My Victimhood is Bigger than Yours, or, “Genocide” Isn’t What It Used To Be

“My victimhood is bigger than yours” (hereafter MVBY) is a very popular game these days, particularly around election season.  MVBY is easy to play, but you can best acquire expertise by going to a university, any university, and major in one of the “studies” disciplines – Women Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, African American Studies, Latino Studies or maybe Queer Theory or Post-Colonialism. There are a lot of options to choose from, and the best part is that when finished, you are fully equipped to make life miserable for anyone who doubts the particular version of victimhood you espouse. Almost all of the degrees come with an easily mastered vocabulary of handy accusations, insults and slurs, an in-your-face attitude that will intimidate most people, and a self-righteous certainty that is invincible to counterarguments and can withstand the response of anyone courageous enough be critical or skeptical of your point of view.  

Some of the more gifted graduates go on to prestige jobs at cable networks like CNN or national newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post. They get well paid to complain about “racism,” “sexism,” "anti-Semitism" and “white supremacy” and enjoy unmasking the bigotry of the rubes who voted for Trump. Other graduates become teachers in the schools and universities. They conduct the “consciousness raising” so that the next generation of victims knows how even better to articulate its grievances, formulate its demands, and as former President Obama put it, “Get in their face.” Those who prefer administrative-human resources “work,” will find that the “Diversity Industry” is an employment growth-sector. The rapid expansion of victim groups has stimulated demand for appropriately credentialed personnel to pursue the workplace perpetrators of microaggressions, racist dog whistles and hate speech. For the more physically oriented and less intellectually gifted victim-credentialed folks, there are opportunities for street work. Join Antifa or BLM, put on a mask, smash some storefront windows, and beat up anyone who appears to display racist tendencies or Nazi sympathies. For the less physically oriented, lawyers are aplenty. They will help you target and maximize the impact of your accusations of discrimination, harassment and abuse.

However, to get a better sense of how the politicians and the educators help make MVBY a national past time and turn schools into propaganda mills, consider this recent development in Connecticut. From the Hartford Courant, October, 21, 2018.

“Connecticut lawmakers moved closer on Monday toward requiring the state's school districts to teach students about the Holocaust and other genocides, voicing concern about an uptick an anti-Semitic acts and an apparent lack of knowledge among many young people about such atrocities. While the state Department of Education has made an optional course on genocide available to districts, legislators said many have not used it. ‘We have not done enough to educate the young,’ said Democratic Rep. Andrew Fleischmann of West Hartford, who voiced concern about recent polling that has shown a lack of awareness about the Holocaust and the six million Jewish victims. ‘It's not clear why we would have districts not teaching this profoundly important subject.’”

The article goes on to add that “The House of Representatives voted 147-0 in favor of the bill following a somber and poignant debate.” Really? One has to wonder: just how “somber and poignant” a “debate” could be with a vote of 147 to 0 as the outcome? How long did it last? It sounds more to me like the sorts of voting that took place in the Council of People’s Commissars back in the halcyon days of the USSR. “No” is not a career-enhancing move, as everyone, wink-wink, understands. “It's not clear why we would have districts not teaching this profoundly important subject.”  Come on Commisar Fleischmann! You are just being polite. We all know what is going on in these districts. 

Did anyone in this somber debate raise what seems to be the most obvious question: Why should the teaching of “Holocaust and other genocides” be mandatory? Representative Fleischmann says that this is a “profoundly important subject.” Fine, but let’s drop the preacherly pose, set the scolding aside for a moment and be upfront and honest: what is “important” is an outcome heavily conditioned by self-interest and self-identity. Engineers argue that mathematics and physics are profoundly important subjects for instruction, for English teachers, literature and grammar. Devout Catholics want their children to be taught to believe in the sanctity of life and the mortal sin of abortion, for feminists, the equality of women, access to abortion, and the social construction of gender are very important.

Why then does the Holocaust merit privileged status as a mandatory topic in the schools?  The last 3000 years or so of history is full of mass murder, atrocities, rape and pillage. So much to choose from, so where do you draw the line? You could fill up the entire K-12 years with nothing else. Given the heavy moralizing that energizes the teaching of these sorts of topics, unfortunately, the efforts inevitably twist themselves into tendentious, fact-selective enterprises of enforced dogma that suffer absolutely no critical or skeptical reaction – true believers are the intended outcome, anything else is punishable heresy. Look what happened to Larry Summers a few years back at Harvard. Being a certified victim, or related to a victim of any atrocity gives the claimant enormous moral, and possibly political, leverage, which is why, it should seem obvious, that victim-status has become such a coveted commodity that comes with a vast advocacy network and legal enforcement apparatus. To wit: “Last year, the General Assembly passed legislation making the commission of a hate crime a felony instead of a misdemeanor. Violence and threats based on a person's gender also were deemed hate crimes. The state's previous law only protected gender identity or expression, not gender,” also from the Hartford Courant article.

