Dilbert Gets Downsized

 

Scott Adams began writing his comic strip Dilbert in 1989.   The strip quickly became popular but I was not a regular reader until it was in its tenth year.   Then on Thursday, 9 September, 1999 the first panel of the strip had Dilbert in the office of his Pointy-Haired Boss saying “I found some numbers that support your strategic plan”.   In the second panel he adds “I had to take the square root of a negative number to do it.”   In the final panel he says “The timeline is on this Mobius strip” which he hands to the Pointy-Haired Boss who responds by saying “Good work”.   I found this to be so hilarious that from that point on Dilbert,  Dogbert, all the assorted other –berts, Wally, Alice, the Pointy-Haired Boss, and company joined Garfield, Snoopy, and Dagwood on the list of characters to whom I would turn for a laugh every time a newspaper was before me.  

 

It appears that most newspaper readers are no longer going to be able to do this.   Over the last week hundreds of newspapers dropped Dilbert and over the weekend the syndicate that carried it dropped it as well.   Here in Winnipeg the strip had been carried by the Winnipeg Free Press which announced on Monday that it was dropping it thus removing the last remaining reason for anyone to ever again pick up a copy of that paper.  Of course with newspaper readership as low as it is pretty soon many of these newspapers are likely to be out of business while Dilbert will still be available to its fans online.   Indeed, I hope that not merely many but most or all of the newspapers that dropped Dilbert will soon be filing for bankruptcy.   Any newspaper that would drop Dilbert for the reason for which it has been dropped is, in my opinion, a rag its community would be better off without. 

 

The media mob that is gunning for Scott Adams has been crying “racist” over remarks he made on his podcast.   Now before looking at what he said and why it is being labelled “racist” a few words are in order about accusations of racism in general.  

 

When someone is accused of committing a crime we hold a trial in which he is given the opportunity to confront and cross-examine his accusers and to mount a defence.   The burden of proof is placed upon his accusers and the bar is set as high as it can go.   The prosecutor must establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.   If the prosecution fails to do so then the accused is entitled to an acquittal.   This is called the principle of the presumption of innocence – that someone accused is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.   This is an ancient principle going back at least as far as the Roman Empire.   While not universal it is the next thing to it, being affirmed in one form or another by all of the Abrahamic religions and being a keystone to the concept of justice embodied in the Common Law of the British Commonwealth and the United States.   It is an essential protection against those who would seek to turn the law into a weapon to destroy their personal enemies through making false accusations.

 

There has never been an equivalent to the principle of the presumption of innocence for non-criminal accusations. It had not been thought that one was necessary.  It was assumed that the worst things people could be accused of were crimes - murder, rape, robbery, etc. – and that therefore accusations of things that were non-crimes would be lesser accusations that would do less harm to the accused’s reputation than criminal accusations.   It was similarly assumed that the socially and culturally imposed consequences of doing things society frowned upon but which were not prohibited by criminal law would be less severe and damaging than the penalties inflicted by the courts upon law breakers.   These assumptions are far less valid today than they were decades or even just a few years ago.

 

In the last three quarters of a century progressive liberals have coined the terms “racism” and “racist” and convinced the public that “racism” is worse than the worst crime and that “racists” are worse than the worst criminals.   Through doing so, they have persuaded the public to be largely indifferent or approving of the way they treat people they accuse of being “racists”.    The way they treat accused “racists” is to utterly destroy them economically and socially.   Since the same progressive liberals have done everything in their power to strip the criminal justice system of any real teeth when it comes to punishing actual crimes this in effect makes the consequences of an accusation of “racism” far more damaging than the consequences of a criminal accusation.    Furthermore, they have managed to attach a presumption of guilt to accusations of “racism”.   By doing all of this, they have successfully bypassed the safeguards in our traditional justice system protecting people from those who seek to use the law and courts as weapons to destroy their enemies through false accusations by establishing an alternative way of destroying their enemies through accusations.   Indeed, they have been so successful at this that they have created a battery of similar weapon words with which to crush and destroy their enemies.

 

The anemic opposition to progressive liberalism that is mainstream “conservatism” has chosen a strategy of responding to this by trying to turn said accusations against their creators and saying that it is the progressive liberals who are the “real racists”.    The most that mainstream conservatives have been able to accomplish through this has been to score a few points against their opponents in academic debates.    What is desperately needed is for the opponents of progressive liberalism to abandon this form of the fallacy of tu quoque that affirms the very false presupposition that, having been instilled in the public mind, enable progressivism to weaponized words in this manner.   Instead they should be attacking those presuppositions, exposing this system of destroying people through weaponized words as being fundamentally unjust, and stripping words like “racist” of their power to destroy.

