Tag: race

Fear turning into hatred

As an angry and disaffected youth, back in the 1970s and 1980s, long before my subsequent change of heart and conversion to Catholicism, I had been a leading member of the National Front, which would later metamorphose into the British National Party. I was a member of the National Front’s Executive Council and its National Directorate and was Chairman of its youth movement, the Young National Front. I was sentenced to prison twice, in 1982 and 1985, for “publishing material likely to incite racial hatred,” an offence under the Race Relations Act. One of my closest friends was Nick Griffin, later to become notorious as the leader of the BNP. I was best man at Nick’s wedding and co-edited a magazine with him. Perhaps, therefore, it could be suggested that I might have a sense of déjà vu as I observe the turbulent times in which we live. In some ways, I do. The similarities are striking. And yet in many ways, and perhaps in the most important ways, things are very different today.

Racism is always evil, as is any other manifestation of hatred towards our neighbours or our enemies. Christians can never espouse racism, nor can they support with a clear conscience parties that advocate racism. It is, however, unfair to suggest that anyone who is concerned about the Islamization of Europe or about the endemic corruption and overarching imperialism of the European Union is either a racist or a xenophobe. Such language is the sort of thoughtless knee-jerk reaction that is the death of rational discourse. Furthermore, it is the sort of demonizing and stereotyping of opponents of which the racists are themselves guilty. Against such dumbing-down of the real nature of the problem, I would argue, with Pope Benedict XVI among others, that there are three mutually incompatible and inimical forces at work in the international arena: secular globalism, radical Islam, and Christian orthodoxy. As Pope Benedict highlighted in his prophetic Regensburg Address, the clash between these forces is at the troubled heart of our darkening world.

This struggle for the heart of Europe was encapsulated by a young priest, Father Jacek Międlar, at a rally of almost 100,000 patriotic Poles in Warsaw in November last year. Comparing efforts by the European Union to force Poland to accept large scale Islamic immigration, he likened the EU’s coercion of the Polish people to the oppression of the Soviet occupation.

…

Leftist and Islamic aggression aimed at everything Christian and national makes us very afraid … But we’re also afraid that our fear will turn into hatred. And we, as Christians, cannot let this happen. That’s why we, the Christians, want dialogue. But no one wants to talk to us, instead calling us fascists, racists, xenophobes, and infidel dogs. We can never allow this [succumbing to hatred]. We don’t want to fight with the hammer of hate they [the socialists and the Islamic fundamentalists] want to push in our hands…. We want to fight with the sword of truth. With the sword of love! With the sword of the Gospel! With the Sword that is Jesus Christ, our living Lord and Saviour.

(Joseph Pearce, What Does the Rise of Europe’s New Right Mean for Christians?) I heartily recommend it.

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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Thought crime?

I’ve been suffering a bit of cognitive indigestion, as a cluster of blogs styled “Alternative Right” I’ve begun guardedly following has lobbed a timely but disconcerting claim my way:

Ron Paul has a real chance of winning next week’s Iowa caucuses. And not surprisingly “the Smearbund” (as Murray Rothbard termed it) has returned—along with discussion of those newsletters, which have haunted the Congressman for 15 years.

The GOP establishment will tolerate Paul so long as he remains a folksy and charming long-shot. (He’s even useful in that he keeps Constitution-thumping die-hards within the Republican fold.) But the second it looks like the man might actually win, the gloves come off.

To be sure, most of the smears of Paul’s brand of Old-Right libertarianism are unfair and ungrounded; and they usually amount to a variation on theme—“You don’t want to invade [Insert Middle Eastern Country], ergo you endorse [Insert cruel dictator]! Such logic is invariably accompanied by allusions to Hitler, “the lessons of Munich,” yadayadayada. (This past week Dorothy Rabinowitz shrieked that Paul is a “propagandist for our enemies.”)

That being said, the claim that Paul’s newsletters from the ‘90s are “racist” (at least as that word is commonly defined) is, in fact, quite fair.

One can defend most of what is written on libertarian, non-racial grounds, as Justin Raimondo did in his powerful 2008 piece from Takimag. But the fact remains that the newsletters were “racist” in the sense that race is real—it has a remarkable analytic and predictive capacity—and the newsletter authors (whoever they might be) were willing to “go there.”

(Emphasis added) You can read the whole thing here, if so inclined, though I suspect you may not be.

I’ve been much more inclined to the “race is a pigment of the imagination” view than the “race … has remarkable analytic and predictive capacity” view.

I’m a man of the Right, I think. Maybe off the right end of the modern scale, even, though there seem to be enough kindred spirits if only in cyberspace. I’m almost certainly off the right end of the lamestream media’s scale, which runs from right liberals to left liberals.

I’m willing to be contrarian. Since I’m not running for office, I’m willing to grab “third rails” like Social Security, suggesting that retirement age should be raised with life expectancies and that retirement benefits should be indexed to cost of living, rather than to wages of those still working.

I’m not overly solicitous of claims that words hurt someone’s feelings, or that we must crush every eccentric who, despite being in the marketplace, might choose not to serve certain people.

I’m even willing to say that human equality does not require deluding ourselves about every human being being equally gifted in all areas of life and art, and that the way things have developed over generations, some aptitudes may be broadly correlated with skin pigmentation. I won’t use examples, but if you can’t think of any prominent and high-paying jobs where people with dark skin are disproportionately represented – maybe during the commercial breaks in pro sports – you’re probably not trying very hard.

So why am I hesitant to grasp the nettle and celebrate all the little (and big?) indicia of possible racial differences?

I guess it’s because I intuitively grasp that we’re still living in black slavery’s denouement (I don’t think we’re to epilogue yet); because “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” and Lebensunwerten Lebens still ring in my ears; because I fear our judicially robed and medically smocked “betters” as much as our possum-eating “inferiors;” because I especially fear our scientifically smocked techno-triumphalists (H/T James Howard Kunstler, who uses the term differently), including the folks at Monsaton, who are just dying to try out various embryonic stem cell tricks, transhumanist gene-splicing, and patenting of life forms.

Race simply remains a minefield that I’m not willing to enter, as I think the risk of doing so – feeding some grand, hubristic social engineering project – vastly outweighs the potential benefit – changing our ill-informed individual and mediating structure biases and idiosyncrasies from reflexive to scientific.

I’m also reminded of the ambiguity of political spectra and terms like Left, Right, Liberal, Conservative and so forth.

Thanks for reading. This blog has very much been one of the “I write to see what I think (or why I feel this way)” variety.

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Standing advice on enduring themes.