But on with the somber Connecticut lawmakers: Who then should teach the American children about the “Holocaust and other genicides”? Before attempting to answer the question, it is reasonable to conclude that the upper-case “Holocaust” is going to be the centerpiece of attention given the “uptick of anti-Semitic acts” that young people seem to be unaware of, as noted by Alan Levin, the regional civil rights chairman of the Connecticut Anti-Defamation League, who was cited in the Hartford Courant article. One can speculate about ADL priorities operating in this venue, but what about the lower-case afterthought, the “other genocides”? Well, to borrow an old Cricket metaphor, that is a bit of “sticky wicket” because, you see, from the very beginning of its coinage by Raphael Lemkin and its attachment to Hitler and the Third Reich, “genocide” has been a tool of cynical ideologues used in the service of self-interest.  In a review, of Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (Princeton University Press) Aaron Rothstein writes in “Bodies Count”:

“Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford, wonders why Lemkin, and those who followed his analysis at the United Nations in writing the Genocide Convention, created a concept that incorporated Hitler’s killings—the attempt to extirpate the Jews was an attempt to exterminate an ethnic group (and nation)—but did not extend as far as Stalin’s murders. Naimark points out that Lemkin’s 1933 argument, unlike his 1944 book, included a reference to the extermination of a “social collectivity.” Such collectivities include political parties or groups organized around particular ideas; they could be almost any group considered to be a political opponent. In Lemkin’s earlier analysis, the attempt to exterminate such groups would also have been considered genocide. But not in 1944. And not in 1948, either, when Lemkin’s work influenced the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That document also leaves out social and political collectivities, stating that genocide includes the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Naimark suggests that the reason for this alteration in the concept was simple, but it has had large consequences: Lemkin did not want to upset Stalin who, despite brutally exterminating political groups in the Soviet Union, was vital to the Allied war effort against Hitler.”

Yes, it was extremely important not to “upset Stalin” which meant that his mass-murders – millions of Ukraine peasants, the Katyn Wood massacre, as well as his extensive mass-deportations and ethnic cleansing during WWII, and the million-plus slave-laborers in the Gulag – would have to be conveniently overlooked. Lemkin himself in a recent study by Anton Weiss-Wendt, who directs research at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway, emerges as an unsavory opportunist. In a review:

“Rather than the ‘saintly figure’ of popular accounts, Weiss-Wendt instead presents Lemkin as ‘a rather odious character— jealous, monomaniacal, self-important, but most of all unscrupulous’, complicit in the gutting of his own creation. As early as 1947, Lemkin himself favored the exclusion of political groups in order to secure adoption of the treaty, and enlisted the World Jewish Congress in this effort.” (Holocaust and Genocide Studies, September, 2017)

Genocide as a moral and legal concept from its establishment by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948 has been selectively applied and politically manipulated so as to make its current application a dubious polemical ploy that certifies victimhood with an exclamation point. The Wikipedia “List of Genocides by Death Toll” has a total of thirty-five genocides that range back to 135 BC, “the Punic battle of Carthage.”  It also cites the “Canadian residential school system (Canadian genocide)” that claimed somewhere between “3,200 and 32,000 lives over 120 years” (a multi-generational conspiracy apparently). Not on the list was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” that in five years killed between 20 and 40 million Chinese. The Wikipedia list also states that “Scholars are divided and their debate is inconclusive on whether the Holodomor [Stalin’s terror famine that killed three to five million Ukrainians] falls under the definition of genocide.” When what counts as “genocide” is elusive enough to put the “scholars” in opposition over 3 to 5 million dictator-designed dead people and inclusive enough to put the Canadian residential school system in the dock over 32,000 or is it 3,200 or maybe 32?), it is time, the next time you hear the word, to kick the dog and go out and mow your lawn.    

In 2012 Paul Preston, a prolific British historian of the Spanish civil war, published a massive work entitled, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain. Preston just couldn’t help himself: he says so in the Prologue to the book (xi). So now, it seems, “Holocaust” is going the way of “genocide” with Franco joining the ranks of Hitler in the “circles of evil” rankings. This made Preston wildly popular with the Spanish leftists who are now set to evict Franco from the hated Valle de los Caidos and who will probably soon blow the place up. I don’t know, however, if Preston heard from the Anti-Defamation League and Deborah Lipstad, the self-appointed guardian of Holocaust orthodoxy, with accusations of trademark infringement, but, clearly, there are powerful incentives to push the envelope of guilt and inflationary pressure at work for those who toil at manipulating the nomenclature-of-evil, trying to move their favorite victim-class to the front of the line.

So, to return to the question: Who then should teach the American children about the “Holocaust and other genocides”?  Here, from the Hartford Courant, is the Connecticut solution:

“Under the legislation, local and regional school boards must include the topic in their social studies curriculum beginning with the 2018-19 school year. It is estimated the mandate could cost districts less than $5,000, but the legislation allows local school officials to use free, online resources and to accept grants and donations to cover the cost.”