 

Let us now take a look at the accusations against Scott Adams.   In his Real Coffee with Scott Adams podcast he was commenting on the results of a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports.    The poll asked Americans whether “it’s okay to be white” and reported its findings by race.   The number of blacks that did not agree that “it’s okay be white” was just under 50%, and while these were divided almost equally among those who outright disagreed and those who were not sure, those who outright disagreed were the larger percentage, 26% as opposed to the 21% who were not certain.   Adams, in response to this said that while he had been identifying as black for years – this seems to be an ongoing joke about the translunacy that has engulfed Western culture since the apogynosis of Bruce Jenner – this poll had led him to reconsider this decision because it amounted to joining a hate group and advised whites that the best advice he could give them was to “get the hell away from black people”.

 

Those who have been denouncing Adams in print over the last week all seem to share the same defect in their ability to reason.  Everything Adams said was reasonable if the Rasmussen Reports poll and its results are taken at face value.   If you don’t agree with “it’s okay to be white” than you either think “it is not okay to be white” or “it might not be okay to be white”, the first of which translates into “whites should not exist” and the second into an openness to the idea that whites should not exist.   It is entirely fair to interpret someone’s saying that someone else should not exist as an expression of hate and it is also fair to interpret the expression of uncertainty as to whether someone should exist or not as expressing a weaker form of the same hate.   When a poll, therefore, tells us that such hate exists among 47% of a population it indicates that said population has a serious problem with hate.  Adam’s advice to the objects of this hate is actually quite moderate.   He advised them to get away from those who hate them, not to hate them back or launch some sort of preemptive hate strike against them. 

 

Adams’ denouncers, unsurprisingly, have taken the position that what one thinks of the expression "it's okay to be white” should be based upon who purportedly coined the phrase rather than what the phrase means.   According to self-appointed and self-important anti-“hate” watchdog groups, the slogan “It’s okay to be white” was coined by “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists” on 4chan.   Therefore, according to these supposed experts, the right thing to do is to denounce the slogan because of the people who came up with it.   This way of thinking, applied by Adams’ denouncers to the Rasmussen poll, means that the 47% of blacks polled who did not agree with the statement were in the right because they were disagreeing with “white supremacists”.   This is ridiculous, however, for many reasons.   Whether or not we agree or disagree with a statement ought to be based on the truth or not of what the statement says not on who said it.   Statements that in terms of their content are true and good do not become otherwise through contamination by those who say them.   If it were otherwise, and “it’s okay to be white” were somehow contaminated by the white supremacy that those who coined it are accused of holding, then “black lives matter” is similarly contaminated by the looting and rioting and vandalism of the movement that coined it as its slogan and “every child matters” is contaminated with the Christophobia that spawned the arson and vandalism of almost seventy churches in the biggest hate crime spree in Canadian history.   Indeed, if the 47% of black respondents to the Rasmussen poll who did not agree with the statement “it’s okay to be white” are to be applauded because of the alleged origin of the statement then what does that say about the 53% of black respondents who agreed with it?

 

The Rasmussen poll did not ask people what they thought of the people who originally coined the phrase “it’s okay to be white”.   It did not even mention them.   Rather, it asked people whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement.   Scott Adams took the poll at face value and rightly drew from it the conclusion that an alarmingly large number of black people openly express some degree of hate towards white people and that this is cause for concern on the part of those targeted by that hate.   His response to the poll was reasonable.   His accusers’ response to his podcast was not.   Unfortunately his accusers were many and powerful and so Dilbert will no longer be available in the comics section of most newspapers.   Once again the humourless, self-righteous, watchdogs of anti-racism will have robbed countless people of something that brought a smile to their face and mirth to their hearts.

 

As Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light would say:  Darn them all to Heck!

The White Inferiority Complex

 

For decades, hurling the epithet “racist” was the liberal’s go-to method of acknowledging anyone who disagreed with him from a standpoint somewhere to his right. In this same period this method served its purpose of discouraging disagreement with progressive liberalism well. Those who belonged to the mainstream of whatever was considered to be conservatism at the time, which was generally what had been considered liberalism a decade or so earlier, were, for some reason that has never really been explained, particularly sensitive to this accusation, and every time the liberal used this dreaded word they would rush to be the first to throw whoever was on the receiving end of the accusation under the bus. 

