Against Anti-Racism and the Hemeneutics of Hatred

Fighting racism requires knowing what it is – not an easy task….  [R]acism is a Schimfort: a term with pejorative connotations, whose very use inevitably tends to be more instrumental than descriptive. To call someone a racist, even if the charge is intellectually dishonest, can be a useful tactic, either in successfully paralyzing or in casting enough suspicion as to curtail credibility.  
                                            Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?”

A proposal: to make the charge of “racism” an automatic libelous offense if made by a private citizen, an impeachable act with the loss of government pension if made by a public official.  Punishment falls on the accuser unless the charge could be substantiated and confirmed by empirically verifiable evidence based on a single, legally promulgated definition of “racism” with clear, operational terms. What about free speech, you counter? Well, what about it?  Free speech has done a disappearing act in Canada where the Canadian Senate recently passed Bill C-16 which puts yet another hate crime on the books, this one making it a hate crime, are you ready? -- to refer to a transgendered person who has become a “he” as a “she” and vice versa. “Transphobia” is born joining its morally defective cousins, homophobia and Islamophobia, phobias that will put the possessor in the cross hairs of the local prosecutor.  Also, free speech in western Europe has given way to government regulated speech where any criticism of a member of a designated protected class is prosecutable, again, as hate speech. Here in the U.S.? Try going to any university and college campus and see how far free speech takes you before some social justice warrior throws a plastic bag of feces at you because you are deemed a “hateful” person, or some self-designated “anti-fascist” starts punching you because disagreeing with him makes you a fascist.

Essentially, the governments in the western world have clearly shifted away from the long-held high priority of liberal, democratic polities for freedom of expression to the suppression of “hatred” selectively and arbitrarily interpreted and enforced by high placed ideologues who get to determine whose hatred gets punished and whose is justified. This turns the business of legislating, of making readily understandable rules that everyone is expected to follow, into a contorted hermeneutics of hatred where the subjectivity of moralizing displaces the objectivity of law and the intended universality of its application. The ideologues who operate the abstruse moral machinery that is designed to suppress hatred have theorized individuals into distinct groups, the oppressed and the oppressors, the later who exploit and, of course, hate the former. The social world the ideologues envision is a deeply morally fractured one populated by helpless, blameless victims who need protection from the malevolent, menacing bigots who fail to recognize the humanity of those they oppress. The moral and legal order of such a world then must be structured to protect the oppressed and punish the oppressors, and so the moral and legal standards and expectations necessarily differ depending on whether you are an oppressor or one of the oppressed.  The mad scramble then commences. You join, if you can, the community of the oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge, and demand the assistance and protection of the state.  Failing that, retreat, submit, be quiet and hope the political police will leave you in peace.  Whatever one might wish to call this kind of social-political order, a “democracy” is not what firsts jumps to mind.

But a swift and resolute implementation of the above proposal would have many immediate and enormously salubrious effects. Below are just a few. To begin with, it would liberate public discourse from the fetters imposed by the preening moralists and scolds in so many places who wait to pounce on any and every deviation from the script of political correctness.  Some of the scolds are even highly paid to do so. In the workplace, at cocktail parties, in schools, churches, labor unions, political assemblies, and, even as unimaginable as it might now seem, university classrooms, people could speak their minds, express their concerns without the threatening, censorious race commissars launching protests and coercing apologies, Chinese Cultural Revolution style.  Fewer lobotomized college students would be assaulting campus speakers who might hurt their feelings. No more time wasted on deciphering “racist dog whistles.” No longer would we have to endure the hypocritical, disingenuous calls from the likes of Barack Obama, fresh from consorting with a scurrilous race-hustler like Al Sharpton, for a “national conversation about race” because it would actually be possible to have real one, or rather, many, without a threat to your career, reputation, even your physical safety.

The enacted proposal would reduce the current mass hysteria most recently manifest with the election of Donald Trump, christened during his campaign by Hillary Clinton and the MSM as an “unredeemable” racist along with the sixty-two million people that voted for him. There would be fewer reincarnated Hilters and Mussolinis, Bull Connors and George Wallaces to fear, agonize over and scare small children.  The Ku Klux Klan would be the laughable fringe-guys in pointy hats numbering of a couple of thousand nationwide, not, once again, all the Trump voters from Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.”  It would be less likely that another disillusioned Democrat like James Hodgkinson would take target practice at Republican congressmen.  The Southern Poverty Law Center, unable to smear any conservative individual or organization it took a fancy to, would have to close up shop.