A bit of online research will indicate the likely source of the “free, online resources,” and elementary deductive logic will point you in the right direction to guess about the content and structure. Oh, and note the direction, from “must include the topic…” to ... “the legislation allows local schools to use free online resources…”  Alan Levin from the ADL, I’ll bet, has an uncle in the furniture business. 

But let me confidently speculate about a few of the things that the students of Connecticut and those in the nineteen other states in line to make Holocaust education mandatory will not learn from their Holocaust education: 

Churchill’s firebombing of 131 cities during WWII, immolating hundreds of thousands of German civilians, including women and children – war crimes under international law (Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland Im Bombenkrieg, 1940-1945, Propylean, 2002);

The predominant role that Jewish Bolsheviks played in the murder of the Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, fourteen year old son and four daughters -- bayoneted to death (Mark Weber, “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime,” (The Unz Review);

The rape and murder of tens of thousands of German women by Red Army soldiers in 1945 (Anthony Beevor, “They Raped every Female from Eight to Eighty” in The Guardian);

The ethnic cleansing and force deportation of fifteen million ethnic Germans from “liberated” central Europe, of which two million died from starvation, disease and murder – the result of Potsdam Conference in 1945 with Truman, Churchill and Attlee in collusion with human rights champion, Joseph Stalin (Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge, 1977);  

Ethnic cleansing and deportation of Palestinians; the dispossession and theft of their property; the massacres and atrocities of Israeli hero, Ariel Sharon; and Golda Meir’s declamation of diversity and inclusion from 1969: “There was no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.” (Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Grove Press, 2017, p. 224).

This list could go on for a very long time, but the victims of these atrocities and many of the others that could be cited are not currently in fashion and will not be anytime soon. And so, we have come full circle back to the high stakes game of “My victimhood is greater than yours.” At some point it should become obvious that certain people take this game more seriously than others and play it much better than anyone else.

Franciso Franco, Donald Trump and the Future of Fascism

The Socialist party in Spain is taking power and it appears that high on its agenda is to interrupt the eternal slumber of General Francisco Franco in his gothic mausoleum, Valle de los Caidos. With the shifting tectonic plates of Spanish politics his posthumous eviction appears to be on the near horizon, a savory morsel of venganza for the Spanish left over the Franquistas.

Forty-three years after his death and the restoration of the Spanish monarchy and almost eighty years since his civil war victory over the Spanish Republicans the hatred of the Spanish left for the dead Caudillo continues unabated. In the long run Franco abjectly failed in Spain to stem the modern, secularizing tides of change that were washing over the rest of Europe. Unforgettable and unforgiveable, however, is that he was on the wrong side of history, opposed by the “progressives” of his time, and thus, not supposed to win in 1939. That he did with the help of Hitler and Mussolini makes his memory an unrelenting abomination.

Whenever progressives lose they think and act as if they stand on the brink of an apocalypse, as was in stark evidence recently in the reaction of the American left to the improbable defeat of Hillary Clinton who sneered at Trump as a Fascist of sorts whose supporters were “irredeemable.” Trump, like Franco, was declared to be on the wrong side of history and not supposed to win. For the progeny of the communists, socialists and anarchists who succumbed to Franco’s Nationalists, his victory and subsequent dictatorship must be rendered a political and moral cataclysm fit only for execration.  Revenge is to be vented symbolically upon his tomb and his memory.    

A recent article in the New York Times on the planned demolition of Franco’s crypt quotes Paul Preston, who has written prolifically on Franco and the Spanish Civil War.

“Paul Preston, a British historian and biographer of Franco, said that Spain was an anomaly in Europe in keeping a ‘place of pilgrimage for its fascist dictator’ — there are no monuments to Adolf Hitler in Germany or in Austria, nor to Benito Mussolini in Italy. Among the more than 250,000 visitors to the Valle de los Caídos each year, Mr. Preston said, many are devotees of Franco ‘brought up to believe that he was a benefactor for Spain.’”

Preston does not bother to speculate as to what sort of considerations might move these misguided “devotees” of the Generalissimo. Certainly, they would be nothing that would make any sense to the normal, rational sorts of people who read the New York Times and reflect thoughtfully on all matters of politics. You see, Preston, while nominally a historian, is really a high functioning, sophisticated member of that school of moralists whose theorizing is firmly anchored to the ghost of Adolf Hitler, the ne plus ultra of wickedness and depravity who seems to be always busy reincarnating himself as Trump, Putin, Bush II or whoever is the current menace of right-thinking people said to be “strangling democracy” somewhere. For moralizing purposes, this “Hitlerizing” approach works very well leaving no moral ambiguity to contend with; those who are good and those who are evil are clearly distinguishable. Those who are evil are supremely and unequivocally so, which by contrast makes those who are good paragons of virtue and moral rectitude. When a brand new Hitler comes to town, no need for further conversation, debate or compromise; taking to the streets, brandishing anti-Fascist bona fides, and active resistance is the only moral option. Franco, for Preston, was just an Iberian cutout of the Austrian Corporal, and so anyone who might even attempt to offer an attenuating perspective on his life and career, would have to be castigated as a Brownshirt apologist, drooling away on the fringes. (See: Fosterspeak: Santiago Carrillo, the Last Stalinist)