Eventually, however, this word lost most of its bite. It had simply been used too often and against too many people. When everyone is a racist, nobody is a racist, and people stop caring when you call somebody a racist. While it made something of a comeback this year, when used with the modifier “systemic”, for a few years now it has been largely replaced in liberal usage with “white supremacist.”

By trading the worn out “racist” for the fresh “white supremacist”, liberals exchanged an insult that had lost most of its meaning through overuse for one that was more powerful than the original had ever been, but in doing so they made themselves look absurd. For one thing white supremacist has a much narrower range of meaning than racist, with connotations of ideology, zeal, commitment, and activism that the word racist does not. There are very few actual white supremacists left and when liberals try to use this expression in the way they used to use racist they invite ridicule upon themselves. 

There is another aspect to the absurdity of the charge of white supremacism being flung around like so much monkey excrement. It is quite evident to anybody with open eyes that if any sort of bad racial thought presently infests the minds of the white people of Western Civilization it is not a sense of superiority over others, much less a feeling of supremacy over others, but rather a sort of inferiority complex. 

What other explanation can there be for the fact that even though the United States, after its Supreme Court abolished all de jure discrimination against blacks, established de jure discrimination against whites in 1964, and Canada, the United Kingdom, and all other Western countries decided to follow this foolish American precedent, and for over a generation anti-white discrimination has been the only established racism in Western Civilization, nevertheless white people have been willing to affirm the proposition that Western countries are “white supremacist” and that they therefore enjoy “privilege” on the basis of their skin colour? 

How else do we explain all the white people who are enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter? BLM, despite the organization’s innocuous if also truistic and banal name, is not about a positive agenda of promoting the security and well-being of black people. Abortion rates have been disproportionately high among black people for decades, but BLM couldn’t care less about all the black lives lost to abortion. They are, in fact, allied to the pro-abortion, feminist cause. Nor does BLM care about all the black lives taken by black perpetrators of violent crime. Blacks are overrepresented among both the perpetrators and the victims of violent crime in general, which has been the case for as long as statistics have been kept about this sort of thing and shows no sign of ceasing to be the case any time soon, and this overrepresentation is even larger for homicide. The inevitable and natural corollary of this is that blacks are also overrepresented among crime suspects, arrests, convictions, and incarcerations. The black lives lost to black crime are not black lives that matter to BLM. BLM cares only about blaming the overrepresentation of blacks among suspects, arrests, etc., on the racism of white police. For this is what BLM is truly about – spreading hatred of police officers, Western Civilization in general but with a focus on the United States, and especially of white people. 

It makes about as much sense, therefore, for white people to support BLM as it would for black people to go around wearing white robes with pointy hoods. Yet this year, in which BLM has, ahem, removed its mask and revealed its true colours like never before, it would have been difficult not to notice the prominent participation of whites in the record-breaking wave of race riots and the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoist assault on historical monuments and statues. That is even without taking into account the lionizers of BLM and its cause among white newspaper and television commentators, white university professors, white clergymen, white corporate executives, white celebrities, and white politicians. 

There is a name for this sort of inferiority complex. It is called liberalism. While there are many different liberalisms with many different meanings, the one that I have in mind here is that of the liberal whom Robert Frost defined as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Although I must say that when the poet penned that worthy diagnosis it probably never occurred to him that the disease would progress to the point where those infected actively take up arms against their own side. 

This, however, is the stage of the condition in which we find ourselves today and it may very well prove to be the terminal stage. 

Today, whether they seriously believe it to be true or not, a sizeable portion of whites are willing to affirm that racism is a moral offence for which light-skinned people of European ancestry bear a unique guilt, that they are guilty of it even if they are not conscious of having thought a racist thought, said a racist word, or committed a racist act, that this unconscious racism supposedly built into the very fabric of society is worse than the overt racial hatred that is often directed against whites by blacks and others with an anti-white axe to grind, and that it is their moral duty, therefore, to express contrition or shame whenever any non-white person chooses to take offence at something they have said or done or merely the fact that they are living and breathing, and to ignore or excuse explicit expressions of racial animus directed against them, even when these are violent in tone. 

Western liberalism has clearly undergone a mutation from when its humanitarian and universalist ideals merely generated a blindness to the legitimate particular interests of Western nations and peoples. It now actively opposes those interests. 

