are seeking to turn Africa into a stage for celebrity expressions of cheap moral bombast.''
It's incredible but predictable that the liberals and leftists cannot or will not see the condescension and paternalism in their racial do-gooding, their conspicuous trans-racial altruism.
Madonna is in all respects a quintessential liberal, as are the other 'diversity'-obsessed celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Bono, Bob Geldof, and all the rest. In no way are they connected to Kipling or colonialism or 'racism', unless you are honest enough to call the liberal racial meddling pro-minority racism of a sort, which it could be seen to be.
Implicit in their constant bleating about poor Darfur or the downtrodden wretched of the earth, who are forever in need of our help, is the idea that these people are indeed perpetual children, who have not reached an adult stage of development. Adulthood is characterized by independence and self-sufficiency.
Kipling's terminology which the writer sanctimoniously calls 'that old poisonous prejudice' simply expressed, with no sentimentality and cloying condescension, what most liberals actually, deep down, think about the Third World peoples.
Clearly, liberal westerners, whites, believe that the other races are incapable of taking care of themselves, hence they are in need of constant infusions of money and other aid from us in order to survive. And if we decline to intervene and make things all right for these benighted people, we are guilty of racism, genocide, or whatever term of opprobrium they deem useful to instill guilt.
If liberals, for a moment, believed the Third Worlders to be our equals, they would surely be content to leave them to their own devices -- wouldn't they? Obviously they view non-whites as children in need of a handout, not a hand up, in need of our supervision and assistance in everything.
Instead of admitting this upfront, they ascribe this attitude to the realists, who will say openly that the races are not equal in capacity for self-sufficiency. We all agree on that; it's just that those of us who say it frankly are condemned as 'racists' or 'bigots' or 'colonialists.' Well, if we must be permanently involved in the affairs of the Third World, why not just re-institute colonial rule?
And as for the attitudes of Madonna and her celebrity friends being 'Kiplingesque', that's an undeserved compliment, not an insult, as the writer intends it to be. If only Madonna and the other Hollywood do-gooding dilettantes were Kiplingesque. If only our leaders were Kiplingesque. Kipling was a man with good sense about people and their differences, a quality we seem to have lost beyond recovery in our day.
...This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf --
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
On a recent thread here, the subject of interracial adoptions came up, and coincidentally, foreign, interracial adoptions are in the spotlight. And as usual, whitey is the guilty party in any problems associated with this practice:
Halted foreign adoptions leave would-be parents in limbo
...Guatemala announced this month that it would conduct a case-by-case review of every pending foreign adoption case. That put on hold the adoption plans of about 2,000 American families.
The crackdown comes amid reports that some in Guatemala coerce mothers to relinquish their children for adoption -- or steal the children outright and present them as orphans.
Similar accusations have arisen in Vietnam.
After the United States accused adoption agencies there of corruption and baby-selling, Vietnam said in April that it would no longer allow adoptions to the United States.
"My husband and I were absolutely devastated," Teresinski said. "Adoptive parents have put a lot of emotional energy and a lot of financial resources in the process."
Vietnam's decision affects several hundred families.
Families in the United States adopted 4,728 children from Guatemala and 828 from Vietnam last year.
The halt in adoptions from those two nations unfolds against the backdrop of a dramatic rise in international adoptions in the United States.
The number of foreign-born children adopted by U.S. families more than tripled from 1990 to 2004, when it reached a high of 22,884, though the figure has declined slightly each year since.
In 2007, the U.S. granted visas to 19,613 children so they could join an adoptive family in the United States, according to U.S. State Department figures. About 70 percent of those children came from four countries: China, Guatemala, Russia and Ethiopia.''
I live in a (to date) non-diverse small town. Foreign adoptions, mostly from the countries mentioned above, seem to be quite the trend among the conspicuously altruistic. Adopting a child from a Third World country is the thing to do in certain sets, and the more exotic, the better.
It seems there is little consideration given to the question of how the children will adapt, or fit in, and how they will identify among a group of people unlike themselves.
And then there's the matter of how the demographics of a small town will be affected by growing numbers of people of different races. Will there be conflicts as they reach adulthood, or will the kumbaya spirit prevail? Given our trend these days toward ethnic splintering, the presence of many adoptees of various races will only contribute to the confusion and the division.
This news story has to do with the question: Do whites need training before parenting black children?
NEW YORK (AP) -- Several leading child welfare groups Tuesday urged an overhaul of federal laws dealing with transracial adoption, arguing that black children in foster care are ill-served by a "colorblind" approach meant to encourage their adoption by white families.
[...]
Of the black children adopted out of foster care, about 20 percent are adopted by white families. The Donaldson report said current federal law, by stressing color blindness, deters child welfare agencies from assessing families' readiness to adopt transracially or preparing them for the distinctive challenges they might face.
"There is a higher rate of problems in minority foster children adopted transracially than in-race," said the report. "All children deserve to be raised in families that respect their cultural heritage."
For once, I actually agree with the 'experts' in the article, although I suspect my reasons are different. It is not that inept, clueless Whitey is too innately racist and insensitive to properly 'respect the cultural heritage' of any black or other non-white children they adopt or foster. It's simply that people are not interchangeable, and babies and children probably fare best with people like themselves, ideally.
Children in cross-racial adoptions tend to have identity issues, and those who are biracial have further problems, as witness this adoptee's account.
Because I felt that I did not belong to any group, my confidence eroded. I was ashamed and embarrassed when people discussed race or when they wanted to know about my family. I was confused because I did not understand my biracial background and did not have the support of my natural parents to help me understand my heritage. Instead of believing in myself, my abilities and my intelligence, as I had in high school, I became withdrawn. I did not readily participate in class or take part in extra-curricular activities because of my insecurity and confusion about my racial identity. Although I learned that we simply do not live in a "color blind" world, I felt that I had no one to turn to in order to help me understand what it meant to be an African-American man in our society.''
This webpage gives a history of transracial adoptions in America. Interestingly, blacks have been opposed in many cases to whites adopting blacks:
The debate about transracial adoption changed course in 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a statement that took "a vehement stand against the placements of black children in white homes for any reason," calling transracial adoption "unnatural," "artificial," "unnecessary," and proof that African-Americans continued to be assigned to "chattel status." The organization was so committed to the position that black children�s healthy development depended on having black parents that its President, Cenie J. Williams, argued that temporary foster and even institutional placements were preferable to adoption by white families. This opposition slowed black-white adoptions to a trickle. In 1973, the Child Welfare League of America adoption standards, which had been revised in 1968 to make them slightly friendlier to transracial adoption, were rewritten to clarify that same-race placements were always better. The child welfare establishment never supported transracial adoptions.
A number of new agencies, staffed almost entirely by African Americans, such as Homes for Black Children in Detroit and Harlem-Dowling Children�s Service in New York, renewed the effort that had started in the late 1940s and 1950s to find black homes for black children. In spite of successful efforts to boost the numbers of black adoptive families, objections to whites adopting African-American children were never translated into law. Minority group rights to children were legally enforceable only in the case of Native American children, and only after the 1978 passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Since 1972, the numbers of black-white adoptions have declined, but this may have as much to do with stubborn private preferences and prejudices among white adopters as with organized opposition or public policies that created new barriers to transracial placements.''