For historical understanding, however, Preston’s work will not be especially helpful. He remains invincibly oblivious to the reasons that explain why, unlike the absence of monuments for Hitler and Mussolini in contemporary Germany and Italy, there were and are monuments to Franco in Spain. Franco died of natural causes in his old age having prudently kept his country out of World War II (refusing Hitler’s entreaties to draw Spain into an alliance) and having prepared for a peaceful succession of power to a constitutional order. This was in stark contrast to the dramatic, violent exits of Hitler and Mussolini that capped the epic destruction and ruin that their reigns brought to large portions of the planet. The Germans after Hitler’s demise got the Nuremberg Trials; Spain upon Franco’s death got King Juan Carlos, a decent and benevolent man. Spain was never occupied by conquering foreign armies (no Spanish women by the tens of thousands raped and murdered by Red Army soldiers), its citizens never forced or bribed to behave in ways deemed “appropriate” by their Soviet, British, French and American occupiers. Finally, Spanish Catholics might well consider Franco a “benefactor” of sorts given the fate of religious people in communist governed lands throughout the twentieth century. Catholics fared better in mid-twentieth century Spain, then they did in, let us say, Poland.

The Socialists in Spain have been in the Franco decommissioning mode for some time. In 2007 they passed the Law of Historical Memory (Yes, that is not a parody) and commenced the renaming of streets and buildings and the removal of monuments and statues having anything to do with Franco. The Valle de los Caidos has, of course, always been their grand prize. Historical “memory” in contemporary western Europe is a state monopolized enterprise and incorrect thinking about touchy subjects is subject to punishment. To make certain Hitler reigns historically supreme and unchallenged as the Avatar of Evil, historians who depart from the officially sanctioned narratives about German iniquities and culpability are labeled as “holocaust deniers,” their morally opprobrious opinions deemed sufficient to subject them to criminal prosecution. When the state resorts to the criminalizing of unpopular opinions, however, one has to wonder what defects or limitations there might be with the orthodox version that require persecution of the sceptics. Since the dissenters are so obviously deluded and/or ignorant that no normal person would pay them attention, why do they need to be threatened with prison?

The American left has no Franco statues upon which to vent their anti-Fascist fury, but the 2016 Presidential surprise election of Donald Trump was immediately followed by his predictable Hitlerization. Statues and monuments signaling “white supremacy” are now the targets of our very own antifas and Black Lives Matters gangs who seem to resemble the church-burning, priest-murdering, nun-raping, anti-Fascist Spanish anarchists of the 1930s. The attempted mass-murder last year by Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, of dozens of Republican Congressmen and the encouragement by national Democrat leaders for their supporters to engage in the harassment and physical intimidation of Trump administration officials portends an escalation to unprecedented levels of violent political conflict.   

Just recently, the NAACP called for the sandblasting away of Confederate carvings on Stone Mountain Georgia.  The north face of Stone Mountain depicts three Confederate figures — Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Work on the carving began in 1923, according to the park’s website. It is 400 feet above ground and the entire carved surface covers about three acres. It is larger than Mount Rushmore.  A protest march on July 4^th included Black Panthers armed with AK-47s and AR-15s.

From the Democrat Candidate for Governor of Georgia:

“Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called for the removal of the giant carving that depicts three Confederate war leaders on the face of state-owned Stone Mountain, saying it “remains a blight on our state and should be removed.’”

The left in Spain and the U.S are set on destroying the symbols of a past that make them feel bad. In Spain the memory of Franco seems to poison their waking moments even though he has been long dead and widely forgotten in most of the world. In the U.S. the memory of slavery and Jim Crow, though ancient history, continues to arouses their resentment.

Purging Franco from public spaces and tearing down Confederate statues, however, is not going to make the moralists on the left feel better because feeling bad (angry, resentful, vengeful) is the high octane emotional fuel that runs the engines of cultural Marxism. Left-wing ideologues and activists gain political traction by leveraging the grievances of victim classes, by churning up their anger and turning it against the oppressor classes. Victims who don’t realize that they are victims and feel bad about it are of no use, and without self-conscious, agitated victims, cultural Marxism is like a fast car with no wheels; it goes nowhere.

What helps to keep the bad feelings fresh, invigorating and thus efficacious for members of the victim class is a demonizing vocabulary at their disposal that enables them to portray the oppressors as malignant cretins who have no place in a modern, progressive society. Which is why “Fascist” remains one of the favorites in the left’s lexicon of abuse and why Hitler keeps reappearing whenever progressives experience some resistance to their planned march to perfect equality. The logic is obvious and primitive. “Hitler would be against ‘x’ (‘x’ being the latest progressive fashion); therefore, your opposition to ‘x’ means you must be like Hitler.”  “Fascism” has the ideal, goose-stepping imagery and historical connotations from the 1930s that make it the perfect, all-purpose smear – the Gestapo, concentration camps, racial persecution, cult-worship of the leader. 

