A Horrible Question to Ask
A reader named Dave asks
This might sound horrible to ask, but when did White become the new Black? I mean, people today talk of being white the way the KKK talks about being black. White as a racial description has become almost exclusively derogatory. I don’t see this as good, or am I missing something?
My answer:
It happened in the 1990s with the rise of a philosophy called postmodernism also called nihilism in our college campuses. Christ-hating Intellectuals grew enamored of the idea that, if there is no such thing as truth, no grand narrative, no one model of the universe preferred over any other model, then no one could criticize an intellectual for being godless, i.e., an ignoramus.
Intellectuals (I speak as one myself) do not mind being accused of vice. But being accused of ignorance is hateful to us.
So these nihilists invented a method to retreat from any argument whatsoever while claiming the laurels of victory and the sneers of superiority. “You cannot say I am being illogical, because no statements are true nor false, not even these! Were you educated, you would know that knowledge is illusion!”
Now, no one can actually believe this, nor does anyone try, nor is anyone not an idiot likely to believe the intellectual when he says this: it is just a convenient excuse to escape an argument while insulting the opponent who otherwise would defeat you.
Nihilism, technically speaking, is not a philosophy. It is a psychological and rhetorical tactic to avoid philosophy. It is an attack. It is an elaborate way of saying “Shut up!” to facts, or to anyone who recites facts.
Since no one believes nihilism and no one lives by such its precepts (it has no precepts, and nothing to believe) the intellectual finds he still needs a precept to live by.
“Shut up!” is not, after all, a creed to live by. It is a way to avoid criticism by men who have creeds and have lives and who like life.
Being lazy, vicious and crass, as well as illogical and stupid, the ignoramus intellectual turns immediately to the most simplistic and easily refuted of superstitious cult beliefs he happens to find floating in the mess of his popular culture near at hand: namely, Marxism.
Now, Marxism proposes a simple yet ugly fairy tale to explain all of life and life’s problems: everything is the fault of the Jews. The Jews run the world, and they are evil, and they love evil, and so everything that makes you unhappy is their fault.
Marx dresses it up more elaborately than that, of course, but that is what Marxism boils down to. Life consists of two groups, the Jewish capitalist and the hard-working proletarian, and something like Darwin’s law of the jungle requires these two groups to be locked in a vicious lifelong struggle for power dominance, with no quarter, no parley, and no holds barred. Power is the sole good in life, and nothing is good but power.
Love, compassion, duty, morality, self-sacrifice, art, virtue, beauty, all these are but meaningless words used by the great to deceive the weak, and all are worthless unless they add to one’s power.
Since the struggle against the Jews is Darwinian, that is, inevitable and pitiless, they must be exterminated before they exterminate you. Neither pity, honesty, nor a concern for law and civilization can hinder the apocalypse.
The reason why Marxists lie about absolutely everything, including pointless lies that gain them nothing and are apparently told for no reason, is because lying is part and parcel of their philosophy. It is the core part. Hypocrisy is not an unfortunate side effect. Hypocrisy is the point. Preaching what you do not practice and practicing what you do not preach is the point of Marxism.
Remember, Marxism is not a philosophy, not a worldview, not a point of view. It is a easy-to-remember series of lies, false accusations, slanders, libels, and character assassination tactics meant to deflect criticism and halt the reasoning process. Hypocrisy is both the motive and the goal.
After World War Two, bashing the Jews was out of fashion for a season, so many Marxists became Neomarxists, and used someone else as their scapegoat: the males, the whites, the Christians, the white males, the Christian whites, the Easter Bunny.
The very people who stopped the Marxists known as Nazis were now accused by the Marxists as being Marxists. The Marxist called communists and leftist accused the anti-Marxists called Republicans as being Marxists called Nazis, and invented the laughable claim that the Nazis were rightwing totalitarians, that is, pro-liberty totalitarians.
Also Marxists, who are Jew-haters, calling the people who saved the Jews from the Nazis “Nazis Jew-Haters” became oddly fashionable. At the same time, Democrats, the party of slavery, of Jim Crow, and of the KKK, calling the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, “Slaver Negro-haters” became fashionable.
The innocent failed to fight back, and so the strategy of falsely accusing one’s foes of one’s flaws, also known as lying, aka, political correctness, flourished as never before. Political correctness is the vocabulary of Neomarxism.
Under Neomarxism, also known as intersectionalism, everyone is oppressed, everyone is a victim, and whoever whines the loudest over the smallest problems wins. Whining loudly over small problems is good: Whining infinitely over entirely non-existent problems is best. You get no points for complaining about female genital mutilation by Muslims, child molestation rings run by Muslims in England, because that is real. So you complain about a wage gap or a campus rape culture, because that is not real.
There is precisely one race that has ever eliminated racism as a predominant force in law and society, one religion, and one civilization: that is the White race, the Christian religion, the modern West.
Look at history. You will search in vain for any mention of an abolition society or an antislavery society on any continent in any time period except for one: Christendom. Anti-slavery movements and rhetoric found in the East come from the West. The first recorded condemnation of slavery come from the sermons of Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom in the Fourth Century of the Christian Era.
So the Whites of the West are the only ones to be accused of racism, and, indeed, accused of everything and anything, except any real thing we do wrong.
Our real evils, abortion, sodomy, atheism, totalitarianism, etc., are never criticized. Only our virtues are criticized. Our freedom is called racist. Our toleration is called racist. Our willingness to judge each man by the content of his character and not the color of his skin is called racist. Logic is called racist. Reason is called racist.
The only thing not called racist is giving blacks privileges and hand outs based on race, and holding whites and yellows to a different and higher standard. The only thing not called racist is racism.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