This piece depicts the popular celebrity trend of adopting Third World children as just another manifestation of -- as usual, racism. And colonialism.
The white Madonna's burden
In the May issue of Vanity Fair, there was a telling exchange between its cover star Madonna �- resplendent in leotard and black knee�length boots �- and her interviewer, Rich Cohen.
They were talking about David Banda, the child adopted by Madonna in Malawi in 2006. Understandably, Madonna is gushing about her adopted son and everything that he "represents". And what is that, exactly? Cohen explains: baby David is a "living totem of life as it was lived before machines".
In other words, he�s a simple, wide�eyed, primitive being who helps to remind Madonna about what is really important in life as she jets from one photo�shoot and session recording to another. Cohen compares David to Pocahontas, "the beautiful Indian girl found in wild America", and says that for "bringing this boy into her house and giving him everything", Madonna has got "something in return": a child who symbolises a wilder, more earthy, gritty way of life, who comes from a time "before machines".
[...]
Madonna does not only want her own little black baby to remind her of the simplicity of life -� she also seems keen to save the whole of Africa. As one British commentator put it, she is treating the entire continent as "a little orphan that needs adopting".
[...]
There is something creepily colonialist in Madonna�s attitude to Africa. First we had the White Man�s Burden -� now we have the White Madonna�s Burden. More and more celebrities are treating Africa as a wide-eyed child that needs a Hollywood hug -� or as a wicked devil that needs a Hollywood hammering.
[...]
There is something Kiplingesque in this celebrity swarming of Africa. Kipling branded colonial subjects on the dark continent as "half�devil and half�child" �- and today that old poisonous prejudice finds expression in the celebrity view of Africa as a child that must be adopted (Malawi) or as a devil that must be punished (Sudan). Africans once resisted the armies of colonialism; now they should consider resisting the armies of celebrities, camera crews, make-up artists and hairstylists who are seeking to turn Africa into a stage for celebrity expressions of cheap moral bombast.''
It's incredible but predictable that the liberals and leftists cannot or will not see the condescension and paternalism in their racial do-gooding, their conspicuous trans-racial altruism.
Madonna is in all respects a quintessential liberal, as are the other 'diversity'-obsessed celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Bono, Bob Geldof, and all the rest. In no way are they connected to Kipling or colonialism or 'racism', unless you are honest enough to call the liberal racial meddling pro-minority racism of a sort, which it could be seen to be.
Implicit in their constant bleating about poor Darfur or the downtrodden wretched of the earth, who are forever in need of our help, is the idea that these people are indeed perpetual children, who have not reached an adult stage of development. Adulthood is characterized by independence and self-sufficiency.
Kipling's terminology which the writer sanctimoniously calls 'that old poisonous prejudice' simply expressed, with no sentimentality and cloying condescension, what most liberals actually, deep down, think about the Third World peoples.
Clearly, liberal westerners, whites, believe that the other races are incapable of taking care of themselves, hence they are in need of constant infusions of money and other aid from us in order to survive. And if we decline to intervene and make things all right for these benighted people, we are guilty of racism, genocide, or whatever term of opprobrium they deem useful to instill guilt.
If liberals, for a moment, believed the Third Worlders to be our equals, they would surely be content to leave them to their own devices -- wouldn't they? Obviously they view non-whites as children in need of a handout, not a hand up, in need of our supervision and assistance in everything.
Instead of admitting this upfront, they ascribe this attitude to the realists, who will say openly that the races are not equal in capacity for self-sufficiency. We all agree on that; it's just that those of us who say it frankly are condemned as 'racists' or 'bigots' or 'colonialists.' Well, if we must be permanently involved in the affairs of the Third World, why not just re-institute colonial rule?
And as for the attitudes of Madonna and her celebrity friends being 'Kiplingesque', that's an undeserved compliment, not an insult, as the writer intends it to be. If only Madonna and the other Hollywood do-gooding dilettantes were Kiplingesque. If only our leaders were Kiplingesque. Kipling was a man with good sense about people and their differences, a quality we seem to have lost beyond recovery in our day.
...This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf --
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
Labels: Ethnic Identity, Liberalism, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Racial Guilt, Third World
0 comment Saturday, July 5, 2014 | admin
Do women have stronger same-race dating preferences than men?
According to a study cited in this piece, it appears so.
I am not a scientist, so some of the details of the study are a little technical for me, but it appears that the people in this study were Columbia University graduate students (and that already makes the sample rather atypical) and they were of all races.
A frequent observation (or complaint, depending on the viewpoint of the speaker) is that White women are more prone to date and mate outside their race, as compared to White men. Just in observing couples around the country, it does seem that there is more of this interracial pairing, but it is still, in overall numbers, not that common. But it does seem to be increasing, and no surprise there, given the media's constant promoting of racial mingling.
Overall, though, I've seen far more White male-nonwhite female pairings than vice-versa. And this is a longstanding trend, going back long before the present PC era, when it was far from unknown for White men to marry nonwhite women (Latina, American Indian, or Filipina).
After World War II, the Asian war bride phenomenon was not uncommon.
It does seem that men are more programmed to mate with women they are physically attracted to, and many men do not discriminate when it comes to the primal urges. Women tend to think more long-term with relationships -- often to the chagrin of men -- and will evaluate men as potential husbands rather than just on the basis of sexual attraction.
With men, the trend of mail-order brides is growing, it seems, as discussed here.
When I was a child, there were Asian 'war brides' married to White American men who had served in Korea, Japan, or elsewhere in Asia. I had classmates who had Irish-American or Anglo-American dads and Japanese mothers. It seemed especially common for men who served in the military to marry Filipina women or East Asian women. In some parts of the country, White men not infrequently married Latina women or American Indian women. And this, remember, was in an era where interracial marriage was generally frowned on, if not outright forbidden. But there has always been a stronger taboo against black-White marriages or pairings.
By contrast, I rarely if ever encountered White women married to nonwhite men of any race, with the occasional exception of a Hispanic male-White female or in some areas, American Indian male-White female marriage. But by far, most interracial marriages appeared to be White men with various nonwhite women: Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic or American Indian.
I still think these pairings are more common than any form of black-White pairing. So I do think it's a little unfair to blame women excessively for lack of racial/ethnic fidelity.
Many men who seek out mail-order brides from various parts of Asia and the Pacific blame feminism for their choosing to marry an exotic woman. I think this is in many cases a rationalization for their personal preference for these exotic women. Some term the preference as a 'fetish' and I would say that isn't too strong a word.
Is feminism to blame? Certainly feminism has not improved understanding between the sexes; arguably it has worsened the battle of the sexes in Western countries. But to be fair, not all women are feminists; I often say that feminism has spread to the right, with many 'conservative' women sounding like Gloria Steinem, but traditional women have not disappeared completely. Likewise, I think it is an inaccurate stereotype that the Asian-Pacific women are all frail little lotus blossoms. I've worked with some who are decidedly assertive women, not at all demure and retiring, despite the popular image.
But if a man really wants to maintain racial integrity and fidelity, he would not be inclined to choose a woman of such a racially disparate origin.
