Just watched a video of Jacob Blake, a Black man, being shot by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. While the details are not yet all available, the video suggests there was no need for the cop to fire the shots he did. But while I am distressed by his behavior and convinced that the criteria by which cops are hired, trained, monitored and disciplined need to be overhauled everywhere, such incidents are in no way an indication of systemic, White racism. I am a Boomer and racism was no doubt tolerated by the war-beleaguered generation that preceded mine both here in Canada and throughout the States. But as the Seventies gave way to the Eighties, Western institutions and populations were clearly becoming increasingly sensitive to the plight of the “marginalized,” the poor, people of color, women, etc. I am quite convinced that the vast majority of Whites here in N. America, when confronted with the video of Blake’s shooting will, as they did with the death of George Floyd, be appalled. At the same time I have a stack of testimonials by non-Whites from both here in Canada and the States averring that they have never encountered Racism of any sort and indeed have at times benefited from generous affirmative action programs. Why then are our print and electronic media rife with declarations of support for Antifa and B.L.M. in their contention that the West is cancerous with systemic White bias? The answer, I believe, is suggested by the specious definition of Racism implied by those “woke” academics cited in my last blog.
The notion that the standardization of White cultural values in the Democracies of the West, because it makes others feel “marginalized,” is ipso facto a form of oppression, literally makes any statement of beliefs and values “oppressive” to someone. It is an application of the Neo-Marxist narrative at its simplistic worst. It is the utter uselessness and sheer stupidity of Moral/Intellectual Relativism disguised as “compassion.” It is the absurd formula that led various academics to imply that expecting those from other cultures to show up on time to their jobs, behave with civility and perhaps not reproduce with reckless abandon outside the construct of marriage, is somehow unfair. It entails a definition of “social justice” born of the juvenile self-indulgence and disdain for common sense typical of the Romantics and a myriad of “intellectuals” thereafter, the Frankfurt Theorists being perfect examples. It has taken us to a place where the validity of Principles and Values has been purged from political discourse and replaced with an almost exclusive concern for the empowerment of the “disenfranchised,” whatever the nature of their beliefs or values. It is why in my opening blog I referred to our “progressive” civilization as “mindless by design.”
The traditional Western notion of “moral accountability” is typically attributed by the Left to “judgmental” religious fundamentalists. But in his 1946 book “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre, an atheist, defines the need for each Individual to deal with the terms of his existence with courage and integrity as a Fundamental Human Obligation. Implicit in the ethos of the Ancient Greeks and taken up more recently by the likes of Nathaniel Branden, it is a vision of Man that sees Rational Self-Awareness as essential to a truly moral mode of being, the most obvious means of escape from that burden, of course, being to cast oneself as the victim of some intolerable oppressor.
The so-called anti-racist Ibram X. Kendi, when he says he will not succumb to the “assimilationist” tactics of White society, is in fact admitting he is not so much interested in intellectual or moral integrity as he is in resisting those he has come to see as enemies simply because of the color of their skin. His resentment of White Civilization, indeed the quest of B.L.M. to bring down Capitalism, is rife with racism. The notion that Australia and the Nations of Western Europe and North America, clearly the most civilized societies on the planet, are “systemically” racist is no less obnoxious, no less stereotypical than the statement that “All women are this,” or “All Black people that.”
Of course there are genuine “White Supremacists” among us. But between those few who are such and those rational beings simply seeking to account for the undeniable disparities in human achievement evident in history’s various Civilizations, there is a world of difference. As there is between a true racist and one who simply exercises his right to call out stupidity [i.e., Nick Cannon] wherever he finds it. But such distinctions are no longer allowed in our “woke” civilization. Rational discourse is no longer allowed. Demanding people meet certain basic standards of behavior is no longer allowed. Denouncing mindless idiots rampaging through our streets screaming obscenities, wielding bats and lasers with utter recklessness and destroying property and innocent lives all in the name of “social justice,” is no longer allowed.
The Covid pandemic is not nearly as pernicious as the Pandemic of Stupidity which, at the urging of our “intellectuals,” has come to infect the political Left, a pandemic given to the specious hypothesis that the Cultural Values of Post-Enlightenment Europe came to be normalized in the Nations of the West not because they had more efficacy, both pragmatic and otherwise, than those of other civilizations, but because we White people just love oppressing others.
In August of 2019 The Geller Report informed its readers that signs had begun to appear in London, England, asking its citizens not to defecate in the city’s streets. Given the standards of “inclusiveness” supported by our “anti-racists,” these signs, clearly directed at new immigrants, would appear to be just another example of White insensitivity and arrogance, indeed of Systemic Racism.
Fortunately there are millions among the so-called disenfranchised who simply do not accept this “logic.”