Real flesh and blood Fascists were extinguished by WWII Allied armies, and those few today who imitate the originals occupy the only the far reaches of the social fringe. Thus, the curious irony: while neo-Nazis and Klansmen are few and far between, and while no one in their right mind today wants to be connected with anything resembling Fascism, for the left, it seems, a sizeable portion of the U.S. is made up of them, including our President. The overreach should seem silly and obvious to all but the most deranged fringe of the left. But the smear will persist widely because the left needs Fascists to affirm their own virtue and rationalize their escalating assaults on free speech, religious freedom and historical symbols that offend them. Without the specters of Hitler, Franco, the Klan, sandblasting monuments and renaming streets might seem like a waste of time and effort.

Monuments, Museums and the Racial Reconciliation Racket

 Montgomery, Alabama (CNN) — One of my first thoughts when I arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, and encountered the spring heat was this: How did enslaved men, women and children endure day after day?

                                                   Nia-Malika Henderson

The exotically forenamed Nia-Malika Henderson is a senior political reporter for CNN who, according to her by-line, “reports on the politics, policies and people shaping Washington with a focus on identity politics.” Just wondering, would a reporter so named be pursuing anything other than identity politics?  “Identity politics” has become a euphemism for an ideology whose central premise makes racism the defining feature of both historical and contemporary America and holds white Americans morally culpable for the all of the social and economic disparities that mark black-white race relations. White privilege and whiteness have become the twenty-first century’s scarlet letter with rituals of contrition and petitions for forgiveness as basic requirements for sustaining social and professional respectability.  

Ms. Henderson recently wrote a piece for CNN about her visit to Montgomery, Alabama where she experienced The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration that opened on April 26^th.  She reports that “The memorial captures the brutality and the scale of lynchings throughout the South, where more than 4,000 black men, women and children, died at the hands of white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Most were in response to perceived infractions—walking behind a white woman, attempting to quit a job, reporting a crime or organizing sharecroppers.”

Some curious folks out there might pause and puzzle over just how much “peace” and “justice” will come out of this sort of a museum. But whatever skepticism or misgiving someone might entertain should quickly dissipate with the realization that “memorial” and “museum” are not quite the right words to describe what the creators of this project have in mind. Here is what a visitor will be in for.

From the website: “The memorial is more than a static monument. In the six-acre park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimed and installed in the counties they represent. Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not.”

You need to read this slowly, pause and consider carefully what is going on and why it should make you very nervous and deeply suspicious, particularly, “Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror…” Whoa! Cultural Revolution, China, anyone? So, the old “white supremacy” monuments are being torn down at a dizzying pace, and now up goes a memorial-museum where the curators promise (threaten?) at some indefinite future time to come to your county of residence and determine whether you and your neighbors have “confronted the truth,” i.e., whether you constantly ruminate about how terribly, both in the past (enslavement) and present (mass incarceration), white people treat non-white people. What exactly will that confrontation involve and what will happen to you if your efforts to respond to the confrontation are deemed unsuccessful? Certified attendance at MLK prayer breakfasts will not be sufficient. It sounds like the “peace and justice” envisioned will be something like the fate of white farmers in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or, closer to home, the experience of the property owners in Ferguson, Missouri staring at their burned-out ruins when the rioting mobs were done.   

Somehow, the contemplation and understanding of history (what memorials and museums are supposed to be all about) do not seem to be what visitors to this site are supposed to come away with, and what exactly will the “reconciliation” look like? The objective is the stimulation of anger and bitterness on the part of black Americans; guilt and submission on the part of whites. This is another step up to the complete racializing of American politics which is increasingly marked by a systematic campaign of recrimination, resentment and hostility directed at middle class white Americans with the purpose of leveraging collective guilt through historical grievances and exerting collective retribution against people who had no part in them.  

From the Legacy Museum website: “Why build a memorial to victims of racial terror?  EJI [Equal Justice Initiative, the 501c3 non-for-profit sponsor] believes that publicly confronting the truth about our history is the first step towards recovery and reconciliation. A history of racial injustice must be acknowledged, and mass atrocities and abuse must be recognized and remembered, before a society can recover from mass violence. Public commemoration plays a significant role in prompting community-wide reconciliation.”