This proposal enacted would also mute the multitudes of charlatans and extortionists who populate the “diversity” industry.  Unable to affix “racist” to every conceivable thought, gesture, word, and institution that strikes their fancy, the vast “victim” community under their care, one which they now relentlessly endeavor to expand, would begin to shrink.  The elaborate taxonomy of racism, now in a growth mode – “overt racism,” “covert racism,” economic “racism,” “systemic racism,” “institutional racism,” “environmental racism,” “legacy racism,” and many more – would be duly recognized as mysterious and incomprehensible mumbo jumbo and thus sink happily into oblivion, a subject matter for anthropologists sometime in the far future to ponder as a practice of post-modern superstition or witchcraft.  With many fewer individuals and institutions certified as “racist,” there would be a substantial decline in micro-aggressions which, like a reduction in crime, would make everyone happy. Especially pleased would be university presidents who could relax a bit and not worry about whether they must grovel and apologize every time they hear of one on campus and whether they will be fired for being too lenient on the micro-aggressors.
 
Many “professors” of English and sundry area studies programs would have to seek actual, useful employment. There would be little demand for professors of Post-Colonial Studies, even less for literature courses that are all about the racism in Shakespeare, Milton and Faulkner and every other dead white male in the literary canon. African American studies programs would wither since they are premised on discovery of “racism” as the core of the American experience.

Calling or labelling a person now a “racist” is an excellent way to do accomplish several things that enhance your self-esteem and elevate your status as a superior person.  Firsts, it shows how deeply you care about the disadvantaged, the magnanimous dimensions of your personality and your sensitivity to the suffering of others. As well it immediately separates you from that “racist” you have identified, who, of course, is your complete opposite. Thus the contrast dramatically demonstrates your vast moral superiority and justifies your self-righteous disdain.  It also bolsters your standing among friends and colleagues as a truth-to-power speaker even if that “racist’ you have called out is an unemployed mechanic from down the street whose house is in foreclosure. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything else to bolster your virtue credentials, like send your child to that rundown inner city school full of, well, you get the picture.  Sometimes it is even fun, especially when that “racist” gets really angry and flustered after you have outed him and you get to relish his discomfort as he stumbles through all of those futile protests to convince you otherwise.
 
However, this proposal if enacted would constitute a bold step toward making people more accountable and responsible for the language they use to assert their superior virtue, and it would impose a cost to what is now, cost-free moral preening.  Taking “racism” out of the compendium of popularly permissible slurs would mean that “racist,” as an accusation with all of its invidious comparisons would have to give way to an honest, “I don’t like you,” which is fine. No one is required to like anyone. But not liking someone only means just that, with no implications for your moral stature, no put-downs that testify to your own goodness. So, if you accuse someone of an offense that relegates them to, as Hillary Clinton so elegantly put it, “a basket of deplorables,” as “irredeemable,” you should be able to prove it and suffer some penalty if you cannot.

Most importantly, this proposal enacted would also greatly advance the possibility of making an honest consideration of what the implications are for the mass migrations from the third world that are currently assaulting the countries of the west.  In much of western Europe, native Europeans who question the inundation of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia are shamed by the politicians, in collusion with the media moguls, as bigots and xenophobes.

Immigration is an enormously complex issue with incalculable cultural, political, economic and security implications. Millions of immigrants, many destitute and low-skilled, carry an enormous financial burden that falls mainly on the middle and working class natives. Many of those entering Europe are unable to speak the language of the host country.  Many come from societies with very different cultures, whose values are in conflict with those of western secular society. Not surprising then is that some of new comers are resentful of their hosts and inimical to their norms.  This means that cultural conflict is inevitable and that the sheer number of new-comers threatens the long-enjoyed stability of the host countries.  All of these concerns are real, pressing and legitimate, but the elites who have opened the gates remain crudely reductivist in their own defense, seemingly blind to the coming catastrophe and resolutely self-righteous in their condemnation of those who question them.  Those native, French, Germans, Swedes and Dutch who doubt the wisdom of the inundation and fear the destruction of their own culture get the reductio ad racista treatment so long successful in beating down legitimate dissent.  First, you de-moralize dissent and make it into bigotry; then you make into criminals those citizens you have turned into bigots, unable now in any way to participate in the decisions that affect their lives and those of their children.  That the likes of Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Stefan Löfven continue to call their soft tyrannies run by unelected bureaucrats who punish their citizens for speaking the truth “democracies” is one more expression of their treachery and dishonesty.
 