Think about the implications of the ubiquitous calls to end “systemic racism.” Many, perhaps most, white people have been jumping on board this bandwagon. Perhaps they do not understand that “systemic racism” is a technical term, from neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory, and that it designates this idea of an embedded racism which all white people and only white people are guilty of whether they are conscious of racist thought and actions or not. Perhaps they think it means institutional policies and practices that explicitly discriminate on racial grounds. If the latter is what they think, however, then they are mistaken if they think that racism of this sort, other than the kind that is directed against them, exists in Western countries today. This crusade against “systemic racism” in the Critical Race Theory sense of the term can only have the result, if successful, of making the explicit discrimination against white people that has been institutionalized in all Western countries since the ‘60’s and ‘70s of the last century, worse. 

There is a far worse manifestation of this mutant strain of the liberalism virus. Taken together, a number of liberal policies that have been in place in most if not all Western countries for over four decades, constitute an existential threat to white people. One of these policies is the use of large scale immigration from non-Western countries to offset the declining fertility that has been produced by, among other factors, the anti-natalism of social liberalism’s pro-contraception, pro-abortion, views. The result of this policy having been in place for decades has been the massive demographic transformation of Western societies to the point where in several countries that in living memory were almost entirely white, whites are on the verge of dropping to minority status. When you add to this the introduction in the same time frame of the aforementioned anti-white institutional discrimination, and the vilification of whites in the news media, popular education, and the revisionist educational curriculum, what you end up with is a recipe for a sort of self-inflicted genocide. Indeed, for decades now, Critical Race Theorists such as the late Noel Ignatiev have couched their anti-white ideas in explicitly genocidal language such as “the abolition of the white race”. When called out over this they have defended their rhetoric by saying that the “white race” they are talking about is a social construct, but their arguments have a rather hollow ring to them when we consider that these people would be the first to cry genocide if the same language were used about any other race and that the activist movement that has been built upon the foundation of their theory has translated such rhetoric into even cruder terms and actions that are not so easily explained away. These same people insist that “it is okay to be white” is a dangerous and offensive racist slogan. 

Yet despite all of this, liberalism has been largely successful at convincing a large segment of the white population to regard anyone who dares to speak out against this suicidal combination of policies as being a bigger and more real threat than that combination itself. Indeed, there are several liberal organizations in North America that do nothing else except identify those who speak out against white liberalism’s racial suicide pact and wage a campaign of character assassination against them. 

Liberalism is usually wrong about everything and it is certainly wrong about this. The West does not have a “white supremacist” problem in this day and age. What it is suffering from is rather that many, perhaps most, white people have become infected with a sick-minded racial inferiority complex in which they regard their skin colour as a badge of racial guilt which can only be atoned for through racial suicide. You will be waiting a long time, however, for liberals to acknowledge this. That would mean admitting that liberalism is the problem. Liberals would sooner demonize all those who share their own skin colour than admit that liberalism could be wrong.

“Social” Injustice

I was a theology student back in the 1990s when I first noticed how many liberals or progressives seemed to think nothing of casually throwing the accusation of “racist” against other people. Even liberals or progressives who were also professing Christians and presumably acquainted with the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” At the same time I was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the label “racist” had the power to destroy a person. Being labelled a “racist” could cost a person everything – his livelihood, career, reputation, social standing, friends, and in some cases, family. It did not sit well with me that a word that had this kind of destructive power could be thrown around so lightly with little to no consequences to the person doing the throwing. Especially, since there was no acceptable defence against the accusation. Anything anyone might say in his defence, from a simple denial to making reference to friends of other races, was taken as being itself evidence of guilt. This was a disgusting repudiation of the idea of the presumption of innocence, similar to feminism’s demand that women who accuse men of rape or other forms of sexual assault should be automatically and uncritically believed.

If anti-racists had too much power and too little responsibility then, twenty to twenty-five years ago, it is much, much, worse today. This is true even though the only time that comes immediately to my recollection in which someone actually faced discipline for an unsubstantiated accusation of racism occurred this very week when Jagmeet Singh, the federal leader of the socialist party, was ejected from the House of Commons for calling a member of the Bloc Quebecois a racist. Sadly, his suspension was only for the rest of the day.