Whoever wrote this must live in an alternate universe. In contemporary America reminders of its “history of racial injustice” are relentless and ubiquitous. The main-stream media is obsessed with it. Pop-culture and the entertainment industry cannot get enough (“Black Panther,” anyone, The “Color of Water” or “Hidden Figures” just in the last year or so). Sports? Try watching ESPN or NFL football to attempt to escape the “national conversation on race” the professional scolds running our institutions keep telling us we have to have. Look at the content of public school curricula or the subject matter of social science and humanities courses at most universities and the reverence and sensitivity required whenever the “civil rights movement” is mentioned. Recall then-President Obama’s rumination that “racism is in our DNA.” Consider the single most memorable line coming out of the 2016 American Presidential campaign from Hillary Clinton. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.” So, this business of “publically confronting the truth about our history” is actually going on at a breakneck pace with truth as the biggest casualty. 

The orthodoxy of pervasive, systemic, institutional racism as the defining feature of American society is well defined and ruthlessly enforced by the most powerful forces that shape our culture. As it is with all firmly entrenched orthodoxies, punishment falls heavily on any and all transgressors. Nothing outside the boundaries of orthodoxy can be countenanced as the truth. Religious orthodoxy bans transgression as heresy; communist orthodoxy banned it as false consciousness and counter-revolutionary thinking; identity politics orthodoxy dismisses it simply as “hate.” Recently Mark Zuckerberg in an appearance at a Congressional hearing seemed genuinely flummoxed when asked by Senator Ben Sasse to define “hate speech.” One gathers from his dumbstruck look that he thought that the answer was just too obvious. How could anyone as bright as Sasse even raise it as a serious question? Hate speech is whatever would stimulate the disapproval of the feminists, black studies professors and sociologists who populate the faculties of our prestigious universities or would upset the diversity commissars who manage sensitivity training sessions and enforce speech codes at the corporations.   

Consider the fate of Amy Wax, a senior law professor when she strayed outside of what are normally the tightly secured boundaries of identity politics orthodoxy at the University of Pennsylvania. Together with her colleague Larry Alexander, she published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer that among other things said:

“America’s less progressive culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

One might be tempted to think that not following this script might have something to do with the current “mass incarceration” of black males which is one of the grievances of EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice. But Professor Wax’s suggestion that something other than racism has had a bearing on this ongoing catastrophe was clearly a transgression of major proportions. This along with some of her other violations of the PC code has aroused the fury of students and colleague faculty members at Penn and she is now a persona non-grata, pulled by her dean from teaching first year law courses and routinely pilloried by the illuminati in the local and national media outlets. Only tenure has saved her from a complete professional decommission, termination and expulsion from the university.     

The rage and condemnation cascading down on Professor Wax is completely understandable and instructive. She is not some unemployed West Virginia coal miner who supported Donald Trump, or your run of the mill bigoted Republican politician from fly-over country. She is a brilliant, full Professor at an Ivy League university with a record of teaching excellence who possesses a medical degree from Harvard in addition to her law degree and who also happens to be Jewish. Which make her the ultimate insider, a member of an elite club that prides itself on its progressive politics and its unconditional embrace of the ideology of victimhood. As a high-status member, you do not step out of this pristine, prestigious tent, turn around and piss back in. The keepers of the tent are all about making sure an insider, especially one with her stature, is punished to the max for violating the code. Otherwise, someone on the outside might begin to suspect that the members of the club are not quite as virtuous or perspicacious as they pretend to be.

But let us return for a moment to the alternate universe of the EJI and the truth we are supposed to confront.  “EJI believes that publicly confronting the truth about our history is the first step towards recovery and reconciliation…” The “first step”? Really? Apparently the last 50 years or so of race relations in American society have gone down the memory hole for these earnest EJI reconciliation specialists. Much can be said on this topic, but consider just a few highlights that might be considered as “first steps” and beyond: the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the creation of EEOC; Affirmative Action; Section 8 of the Housing Act; Minority Contract Set-Aside Program; University of California v. Bakke (1978) decision; Oprah; the official beatification of Martin Luther King Jr.; two black American Presidents (Bill Clinton, honorary per Toni Morrison), two black Secretaries of State, two black Attorney Generals; black domination in national athletics and prominence in the entertainment and music industries.  One can go on and on, but this should be sufficient to demonstrate that it would highly delusional to believe that “community wide reconciliation” is where any of us are heading. 

I wish the best for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum and hope my county of residence will be ready for the coming confrontation. In order, however, to advance their efforts at “publicly confronting the truth about our history” now that O.J. Simpson will soon be walking freely among us, let me suggest that another memorial should be erected close by: The Nichole Simpson Brown--Ron Goldman National Memorial. It would be dedicated to victims of racially motivated miscarriages of justice. It could be set up as a site of interactive learning with Johnny Cochrane impersonators doing seminars on race pandering and jury nullification. It could also feature galleries with photos of the bloodstained crime scene, OJ trying on the gloves, video clips of the OJ white Bronco-Police caravan, the circus courtroom antics and best of all, the wildly jubilant black response to the announcement of the jury’s not-guilty verdict. "Who cares if he did it? The white bitch and her Jew boyfriend had it coming", I think, was the message the jurors were sending. (For the record: no white rioting followed this grotesque perversion of justice.) This memorial, however, would eschew the “peace and justice,” and “reconciliation and recovery” crapola that the EJI folks use to disguise their own project of grievance mongering and racial animosity to sound like anything other than what it is, casus belli.   