If the above proposal were enacted the social and political elites would have to begin to argue their case and relinquish the smear that has served so well for so long.

Angela Merkel, Stalin in Drag

 Back in the Pleistocene era in 1989 the Berlin wall went down.  Most of the East Germans, who had likely contemplated with envy the “freedom” enjoyed by the Jurgens and Gretas next door in the West, must have wondered with great anticipation what life in a post-Stalinist world would be like.  No Stasi knuckle crushing snoops in every crevice to monitor and record what you read, said, or might be thinking, no need to pretend that the stupid government propaganda was anything more than attempted manipulation and control.  How relieved and optimistic they must have been, and no one trying to peer into the future then, even with the wildest imagination, could likely have conjured up as a Frau-Fuhrer so ghastly a phantasm as the Teutonic Stalin-in-drag, Angela Merkel. 

A Stalinist world, such as the USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, or Erich Honecker’s DDR, is an alternative universe, one where everything is the opposite of what it is said to be and where just pointing that out amounts to a serious crime.  “Democracy,” majority rule, is the imposition of diktats by the bosses in the Politburo. “Equality” is rigid caste system of privileged party overseeers.  “Freedom” is a one-way ticket to forced labor in the Gulag for those unenthused about life in the workers’ paradise, getting shot trying to escape from East Berlin, or sliding off a crude raft and drowning in the waters off Havana.    

Which bring us to today’s Germany where Boss Merkel has resurrected and summoned the Stalinist Stasi who now pursue the unenlightened ones who exhibit, shall we say, inappropriate emotions.  No room for Germans who do not like the way that they are told to feel about what the apparatchiks are doing to them, a bit like it was in back in the DDR.  Consider, below, this Orwellian description of what German politicians and German police do to German people who fail to understand the proper boundaries of expression.  From a report on recent German government crackdown on social media users.

“In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism. The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action,” Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement. “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”

As officialese goes, this is hard to top for its sheer self-contradictory stupidity, and its bullying, sinister intonations. To begin, “The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action.”  "Hate posting"?  Well, this does sound serious: police action must ensue to stamp out, yes, hate posting. The German people are in grave danger.  But then, try not to laugh, as we learn that the Federal government launched a “coordinated campaign across 14 states” in a country of no less than eighty-one million people, to ensnare a grand total of 36 folks plunking away on social media. Sounds eerily like the Stasi of the DDR, searching far and wide, making sure that no one steps out of line with the approved thinking and guidance of Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker.  This does not describe the action of a government protecting the security and interests of its citizens: it is the work of a propagandizing regime of ideocrats chasing down a few hapless, harmless dissenters. With highly publized punishment for the recalcitrant few, you can cower the many.

These 36 people were “accused of hateful postings over social media” and please note the anonymity, a Kafkaesque nameless specter which accuses but cannot be identified, questioned, countered or even understood.  Who were the accusers and what was the exact nature of the accusations beyond the big old umbrella of “hateful”?  Vague and general works best for government enforcers.  “Hateful” in its normal usage is pretty subjective, but Merkel and the German political establishment have politicized the word so that it is objective, precise and, most important, applicable – “hateful” is disapproval or criticism of state-defined victims – but yet conveniently vague and abstract – producing “a climate of fear” – so as to be able to criminalize whomever they have determined has dissented from the state-imposed multi-cultural orthodoxy.  “A climate of fear” is a nice tool for the government bosses. They can pull it out when needed, supplemented with the lexicon of invectives – “xenophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “nativist” “fascist” -- and unleash their repressive organs, selectively, on whomever offends the the noble sensibilities of the moment.  