As for the women who date or mate interracially, these days, given the 'colorblind' dogma of liberalism, and the fact that most women are politically liberal, it isn't surprising that many women date interracially. Women, unfortunately, tend to be vulnerable to an appeal to their sympathies and their nurturing side. 'Victimhood' awakens the softer feelings of some women. But most importantly, most women don't want to be called 'racist' -- which, trust me, they are called by nonwhites whose advances are not welcomed. The race card is usually played very early on and many weak-minded women give in when the r-word is thrown at them.
It seems to me to be an unfair tactic to use in approaching someone of the opposite sex but it does happen.
Nowadays, choosing to stay within one's own race or ethnicity is increasingly portrayed as 'bigoted' and racist. But it's generally acknowledged that people tend to pair up with those who have commonalities and similarities; the idea that 'opposites attract' is overrated. Men and women by their respective natures sometimes have a difficult time understanding each other; why add ethnic/cultural misunderstanding, racial grievances and guilts, and historical resentments to the inbuilt male-female conflicts?
In the 1957 movie Sayonara, which was really all about interracial love, and the 'star-crossed', misunderstood qualities thereof, the message was that ultimately, love conquers all, and only narrow minds want to bring race or culture into it.
The tagline of the movie was
Worlds apart...theirs was the daring love affair violating every rule, every custom, every centuries-old belief!''
Do you think Hollywood was working the agenda then? There was a spate of these movies during the 50s.
I do remember that near the end of the movie, when Marlon Brando is trying to persuade his Japanese lover, played by Miiko Taka, that she should go against the taboos and marry him, she makes a speech about how their children will be neither Japanese nor American, and asks him where they would belong.
Now, I'm just going from memory here, so please don't chastise me if I remember incorrectly, but I recall that Brando answers with a speech about how that the only thing that matters is Love, not popular opinion, and not even their respective families who might object.
Typical Hollywood cliches, but does that work in real life?
And what about the children? I suspect they would have trouble deciding where they belong. Most likely they would identify more with the nonwhite identity; that seems to be the general rule.
But what could be more natural than wanting children and grandchildren in whom we can see our parents and grandparents? One of the distinguishing marks of family members is that there is a physical resemblance. Family members generally share outward physical traits as well as mental and psychological similarities. I am sure that Japanese grandparents might prefer to have a grandchild with distinctly, identifiably Japanese looks, one who looks like them. Of course they would not be called racist for feeling that way. Only Whites are accused of racism for wanting their descendants to look like them and to be part of the continuity of a family line of the same race.
A family has a dimension in time; our extended family is not just those who are alive at the same time, but those who have gone before us, who gave us life, and those to whom we give life, those who come after us. Why should we not want them to be as like us as possible, and like our parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents?
We are all part of a continuity which made us what we are today, and we are the result of many generations of holding true; we owe something not only to our living kin but to our forebears and above all, our progeny. Those who choose to ''violate every rule, every custom, every age-old belief' as the movie tag-line put it, are acting selfishly and shortsightedly. They are disavowing both their ancestors and their progeny, who will likely feel little connection to them.
The article I linked yesterday contained the prediction that this country would be completely hybridized in a matter of time. I think it's likely, if present trends continue, that this will be the case. Given that the younger generations seem so programmed to be militantly 'colorblind' or to actually prefer nonwhites, it seems the trend is bound to accelerate with each new generation. That prospect, to me, seems almost tantamount to being told that I will have no progeny, because the people who inhabit this place after I am gone will likely speak another language, honor other traditions, be of an alien religion, and look very unlike me and my forebears, even if they bear some of the same genes. The fact is, they will bear other, very dissimilar genes, and identify as part of that people. And that, in essence, will be the end of my line.
I do think that there will be some who will want to resist being put into the big DNA blender. It may be only a few, but as long as people still have some free choice about marrying and reproducing, at least some will continue do what is natural to us: choose to remain among our own.
According to a study cited in this piece, it appears so.
I am not a scientist, so some of the details of the study are a little technical for me, but it appears that the people in this study were Columbia University graduate students (and that already makes the sample rather atypical) and they were of all races.
A frequent observation (or complaint, depending on the viewpoint of the speaker) is that White women are more prone to date and mate outside their race, as compared to White men. Just in observing couples around the country, it does seem that there is more of this interracial pairing, but it is still, in overall numbers, not that common. But it does seem to be increasing, and no surprise there, given the media's constant promoting of racial mingling.
Overall, though, I've seen far more White male-nonwhite female pairings than vice-versa. And this is a longstanding trend, going back long before the present PC era, when it was far from unknown for White men to marry nonwhite women (Latina, American Indian, or Filipina).
After World War II, the Asian war bride phenomenon was not uncommon.
It does seem that men are more programmed to mate with women they are physically attracted to, and many men do not discriminate when it comes to the primal urges. Women tend to think more long-term with relationships -- often to the chagrin of men -- and will evaluate men as potential husbands rather than just on the basis of sexual attraction.
With men, the trend of mail-order brides is growing, it seems, as discussed here.
When I was a child, there were Asian 'war brides' married to White American men who had served in Korea, Japan, or elsewhere in Asia. I had classmates who had Irish-American or Anglo-American dads and Japanese mothers. It seemed especially common for men who served in the military to marry Filipina women or East Asian women. In some parts of the country, White men not infrequently married Latina women or American Indian women. And this, remember, was in an era where interracial marriage was generally frowned on, if not outright forbidden. But there has always been a stronger taboo against black-White marriages or pairings.
By contrast, I rarely if ever encountered White women married to nonwhite men of any race, with the occasional exception of a Hispanic male-White female or in some areas, American Indian male-White female marriage. But by far, most interracial marriages appeared to be White men with various nonwhite women: Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic or American Indian.
I still think these pairings are more common than any form of black-White pairing. So I do think it's a little unfair to blame women excessively for lack of racial/ethnic fidelity.
Many men who seek out mail-order brides from various parts of Asia and the Pacific blame feminism for their choosing to marry an exotic woman. I think this is in many cases a rationalization for their personal preference for these exotic women. Some term the preference as a 'fetish' and I would say that isn't too strong a word.
Is feminism to blame? Certainly feminism has not improved understanding between the sexes; arguably it has worsened the battle of the sexes in Western countries. But to be fair, not all women are feminists; I often say that feminism has spread to the right, with many 'conservative' women sounding like Gloria Steinem, but traditional women have not disappeared completely. Likewise, I think it is an inaccurate stereotype that the Asian-Pacific women are all frail little lotus blossoms. I've worked with some who are decidedly assertive women, not at all demure and retiring, despite the popular image.
But if a man really wants to maintain racial integrity and fidelity, he would not be inclined to choose a woman of such a racially disparate origin.
As for the women who date or mate interracially, these days, given the 'colorblind' dogma of liberalism, and the fact that most women are politically liberal, it isn't surprising that many women date interracially. Women, unfortunately, tend to be vulnerable to an appeal to their sympathies and their nurturing side. 'Victimhood' awakens the softer feelings of some women. But most importantly, most women don't want to be called 'racist' -- which, trust me, they are called by nonwhites whose advances are not welcomed. The race card is usually played very early on and many weak-minded women give in when the r-word is thrown at them.
It seems to me to be an unfair tactic to use in approaching someone of the opposite sex but it does happen.