Is America a Democracy? Its Enemies Think Not

                                                                                     
 

“Stalin’s dictatorship, too would be expected to foster ‘a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and abroad and/or by imposing upon the population gigantic tasks that would be unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship’ as well as, ‘a charismatic image of the dictator,’ ‘a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote future’ and ‘proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.’”

(From Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, p. 306)

Observations and reflections of seemingly no relevance to your daily comings and goings jump out at you sometimes and make a strong, unexpected connection to your unrelenting, consuming nightmares. Jumping out at me was the above reflection on Stalin’s dictatorship from a new biography by the prolific historian of the Soviet era, Stephen Kotkin. So, how does a long dead, mass-murdering Bolshevik connect to twenty-first century American politics now in a constant, wild frenzy over one of its most bizarre of improbabilities, a TV-reality show star and former real estate mogul with gorgeous wife numero tres sitting in the White House? 

The closest we have gotten to a “charismatic image of the dictator” in recent times might have been the cult of personality that enveloped candidate Barack Obama, The One, in 2008 replete with fainting maidens at his rallies, God-comparisons by serious journalists, and fake Greek columns for the backdrops of his speeches. Obama’s “healing the planet” magic was sustained for a season by the massive collective sycophancy composed of the media establishment, the entertainment industry and academia. The cult of Obama, however, was a celebrity cult and Americans in their embrace of celebrities are, if nothing else, a fickle lot. Obama is now (at least for the time being), past tense, the mystic, Oprah, the current fashionable buzz.  For better or worse, we have, as they say, moved on, and whatever one might care to say about Donald Trump, “charismatic” is not what first jumps to mind.

What strikes so close to home about Kotkin’s comments on Stalin’s rule is his noting of “a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home or abroad….”  It is safe to say, I believe, that “a permanent condition of stress” captures what so many of us now feel as we endure the daily irruptions of ideological warfare increasingly infused with the language of apocalypse and the denunciation of yet another enemy of “our democracy.” Nancy Pelosi, of the recent Republican tax bill, intoned, “It is the end of the world… The debate on health care is life/death… This is Armageddon.” In the head of this cognitively impaired septuagenarian, predicting how the levers move to arrange her thoughts might be an entertaining exercise, but she cannot possibly believe this. No one believes it, but American politics has descended into untrammeled tribal warfare, and warfare is all about friends and enemies. Obama let it slip out in a 2010 Univision interview, dropping his ‘g’s  in order to sound less like a President and more like a mob boss, “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.” Obama, however, had stumbled on to something: enemies exist to be punished; that’s the whole point, and when you practice politics as warfare, that’s the only rule. 

The existence of these enemies Obama had put in his sights for punishment, I would suggest, is what makes our “permanent condition of stress” permanent. Moreover, it should be obvious that, whatever the particular threats political enemies might exude, persistence and endurance are of the highest importance, in a word, permanence. A completely vanquished enemy is no longer an enemy, and without him, the status-quo with all of its limitations and imperfections conveniently ascribed to his wiles, belongs entirely to the victor, an undisputed but tainted possession, however, that does not work completely to his advantage. On our enemies, we depend for our longevity more, perhaps, than on our friends.

Stalin was extremely fortunate in the early stages of his dictatorship to have had Hitler and Mussolini as his enemies. The racial and national superiority claimed by the Nazis and Fascists and their affinity for violence and military aggression made them the perfect foil for the Soviet’s phony “peace” propaganda and the promise of humanity’s revolutionary march of progress toward a world of equality, harmony and plenty and a socialist workers paradise. The Soviets were the “progressives” of the 1930s; they had divined the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice and were, in stark contrast to the Nazis, bending right along with it. Though Nazi Germany was militarily vanquished by Stalin (with massive assistance from the capitalist powers he had vowed to destroy) the imagery of fascism was embraced by the Soviets up to its collapse in 1991 to define its enemies, including its primary cold war enemy, the United States.

Who then are the enemies that now foster this “permanent state of stress” that seems to plague American politics? These are “enemies within,” those who oppose or are indifferent to the coercive moralism of the self-proclaimed “progressives” who now own the Democrat party. These enemies, in continuity with practice of the Soviet-era progressives, employing the ominous swastika-blackshirt imagery of the 1930s, continue to be smeared as fascists; “fascism” meaning opposition or resistance to progress. Only moral defectives and mental pigmies can be against progress which is why “fascist” rolls so effortlessly off the tongue of a progressive whenever he encounters someone not of his ilk. 