“Incitement to racism” as a crime is particularly troublesome to contemplate since “racist” is now applied so promiscuously, particularly by leftwing politicians all over the planet, as to be meaningless beyond its intent as an insult, shorthand for “a stupid, mean-spirited right-winger, lacking in compassion for the unfortunate who has no place in our progressive society.”  In the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton claimed that half of Donald Trump supporters were “racists” and hence, “irredeemable,” which to a lot of people sounded rather hateful, not to mention, threatening. Unlike other crimes, e. g. murder, assault, burglary, jury tampering, it is impossible for one to prove that he is not a racist (no one I have ever heard of has of yet ever pulled off this feat), which makes it so handy and versatile.  Safe to say, no leftwing politician in the U.S in the last twenty years has not at some time resorted to calling someone he or she didn’t like a racist. And, speaking of “incitement,” and “hate speech,” reeved up on a steady stream of Trump-hatred from the likes of the NYT scribblers and CNN, MSNBC talkers, a leftist from the Bernie Sanders camp recently attempted to murder a couple of dozen Republican congressmen in suburban Washington DC.  

Let us now hear from the head German policeman, Herr, Holger Münch, speaking like he was trained by the editors of Pravda.  “Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet.”  Orwellian Newspeak like this leans toward first-person plural pronouns – “Our free society…” –  there is, of course, no “our”, in possession of a "free society."  This is an intentional misdirection which camouflages the master-slave relationship of the German people and their German governors, the actual power exerted by an elite, privileged class over those whom they regard as their inferiors, some of whom, many perhaps, who resent the imposed mass migration of needy third-worlders and who don’t feel free to complain about it. Of course, we don’t know what the “threats,” “criminal violence” and “violence” are that filled the social media messaging of these now 36 criminals tracked down by the German Feds, but one suspects that the laws upon which the prosecution will be based have been written with  a maximum, "enemy of our freedom" scope and flexibility as to assure conviction and that the presiding magistrates will spare no effort to inflict maximum punishment.  Examples must be made.   

One “climate of fear” that does not seem to trouble Holger Münch much comes from the spectacle of secular, liberated German women accosted in mass by young immigrant Muslim males whose views of women are shaped by the texts of a seventh century prophet from a desert, and whose behavior, coming from German men, would put them for long stretches in prison.   From New Year’s Eve, 2016:

“The world reeled following reports that as many as 1,000 women had been sexually assaulted - groped, robbed, intimidated and separated from their friends - at Cologne's central train station on New Year's Eve. Many of the perpetrators, it was alleged, appeared to be of North African or Arab descent…”  

Oh, yes, no jumping to conclusions too quickly: the “alleged” North African and Arab-descendent robbers, gropers and sexual assaulters numbered at least 1,000.  They collected around one gathering place in a single city in contrast to the 36 Die Herren und Damen in 14 different states at home on laptops posting mean, angry stuff on their Facebook pages, probably read only by the flunkies in the governments' PC surveillance department who sicced the policemen on them.  Who, really, should be afraid of whom?  In the new DDR only Angela and her Handlangeren get to say.  But let’s pursue the conversation about fear.  There was a lot of it on the streets of Cologne and elsewhere in Germany from the criminal violence of Merkel’s protected class of victims.  The perpetrators, however, are not the concern or target of the nouveau Stasi Federal police chief.  Instead, room for more of them must be made so that Frau Merkel’s globalist, multicultural, bona fides remain in tact.  This is a “climate of fear” that the Germans will be expected by Merkel and her crew to get used to.

The hate-speech/hate crime legislation that Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada and other western European countries have put into place is a predictable, logical extension of their capitulation to third world mass migration.  In the U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, who was instrumental in the passage of the 1965 immigration law that led to the flooding of the country with third world immigrants, later became a strong advocate in the Senate of hate-crime legislation.  Mass immigration and hate-crimes are hand in glove measures for leftists. First you flood the towns with aliens and then punish the locals when they complain.

In the same news release cited above, Heiko Mass, the German Justice Minister, is now said to be pushing for a new law that targets “hate speech” on social media.  As the elites’ strategy of the ethnic replacement of their native populations becomes a painful reality to them, it becomes politically necessary to ramp up the criminalization of the inevitable expression of resentment that results, and to punish resistance and opposition to the planned destruction.  The criminalization of speech based on emotion is one more step toward completing the soft totalitarian society desired by the left with its coerced uniformity of thinking and behavior.  Somehow, somewhere down the road we will all be equal the way, God, no, sorry, history intended.  Don’t worry, be happy.