Nowadays, choosing to stay within one's own race or ethnicity is increasingly portrayed as 'bigoted' and racist. But it's generally acknowledged that people tend to pair up with those who have commonalities and similarities; the idea that 'opposites attract' is overrated. Men and women by their respective natures sometimes have a difficult time understanding each other; why add ethnic/cultural misunderstanding, racial grievances and guilts, and historical resentments to the inbuilt male-female conflicts?
In the 1957 movie Sayonara, which was really all about interracial love, and the 'star-crossed', misunderstood qualities thereof, the message was that ultimately, love conquers all, and only narrow minds want to bring race or culture into it.
The tagline of the movie was
Worlds apart...theirs was the daring love affair violating every rule, every custom, every centuries-old belief!''
Do you think Hollywood was working the agenda then? There was a spate of these movies during the 50s.
I do remember that near the end of the movie, when Marlon Brando is trying to persuade his Japanese lover, played by Miiko Taka, that she should go against the taboos and marry him, she makes a speech about how their children will be neither Japanese nor American, and asks him where they would belong.
Now, I'm just going from memory here, so please don't chastise me if I remember incorrectly, but I recall that Brando answers with a speech about how that the only thing that matters is Love, not popular opinion, and not even their respective families who might object.
Typical Hollywood cliches, but does that work in real life?
And what about the children? I suspect they would have trouble deciding where they belong. Most likely they would identify more with the nonwhite identity; that seems to be the general rule.
But what could be more natural than wanting children and grandchildren in whom we can see our parents and grandparents? One of the distinguishing marks of family members is that there is a physical resemblance. Family members generally share outward physical traits as well as mental and psychological similarities. I am sure that Japanese grandparents might prefer to have a grandchild with distinctly, identifiably Japanese looks, one who looks like them. Of course they would not be called racist for feeling that way. Only Whites are accused of racism for wanting their descendants to look like them and to be part of the continuity of a family line of the same race.
A family has a dimension in time; our extended family is not just those who are alive at the same time, but those who have gone before us, who gave us life, and those to whom we give life, those who come after us. Why should we not want them to be as like us as possible, and like our parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents?
We are all part of a continuity which made us what we are today, and we are the result of many generations of holding true; we owe something not only to our living kin but to our forebears and above all, our progeny. Those who choose to ''violate every rule, every custom, every age-old belief' as the movie tag-line put it, are acting selfishly and shortsightedly. They are disavowing both their ancestors and their progeny, who will likely feel little connection to them.
The article I linked yesterday contained the prediction that this country would be completely hybridized in a matter of time. I think it's likely, if present trends continue, that this will be the case. Given that the younger generations seem so programmed to be militantly 'colorblind' or to actually prefer nonwhites, it seems the trend is bound to accelerate with each new generation. That prospect, to me, seems almost tantamount to being told that I will have no progeny, because the people who inhabit this place after I am gone will likely speak another language, honor other traditions, be of an alien religion, and look very unlike me and my forebears, even if they bear some of the same genes. The fact is, they will bear other, very dissimilar genes, and identify as part of that people. And that, in essence, will be the end of my line.
I do think that there will be some who will want to resist being put into the big DNA blender. It may be only a few, but as long as people still have some free choice about marrying and reproducing, at least some will continue do what is natural to us: choose to remain among our own.
Labels: American Identity, Ethnic Identity, Ethnocentrism, Social Sciences
0 comment Saturday, June 28, 2014 | admin
It seems to me that I recently wrote a post on this subject, but it never seems to go away.
Upfront, I will say that this is my definitive statement on the subject. If it is raised in the future, I will just refer readers to this post, rather than saying it all again.
Yet again, I am being challenged as to why I focus on Anglo-American or WASP roots on this blog.
The implication is generally that I am excluding others, and failing to foster general American unity by focusing on one group, even if that group is the founding stock and the creative force behind the Republic that was established here in 1776.
The argument is made that Americans are all mixed, deracinated people who identify only as Americans, and that to identify with any particular ethnicity is to be divisive.
To what extent that is true, I don't know. I know that the 'generic American' identity is embraced by many people of mixed European ancestry, and I know that in many areas people are rather hopelessly mixed so as to identify with no particular ethnicity. That's a problem.
Is it possible to identify as just American when everybody else, especially minorities, have a strong ethnic identity?
Do I have to bring up yet again that many people outside the U.S. sneer at us because we are 'a people of no race or identity'? That is a common view of us in Europe. To expect Europeans to acknowledge us as cousins or even distant kin is often to be disappointed and rebuffed, as they hold us in low regard in many cases, and consider us mongrels, compared to themselves. Yes, there are Europeans who are more welcoming of us, but there are also many who regard us with a blend of scorn and condescension -- because we are a mixed people of no fixed origin.
The word 'American' once meant something. I was quite happy to call myself just American for many years, although I have had a strong Southron identity too. But over the years, the American 'brand' has been cheapened and made meaningless for many people because we are told that the many alien peoples residing here, who speak not a word of English in most cases, are ''new Americans''. Being an American is just a geographical condition, just an address, which tells nothing about who a person is. Remember those 'Ad Council' spots that ran on TV after 9/11, with many foreign people saying 'I am an American'? That's what 'American' has come to mean: anybody who is occupying some spot on American territory.
If America consists of an idea or a proposition, what then are Americans? Just anybody who says they believe in 'freedom' or 'equality'? Is it just a matter of pledging allegiance to a flag or a political system, as many Republicans would have it?
People need more than that. People need roots. They need a sense of kinship and belonging, a sense of who they are in a biological sense, where their actual ancestors came from, how they lived, what they accomplished. They need a sense of their place in history and in the human family.
I put it to you that Americans who feel themselves to be of no particular race or ethnicity, identifying only with a flag or a geopolitical entity, are a people prone to be deracinated, to lack an anchor, to lack confidence. Deracinated and confused people are ripe to be colonized and subjugated, as is happening now.
Such a people, I believe, are also more prone to miscegenation, to want to lose their weak 'identity' by interbreeding or intermarrying with any exotic group of people with an aggressive sense of ethnicity and race, hence you have young people becoming 'wiggers', talking Ebonics, or intermarrying with Hispanics and raising their children as Hispanic. Hardly ever do intermarriages result in the transmission of any kind of White identity. I can think of many cases, and all of them result in Whites becoming renegades to their own race, and 'going native', along with their children.
I firmly believe that we are in a time of re-tribalization. The world will become more ethnically divided, with smaller groups asserting, or re-asserting, their tribal or clan identities. If 'America' in its present form falls apart, which many have predicted will happen, what, then, will be left of an 'American' identity?
People may choose to align with some kind of regional identity. The South has a strong regional identity, or has had, until the recent immigrant influx, along with an earlier migration of Yankees during the Reagan era.
And as to the South, the fact that it had, before the recent Latino invasion, received relatively few immigrants meant that the people of the South were far more homogeneous than those in most of the Northern states. The Northern cities in particular had received most of the Ellis Island immigrants, and the heartland North had many Northern European immigrants (German, Scandinavian, some Dutch) who later formed the sort of generic White European core group.
However, the South had experienced less demographic change than the North. Southron Whites were fairly cohesive, perhaps partly in reaction to the presence of many blacks, and because of the history involving the War Between the States and Reconstruction.