Progress, however, is conveniently and hopelessly abstract and remains always an elusive goal, one, as noted in Kotkin’s observation above, “that is carefully kept in the remote future.” The future is never where we are at, and thus it serves to defer accountability for current failure and as the ideological fulcrum to justify the application of whatever force is necessary to prepare everyone for arrival, someday, at that morally pristine destination of perfect equality, progressivism’s ruling motif. All progressives, whether of the 1930s Bolshevik-genre or 21^st century American social justice warriors, are enthusiasts for coercion, since not everyone comprehends their current fallen state and only those who are willing to submit to the purification rituals get to continue moving toward the promise land. Those who do not are, as Hillary Clinton put it so bluntly during her 2016 Presidential campaign, “irredeemable.” With the shift of a few electoral votes, the future for anyone belonging to this class, would have looked even less promising. When you have the power, what exactly will you do to a large, intractable class of irredeemables that will not involve massive coercion? Hillary’s irredeemables would have felt her revenge; a bit like Stalin’s kulaks of the 1930s.

For today’s progressives, so enthralled with the promises of Obama and now in desperate “resistance” to President Trump, their “friends” and “enemies” no longer break out into Bolshevik-theorized hostile classes (oppressed-proletariat versus oppressor-capitalist) but into racial tribes (oppressed-people of color versus white-oppressors). The vehicle of this relationship is racism, and it is barely an exaggeration to say that twenty minutes cannot pass without Americans being reminded by some angry or condescending “authority” from the chattering classes what a racist society they live in. They watch the mobs assault historical monuments, benignly regarded for hundreds of years, now proclaimed “racist.” Speech that does not conform to the standards set by self-proclaimed victims of racial discrimination and oppression is proscribed as “hate speech,” and harassment and banishment meted out to the transgressors. Whiteness and white-privilege are officially the marks of moral turpitude and require the bearers to undergo confessional “struggle sessions” reminiscent of the Mao’s Red Guard in action during the Cultural Revolution.          

Racism, Obama revealed to us late in his Presidency, is “still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it.” This was not good news, at least for some of us “folks.” Translated into practical-political terms this means that racists are here for the duration, enemies, you might say, of a permanent nature. What punishment might be in store for them is a matter of grim speculation. Obama’s metaphor of the “cure,” clearly, is a euphemism that barely conceals the growing hostility and resentment for the heritage and traditions of white European America and the determination to erase them.

There was no push back on Obama’s “diagnosis” from any notable within our culture shaping institutions. Indeed, this seems to be the received, state-enforced wisdom, the foundation of the ruling orthodoxy, and so once again Kotkin’s text on Stalin’s last-century terror-state bears out a certain resemblance to the descent of 21^st century American politics into a soft dictatorship. We now, as did the Russians in the 1930s, face the “proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.” The dictatorship we live under today has no mustachiod, grey tunic-wearing party General Secretary who personally sets the standards for “correct” thinking enforced by an elaborate apparatus of state-terror. The proscription and repression for us is of a different more insidious, sophisticated order. Instead, we have a hoard of mini-Stalins (race-careerists, political opportunists, left-wing globalists, and cultural Marxists) throughout the land sniffing into every corner of American society for any scent of racism. The American-Stalinist orthodoxy is the judgment that racism, the defining core of American history, dominates every aspect of its social order. Redemption comes only by remaking America into a multicultural rainbow that reflects the diversity of the planet. This is not a debatable proposition: to raise questions or doubts is a high-risk enterprise. Your career can be destroyed, Nobel prize winning geneticist, James Watson, for example, for publishing research on race and IQ. You cannot speak and may be assaulted on a university campus if your views on race related matters do not meet official approval, Charles Murray and his faculty escort, for example, at Middlebury College last year. Professional advancement, academic respectability, social approval and mobility, all rest heavily on conformity to the affirmations of the fixed faith.

In government, the mini-Stalins busy themselves opening the borders to millions of third world people and denouncing as “racist” Americans who resent not only the financial and social burdens they impose, but also fear the loss of their culture and heritage. The journalists and media advocacy-functionaries, perform Pravda-like, rewarded for their fawning with access to corridors of power. From the corrupt, dissolute entertainment industry, we are subjected to productions of obscenity-laced nihilism and a steady barrage of barely disguised works of leftwing agitprop. Little-Stalins infest the workplace as sensitivity enforcers policing such things as the use of gender pronouns, searching for micro-aggressions, expanding the world of victims whose feelings require constant protection from the bigots who fail to grasp the imperatives of diversity and inclusion.   

In this dictatorship that the overlords continue, laughingly, to call “our democracy,” we – white, European, Christian Americans – are the enemy, the permanent enemy. Apologies for slavery and racism and copious confessions of white privilege will not change that. Reparations will not change that. Diversity indoctrination, sensitivity training and absorbing more lectures on tolerance will not make us less toxic. Reverence and worship of Martin Luther King and attendance at MLK prayer breakfasts will make no difference, will impress no one and will not diminish the hostility and rancor held against us. Nothing we say or do will make “whiteness” other than a permanent moral stain. The first practical order is to stop pretending otherwise and collaborating with the engineers of our destruction. What comes next should be obvious.