Most of the old-stock Southron people were of British Isles descent. Many colonial stock Southron people identified as Anglo-Norman or Anglo-Saxon. It was understood among most people that there was no racial division between those two groups of people; the Angl0-Normans were generally thought of by Southrons as being the more aristocratic strain, although now there is a negative image of Normans as being some sort of foreign interlopers, with whom few want to claim a connection -- much the same as with the WASP identity in America, ironically.
My particular family line is mostly Anglo-Norman, with some Huguenot French and Ulster Scots roots, but by far, mostly Anglo-Norman. In this, I think my family tree is quite typical of old-stock Southron families. The idea that all areas of these United States are equally mixed in terms of descent is erroneous. The South preserved its original makeup for considerably longer than the North.
The much-criticized New England WASP colonial stock was actually 'ethnically cleansed', to a great extent, from New England as the Ellis Island immigrants fanned out across the East Coast. Many of my Yankee family members went West, settling the vast wilderness that awaited. Some stopped in the Midwest, settling there, others went far West, as far as they could go. The idea that there is some powerful yet strangely invisible 'WASP elite' in New England is persistent but lacking in basis. The old WASP colonial stock moved West, for the most part, preferring not to live in an overpopulated Northeastern megalopolis as the immigrants kept arriving.
A commenter asked why I had alternately referenced and criticized 'Albion's Seed' by David Hackett Fisher. It is an interesting book with much good information, but I find fault with it because I think it has fostered an oversimplified view of Southern ethnicity. Fisher I think has done a great deal, along with writer Grady McWhiney, to popularize the unproven notion of the South as being mostly Scots-Irish. The Scots-Irish, it is claimed, gave the 'warrior spirit' to the South. And were the Anglo-Normans not likewise formidable warriors?
This kind of thing, this unwillingness to credit Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman people with any accomplishment or talent (other than 'oppressing' the victim groups of the world) is one of the things which prompts me to champion the Anglo-Saxon heritage of America. It's only fair to give credit where due.
And for some reason, perhaps because of media portrayals (Braveheart, for example) the Scots are seen as a glamorous, tough, admirable people, while the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman is seen as sneaky, cold, ruthless, and vicious. That pattern is repeated time and again in movies and novels. The same kind of stereotype of the English was seen in another Gibson movie, The Patriot. That movie, like others, takes liberties with history.
For the record, quite a few of my ancestors lived in the area of Carolina where the story took place, and they were in the thick of the revolution. Some of my ancestors died fighting the British, but I don't accept the stereotype of the British as being evil and cold-blooded -- and foppish, as well.
It's no wonder that few Americans want to identify with any British ancestry they may have; who wants to be connected to the bad guys, the perpetual villains? We see similar stereotyping in recent PC movies in which White Americans are the villains: remember 'Dances With Wolves', with its ugly stereotypes of dirty, bloodthirsty American cavalrymen? The only good Whites were the renegade Whites who went native.
This kind of propaganda has led to Americans being so reticent to defend themselves in the face of relentless attacks by all and sundry. We are a demoralized people who have been schooled to think we have no defense to offer for ourselves and our ancestors; they were bad people who oppressed and plundered the poor weak peoples of the earth, and we are equally bad, because we have a unique kind of original sin called 'innate racism.'
It's 'racism', supposedly, for us even to feel an identification with our White kin group. All other groups can be aggressive in their identity, while we alone can only safely call ourselves ''Americans'', and even that is now considered hateful and 'nativist.' Latin American interlopers in our country tell us that they are just as 'American' as we are. Some liberal educators propose we call ourselves 'United Statesians' so as not to wrongly appropriate the label American, which belongs to everybody from the North Pole to Cape Horn.
Where to, America? Our identity is too exclusive, and it doesn't really belong just to us -- just as America 'belongs to everybody' as many immigrants brazenly claim.
And our European cousins tell us, as one European commenter haughtily told me on this blog, we are neither a race nor a people. We are nonentities. We are ciphers. It's no wonder many of us are eager to lose ourselves in some exotic new culture or identity.
Where to, in this re-tribalizing world, where ancestry and race will become more important in deciding where we stand? Those Americans who think they can sit it out by declaring that they are 'world citizens' or cosmopolitan planetary citizens, are mistaken. They will have to pick a side, and even if they decline to, they will be assigned a side in the conflict, based on their skin color.
Yes, I agree that White people should unite and feel kinship. We are a dwindling proportion of the world's peoples, and some predict our demise, one way or another. Were it not for my religious faith, I think I would predict that European-descended peoples would be blended away in a few generations. However I believe there is a reason why 'peoples, nations, kindreds, and tongues' were created, and it is not in the Divine plan for the Tower of Babel to succeed this time, or ever. The hubristic plan to create one mingled race will not succeed. That's just my personal faith, and I cannot prove it. I believe we, our kin group, will continue, but we are under siege as apparently our rulers want to eliminate all inequalities, including and especially innate racial inequalities.
I am all for uniting with all ethnic groups in the European family. However I cannot unilaterally make that unity happen. I don't have that kind of influence or power.
There are a great many people whose ethnic grievances against Anglo-Saxons make them hostile towards anyone who claims descent from that group. Just check out any message board where Irish, Ulster Irish, or English people congregate. There is an incredible amount of bitterness over the Irish 'troubles' and remote historical events. Irish-Americans in many cases who have never been to Ireland hold grudges and curse the English. That has got to stop if there is to be any unity.
If I am hard on the ethnic 'Ellis Island' descendants, it is because all too often they tend to be open-borders sentimentalists who identify with immigrants more than Americans. and in many instances they hold grudges towards old-stock Americans (which as I've said includes more than just English.)
If they are willing to stop accusing America I am willing to accept them as brothers. The animosity does not start with me; my animus toward grudge-bearers is defensive, not offensive.
So, do I, and this blog, have enough influence to 'unite' Americans or White people generally? This is not one of those mega-blogs which gets thousands and thousands of hits, and which wields considerable influence. What I write here is unlikely to 'divide' Americans (who are already quite divided, thank you) nor to unite Americans. I am just one isolated voice, and I don't particularly wish to be anything else. I write what I write for the few; you, the readers, decide if you are one of the few I write for. If my words speak to you, then this blog is for you. If my words antagonize you and irritate you, perhaps you are looking for something I don't provide.
This blog is my individual attempt to cry out against what I see happening to this country, and to my people, and as I seem to have to repeat often, 'my people' are all of you who identify with old America, and who hold dear what I hold dear, all of you who wish to defend the 'land where our fathers died.' I am a partisan of the South. because I feel that it embodies the real, original America best of all, and potentially may represent a resurgent 'America.'
Does that alienate my Northern readers? It should not. Because I prefer the South, having lived in both North and South, that does not mean I have animosity towards those of you from the North. So likewise because I write about the Anglo-American culture and heritage, which is neglected and despised by many people, that does not ''exclude'' those of you who have little commonality with that. I find this idea that particularism is somehow hostility towards others to be a curious, and rather liberal idea. It's the essence of political correctness, actually, this idea that we are to 'include' everybody and water everything down so as not to offend or 'leave anybody out.'
The nature of the world is that people group together in various ways, all of which include some and exclude others. That is also the essence of love: love excludes most, and prefers one, or the few, above the many.
Just because I love my particular heritage does not mean that I hate others' heritage.
I do find it hard to understand why my expression of my particular affinities is considered offensive. by anyone, unless it rubs salt in wounds based on past perceived resentments.
I write this blog partly for myself, because I feel compelled to write what is in my heart. This is one person's blog, not an attempt to speak to the whole world. This world, and even this country, is much too big and too complicated and too divided for me to be able to 'speak to' everyone or appeal to everyone. No doubt I offend some, but I cannot alter my message or my preferences because they 'turn away' some people. I cannot tailor my message to everyone.
Few people speak up for old-stock Anglo-Americans. Yet if this country ever succeeds in re-establishing any kind of unity, it will have to rally around a common heritage, and in old America, that common identity was the Anglo-based one. What else, pray tell, can we rally around? Like it or not, the Founding Fathers were Englishmen. English and male.
If any ethnicity or heritage deserves to be preserved as a cement which holds us together, the Anglo-Saxons heritage is the obvious choice. It served us well for many generations.
However, it looks as though a balkanized America is in the cards, with regions dominated by different peoples, but we will all have to decide to unite or separate. It is up to the other ethnicities, including the 'just Americans,' to decide with whom they will stand.
Upfront, I will say that this is my definitive statement on the subject. If it is raised in the future, I will just refer readers to this post, rather than saying it all again.
Yet again, I am being challenged as to why I focus on Anglo-American or WASP roots on this blog.
The implication is generally that I am excluding others, and failing to foster general American unity by focusing on one group, even if that group is the founding stock and the creative force behind the Republic that was established here in 1776.
The argument is made that Americans are all mixed, deracinated people who identify only as Americans, and that to identify with any particular ethnicity is to be divisive.
To what extent that is true, I don't know. I know that the 'generic American' identity is embraced by many people of mixed European ancestry, and I know that in many areas people are rather hopelessly mixed so as to identify with no particular ethnicity. That's a problem.
Is it possible to identify as just American when everybody else, especially minorities, have a strong ethnic identity?
Do I have to bring up yet again that many people outside the U.S. sneer at us because we are 'a people of no race or identity'? That is a common view of us in Europe. To expect Europeans to acknowledge us as cousins or even distant kin is often to be disappointed and rebuffed, as they hold us in low regard in many cases, and consider us mongrels, compared to themselves. Yes, there are Europeans who are more welcoming of us, but there are also many who regard us with a blend of scorn and condescension -- because we are a mixed people of no fixed origin.
The word 'American' once meant something. I was quite happy to call myself just American for many years, although I have had a strong Southron identity too. But over the years, the American 'brand' has been cheapened and made meaningless for many people because we are told that the many alien peoples residing here, who speak not a word of English in most cases, are ''new Americans''. Being an American is just a geographical condition, just an address, which tells nothing about who a person is. Remember those 'Ad Council' spots that ran on TV after 9/11, with many foreign people saying 'I am an American'? That's what 'American' has come to mean: anybody who is occupying some spot on American territory.
If America consists of an idea or a proposition, what then are Americans? Just anybody who says they believe in 'freedom' or 'equality'? Is it just a matter of pledging allegiance to a flag or a political system, as many Republicans would have it?
People need more than that. People need roots. They need a sense of kinship and belonging, a sense of who they are in a biological sense, where their actual ancestors came from, how they lived, what they accomplished. They need a sense of their place in history and in the human family.
I put it to you that Americans who feel themselves to be of no particular race or ethnicity, identifying only with a flag or a geopolitical entity, are a people prone to be deracinated, to lack an anchor, to lack confidence. Deracinated and confused people are ripe to be colonized and subjugated, as is happening now.
Such a people, I believe, are also more prone to miscegenation, to want to lose their weak 'identity' by interbreeding or intermarrying with any exotic group of people with an aggressive sense of ethnicity and race, hence you have young people becoming 'wiggers', talking Ebonics, or intermarrying with Hispanics and raising their children as Hispanic. Hardly ever do intermarriages result in the transmission of any kind of White identity. I can think of many cases, and all of them result in Whites becoming renegades to their own race, and 'going native', along with their children.
I firmly believe that we are in a time of re-tribalization. The world will become more ethnically divided, with smaller groups asserting, or re-asserting, their tribal or clan identities. If 'America' in its present form falls apart, which many have predicted will happen, what, then, will be left of an 'American' identity?
People may choose to align with some kind of regional identity. The South has a strong regional identity, or has had, until the recent immigrant influx, along with an earlier migration of Yankees during the Reagan era.
And as to the South, the fact that it had, before the recent Latino invasion, received relatively few immigrants meant that the people of the South were far more homogeneous than those in most of the Northern states. The Northern cities in particular had received most of the Ellis Island immigrants, and the heartland North had many Northern European immigrants (German, Scandinavian, some Dutch) who later formed the sort of generic White European core group.
However, the South had experienced less demographic change than the North. Southron Whites were fairly cohesive, perhaps partly in reaction to the presence of many blacks, and because of the history involving the War Between the States and Reconstruction.
Most of the old-stock Southron people were of British Isles descent. Many colonial stock Southron people identified as Anglo-Norman or Anglo-Saxon. It was understood among most people that there was no racial division between those two groups of people; the Angl0-Normans were generally thought of by Southrons as being the more aristocratic strain, although now there is a negative image of Normans as being some sort of foreign interlopers, with whom few want to claim a connection -- much the same as with the WASP identity in America, ironically.
My particular family line is mostly Anglo-Norman, with some Huguenot French and Ulster Scots roots, but by far, mostly Anglo-Norman. In this, I think my family tree is quite typical of old-stock Southron families. The idea that all areas of these United States are equally mixed in terms of descent is erroneous. The South preserved its original makeup for considerably longer than the North.
The much-criticized New England WASP colonial stock was actually 'ethnically cleansed', to a great extent, from New England as the Ellis Island immigrants fanned out across the East Coast. Many of my Yankee family members went West, settling the vast wilderness that awaited. Some stopped in the Midwest, settling there, others went far West, as far as they could go. The idea that there is some powerful yet strangely invisible 'WASP elite' in New England is persistent but lacking in basis. The old WASP colonial stock moved West, for the most part, preferring not to live in an overpopulated Northeastern megalopolis as the immigrants kept arriving.
A commenter asked why I had alternately referenced and criticized 'Albion's Seed' by David Hackett Fisher. It is an interesting book with much good information, but I find fault with it because I think it has fostered an oversimplified view of Southern ethnicity. Fisher I think has done a great deal, along with writer Grady McWhiney, to popularize the unproven notion of the South as being mostly Scots-Irish. The Scots-Irish, it is claimed, gave the 'warrior spirit' to the South. And were the Anglo-Normans not likewise formidable warriors?
This kind of thing, this unwillingness to credit Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman people with any accomplishment or talent (other than 'oppressing' the victim groups of the world) is one of the things which prompts me to champion the Anglo-Saxon heritage of America. It's only fair to give credit where due.
And for some reason, perhaps because of media portrayals (Braveheart, for example) the Scots are seen as a glamorous, tough, admirable people, while the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman is seen as sneaky, cold, ruthless, and vicious. That pattern is repeated time and again in movies and novels. The same kind of stereotype of the English was seen in another Gibson movie, The Patriot. That movie, like others, takes liberties with history.
For the record, quite a few of my ancestors lived in the area of Carolina where the story took place, and they were in the thick of the revolution. Some of my ancestors died fighting the British, but I don't accept the stereotype of the British as being evil and cold-blooded -- and foppish, as well.
It's no wonder that few Americans want to identify with any British ancestry they may have; who wants to be connected to the bad guys, the perpetual villains? We see similar stereotyping in recent PC movies in which White Americans are the villains: remember 'Dances With Wolves', with its ugly stereotypes of dirty, bloodthirsty American cavalrymen? The only good Whites were the renegade Whites who went native.
This kind of propaganda has led to Americans being so reticent to defend themselves in the face of relentless attacks by all and sundry. We are a demoralized people who have been schooled to think we have no defense to offer for ourselves and our ancestors; they were bad people who oppressed and plundered the poor weak peoples of the earth, and we are equally bad, because we have a unique kind of original sin called 'innate racism.'
It's 'racism', supposedly, for us even to feel an identification with our White kin group. All other groups can be aggressive in their identity, while we alone can only safely call ourselves ''Americans'', and even that is now considered hateful and 'nativist.' Latin American interlopers in our country tell us that they are just as 'American' as we are. Some liberal educators propose we call ourselves 'United Statesians' so as not to wrongly appropriate the label American, which belongs to everybody from the North Pole to Cape Horn.
Where to, America? Our identity is too exclusive, and it doesn't really belong just to us -- just as America 'belongs to everybody' as many immigrants brazenly claim.
And our European cousins tell us, as one European commenter haughtily told me on this blog, we are neither a race nor a people. We are nonentities. We are ciphers. It's no wonder many of us are eager to lose ourselves in some exotic new culture or identity.
Where to, in this re-tribalizing world, where ancestry and race will become more important in deciding where we stand? Those Americans who think they can sit it out by declaring that they are 'world citizens' or cosmopolitan planetary citizens, are mistaken. They will have to pick a side, and even if they decline to, they will be assigned a side in the conflict, based on their skin color.
Yes, I agree that White people should unite and feel kinship. We are a dwindling proportion of the world's peoples, and some predict our demise, one way or another. Were it not for my religious faith, I think I would predict that European-descended peoples would be blended away in a few generations. However I believe there is a reason why 'peoples, nations, kindreds, and tongues' were created, and it is not in the Divine plan for the Tower of Babel to succeed this time, or ever. The hubristic plan to create one mingled race will not succeed. That's just my personal faith, and I cannot prove it. I believe we, our kin group, will continue, but we are under siege as apparently our rulers want to eliminate all inequalities, including and especially innate racial inequalities.
I am all for uniting with all ethnic groups in the European family. However I cannot unilaterally make that unity happen. I don't have that kind of influence or power.
There are a great many people whose ethnic grievances against Anglo-Saxons make them hostile towards anyone who claims descent from that group. Just check out any message board where Irish, Ulster Irish, or English people congregate. There is an incredible amount of bitterness over the Irish 'troubles' and remote historical events. Irish-Americans in many cases who have never been to Ireland hold grudges and curse the English. That has got to stop if there is to be any unity.
If I am hard on the ethnic 'Ellis Island' descendants, it is because all too often they tend to be open-borders sentimentalists who identify with immigrants more than Americans. and in many instances they hold grudges towards old-stock Americans (which as I've said includes more than just English.)
If they are willing to stop accusing America I am willing to accept them as brothers. The animosity does not start with me; my animus toward grudge-bearers is defensive, not offensive.
So, do I, and this blog, have enough influence to 'unite' Americans or White people generally? This is not one of those mega-blogs which gets thousands and thousands of hits, and which wields considerable influence. What I write here is unlikely to 'divide' Americans (who are already quite divided, thank you) nor to unite Americans. I am just one isolated voice, and I don't particularly wish to be anything else. I write what I write for the few; you, the readers, decide if you are one of the few I write for. If my words speak to you, then this blog is for you. If my words antagonize you and irritate you, perhaps you are looking for something I don't provide.
This blog is my individual attempt to cry out against what I see happening to this country, and to my people, and as I seem to have to repeat often, 'my people' are all of you who identify with old America, and who hold dear what I hold dear, all of you who wish to defend the 'land where our fathers died.' I am a partisan of the South. because I feel that it embodies the real, original America best of all, and potentially may represent a resurgent 'America.'
Does that alienate my Northern readers? It should not. Because I prefer the South, having lived in both North and South, that does not mean I have animosity towards those of you from the North. So likewise because I write about the Anglo-American culture and heritage, which is neglected and despised by many people, that does not ''exclude'' those of you who have little commonality with that. I find this idea that particularism is somehow hostility towards others to be a curious, and rather liberal idea. It's the essence of political correctness, actually, this idea that we are to 'include' everybody and water everything down so as not to offend or 'leave anybody out.'
The nature of the world is that people group together in various ways, all of which include some and exclude others. That is also the essence of love: love excludes most, and prefers one, or the few, above the many.
Just because I love my particular heritage does not mean that I hate others' heritage.
I do find it hard to understand why my expression of my particular affinities is considered offensive. by anyone, unless it rubs salt in wounds based on past perceived resentments.
I write this blog partly for myself, because I feel compelled to write what is in my heart. This is one person's blog, not an attempt to speak to the whole world. This world, and even this country, is much too big and too complicated and too divided for me to be able to 'speak to' everyone or appeal to everyone. No doubt I offend some, but I cannot alter my message or my preferences because they 'turn away' some people. I cannot tailor my message to everyone.
Few people speak up for old-stock Anglo-Americans. Yet if this country ever succeeds in re-establishing any kind of unity, it will have to rally around a common heritage, and in old America, that common identity was the Anglo-based one. What else, pray tell, can we rally around? Like it or not, the Founding Fathers were Englishmen. English and male.
If any ethnicity or heritage deserves to be preserved as a cement which holds us together, the Anglo-Saxons heritage is the obvious choice. It served us well for many generations.
However, it looks as though a balkanized America is in the cards, with regions dominated by different peoples, but we will all have to decide to unite or separate. It is up to the other ethnicities, including the 'just Americans,' to decide with whom they will stand.
Labels: American Heritage, Anglo-Americans, Anglo-Saxon Heritage, Balkanization, Divisiveness, Ethnic Division, Ethnic Identity, Ethnic Solidarity, Regional Differences, Secession, South
0 comment Thursday, May 22, 2014 | admin
This is not surprising. The only thing that's surprising about it is that anyone is surprised.
It's rather amusing in a sad way to read some of the comments over at the mainstream GOP forums, where the commenters express shock at Colin Powell's 'racism', and generally seem incensed only because blacks can practice blatant ethnocentrism or racial solidarity and we can't. "No fair! They have to be colorblind if we have to!"
I can honestly say that I expected this endorsement, at least insofar as I ever gave it much thought. We've seen several prominent black figures endorsing or defending Obama, even some who have somehow acquired the reputation of being ''conservative.''
But it seems that their willingness to betray their supposed conservative principles in favor of racial solidarity shows not only their natural, instinctive ethnocentrism but the weakness of their ''conservative'' convictions. As in every other area of life, there is a kind of affirmative action at work when it comes to categorizing minority individuals as conservatives. The bar is automatically much lower, and even a stray 'conservative' principle here or there in an individual will be accepted eagerly as his conservative credentials. Powell never had many real conservative leanings; he was liberal in most important respects, and it seems that for most Republicans, just the fact that a minority person speaks standard English and does not embrace far-left, radical ideas is enough to qualify him or her as ''conservative.'' Most of us are very easily placated when it comes to this issue.
I've blogged before about the obsession that many on the ''right'' have with ''moderate Muslims". The rather embarrassing enthusiasm many display for figures like Walid Shoebat or Irshaad Manji or Ayaan Hirsi Ali is seemingly a show of gratitude that the 'conservative' White feels when finding a minority individual who seems to be on "our side" -- sort of. You can almost see the tears of joy welling up in their eyes as they gush over some conservative minority, like Condoleezza Rice or Thomas Sowell or the "moderate Muslims" who usually show up on Fox News discussions. It's almost as though the Republicans/conservatives feel enormous relief at finding someone in that group that they like or agree with; it's a relief to feel that "maybe I'm not racist (or Islamophobic) after all!"
For that reason, it seems, Republicans and other 'colorblind conservatives' seem to find a real need for "conservative minorities" who will then prove to them that we are really all the same under the skin, and there is really no truth to the stereotypes about minorities. Colin Powell proves that not all blacks are like Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrakhan. Condi Rice, likewise. Thomas Sowell is proof that James Watson was wrong. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is proof that Moslems can be ''on our side''.
I think Republicans are still searching for their Latino poster child, a living example of a ''conservative" Hispanic. They tried with Linda Chavez, but she of course sides with her 'Raza', though she, like Obama, is at least half White/Anglo. And then Mel Martinez was touted as one of those conservative Hispanics, but decidedly sides with his Latino cousins rather than with the gringos. So the paradigm of the minority conservative mascot has not worked out well with Hispanics. But that won't stop the GOP from searching for the elusive Hispanic conservative. It's a hunger, a need, on the part of the doctrinaire 'colorblind conservatives.'
So I suppose it's shocking and dismaying for people who desperately need those like Powell or J.C. Watts to remove their unacknowledged doubts about the PC creed.
Some of the people on the GOP forums who were unhappy about Powell's endorsement are still indignantly maintaining that ''it's not about race; I haven't rejected Obama just because he is black, it's because he is red!''
And maybe that is true in their particular case, but I think there are still many on the ''right'' who refuse to examine why they have misgivings about voting for Obama. I think many of them are too uncomfortable with the concept of acknowledging racial differences, or recognizing that blacks and Whites have different interests to pursue in the political arena. We don't all ''want the same thing" or need the same thing.
Blacks know that they differ from Whites, as do Hispanics. We are the only group not willing to acknowledge that it's human nature to want to affiliate with our own, and pursue our group's well-being. To some extent, we've had the ethnocentrism pummeled out of us, but I think it's still there, even if we try to reject it and deny it to ourselves.
We will always be at a huge disadvantage as long as we are wearing the 'colorblind' blinkers, and everyone else is flagrantly pursuing their group's interest, at our expense.
If we really want 'equality' we should claim our own right to seek the interests and well-being of our own people, as everyone else is doing. Whites are the only dupes trying to play the 'colorblind' game.
It's rather amusing in a sad way to read some of the comments over at the mainstream GOP forums, where the commenters express shock at Colin Powell's 'racism', and generally seem incensed only because blacks can practice blatant ethnocentrism or racial solidarity and we can't. "No fair! They have to be colorblind if we have to!"
I can honestly say that I expected this endorsement, at least insofar as I ever gave it much thought. We've seen several prominent black figures endorsing or defending Obama, even some who have somehow acquired the reputation of being ''conservative.''
But it seems that their willingness to betray their supposed conservative principles in favor of racial solidarity shows not only their natural, instinctive ethnocentrism but the weakness of their ''conservative'' convictions. As in every other area of life, there is a kind of affirmative action at work when it comes to categorizing minority individuals as conservatives. The bar is automatically much lower, and even a stray 'conservative' principle here or there in an individual will be accepted eagerly as his conservative credentials. Powell never had many real conservative leanings; he was liberal in most important respects, and it seems that for most Republicans, just the fact that a minority person speaks standard English and does not embrace far-left, radical ideas is enough to qualify him or her as ''conservative.'' Most of us are very easily placated when it comes to this issue.
I've blogged before about the obsession that many on the ''right'' have with ''moderate Muslims". The rather embarrassing enthusiasm many display for figures like Walid Shoebat or Irshaad Manji or Ayaan Hirsi Ali is seemingly a show of gratitude that the 'conservative' White feels when finding a minority individual who seems to be on "our side" -- sort of. You can almost see the tears of joy welling up in their eyes as they gush over some conservative minority, like Condoleezza Rice or Thomas Sowell or the "moderate Muslims" who usually show up on Fox News discussions. It's almost as though the Republicans/conservatives feel enormous relief at finding someone in that group that they like or agree with; it's a relief to feel that "maybe I'm not racist (or Islamophobic) after all!"
For that reason, it seems, Republicans and other 'colorblind conservatives' seem to find a real need for "conservative minorities" who will then prove to them that we are really all the same under the skin, and there is really no truth to the stereotypes about minorities. Colin Powell proves that not all blacks are like Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrakhan. Condi Rice, likewise. Thomas Sowell is proof that James Watson was wrong. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is proof that Moslems can be ''on our side''.
I think Republicans are still searching for their Latino poster child, a living example of a ''conservative" Hispanic. They tried with Linda Chavez, but she of course sides with her 'Raza', though she, like Obama, is at least half White/Anglo. And then Mel Martinez was touted as one of those conservative Hispanics, but decidedly sides with his Latino cousins rather than with the gringos. So the paradigm of the minority conservative mascot has not worked out well with Hispanics. But that won't stop the GOP from searching for the elusive Hispanic conservative. It's a hunger, a need, on the part of the doctrinaire 'colorblind conservatives.'
So I suppose it's shocking and dismaying for people who desperately need those like Powell or J.C. Watts to remove their unacknowledged doubts about the PC creed.
Some of the people on the GOP forums who were unhappy about Powell's endorsement are still indignantly maintaining that ''it's not about race; I haven't rejected Obama just because he is black, it's because he is red!''
And maybe that is true in their particular case, but I think there are still many on the ''right'' who refuse to examine why they have misgivings about voting for Obama. I think many of them are too uncomfortable with the concept of acknowledging racial differences, or recognizing that blacks and Whites have different interests to pursue in the political arena. We don't all ''want the same thing" or need the same thing.
Blacks know that they differ from Whites, as do Hispanics. We are the only group not willing to acknowledge that it's human nature to want to affiliate with our own, and pursue our group's well-being. To some extent, we've had the ethnocentrism pummeled out of us, but I think it's still there, even if we try to reject it and deny it to ourselves.
We will always be at a huge disadvantage as long as we are wearing the 'colorblind' blinkers, and everyone else is flagrantly pursuing their group's interest, at our expense.
If we really want 'equality' we should claim our own right to seek the interests and well-being of our own people, as everyone else is doing. Whites are the only dupes trying to play the 'colorblind' game.
Labels: Diversity, Ethnic Identity, Ethnocentrism, Political Correctness, Presidential Candidates