Despite Singh’s slap-on-the-wrist, the power mixed with unaccountability of progressive anti-racists is much worse today than it was when I was a student. Back then, most people still understood racism in terms of overt acts – calling someone a derogatory slur, turning someone down for employment because of his skin colour, outright stating that you don’t like such-and-such a race. The concept of institutional racism was around but for many the expression did not convey what the Cultural Marxists intended. Instead it suggested such things as slavery, segregation, and other laws and policies that had treated specific groups negatively in an overt way. What the Cultural Marxists had intended by the term, was a “racism” that was unconscious, that was built into institutions but not in an overt way like segregation, a “racism” in the guilt of which all the members of the race which supposedly benefits share whether they know and acknowledge it or not.

Like I said, that idea was already around when I was a student, although at the time it was largely contained within the campuses of academia. It has obviously become much more powerful since. Today anyone with any sort of civil or ecclesiastical authority is expected to confess the “systemic racism” of his country, and many have lost their position or been threatened with the loss of it for denying “systemic racism.” This is partly a matter of all the students whose heads were being stuffed with that drivel decades ago now being in positions of influence outside of academia. The change in terminology also likely contributed to it. “Systemic racism” does not as easily bring to mind the slain dragons of slavery and segregation as “institutional racism” and is thus easier to sell as a present day problem.

Whether it is called “institutional” or “systemic” however, it is still nonsense. It is parallel to the theory in feminism that argues that rape is not primarily a criminal act of sexual violence by a specific man against a specific woman but an instrument whereby men as a class dominate women as a class in the guilt of which all men share. No, I am not making that up. You can find it in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975). A related theory reasons that because power is not equally distributed between males and females, and inequality of power apparently nullifies consent, therefore all heterosexual intercourse is rape. Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (1987) was widely interpreted as teaching a form of this theory, although she approached a similar conclusion through a much less syllogistic avenue of cultural critique. Clearly related to this last theory is the theory that women are naturally lesbians and that heterosexuality is itself a false social construct created by the patriarchy to oppress women.

Whether we are talking about the mental flatulence that feminism has produced in its rapid descent into total lunacy as outlined in the previous paragraph, or anti-racism’s equally kooky idea that all whites are guilty of a kind of unconscious “racism” because property rights, the rule of law, and every other fundamental element of Western Civilization supposedly have a built-in bias that favours them against other races, we are talking about theories that are fundamentally and deeply unjust, even though their proponents claim to be advocates of “social justice.” Feminist theory and the theory of systemic racism allow feminists and anti-racists to make blanket accusations of crimes of oppression against all men as a group and all white people as a group. Intersectionality theory compounds the guilt for those who are both male and white. Individual men, individual white people, and even individual white men, according to these theories are guilty, even though they may not be conscious of it. This, however, is to declare huge numbers of people to be guilty, in the admitted absence of mens rea.

Mens rea, which is literally translated “guilty mind”, is consciousness of committing a crime. While ignorance of the law is no excuse, criminal culpability requires mens rea. This, like the presumption of innocence, is a fundamental principle of Common Law justice. So, for that matter, is the principle that laws, especially those defining new offences, ought not to be applied retroactively. This principle is being torn to shreds by those who are presently demanding that we raze all monuments to the ground, erase all history, and start again from Year Zero, because they have judged the past to be guilty of failing to live up to their freshly coined standards.

These new standards, furthermore, are expressed in terminology coined by Cultural Marxists, whose modus operandi is to identify a group within society as being oppressed, coin a term, usually ending in –ism or –phobia, and assign it the meaning of an irrational and pathological prejudice against the group in question, and then apply it to any attitude, action, or even word that members of the group or even a single member of the group, claims to personally experience as the –ism or –phobia, and then heap tons of moral condemnation upon anyone and everyone, past and present, to whom those attitudes, actions, and words could be attributed. Since the experience of the “victim” is held to be incontrovertible, the extension of each of these neologisms is infinite. Anything a “person of colour” experiences as “racism” is held to therefore be “racism”, anything that a woman experiences as “sexism” is held to therefore be “sexism”, etc. Cultural Marxism is an outright assault on yet more principles of Common Law justice. It places the accuser beyond cross-examination and weighs the scales heavily in his favour and holds people responsible for what it itself claims to consider to be irrational pathologies.

Common Law justice is not perfect, nor has anyone ever claimed that it was. No human system of justice is ever perfect. It is far better, however, than anything that has gone by the name “justice” in any country that has been foolish enough to allow itself to be governed by a form of Marxism. Like all long-standing, traditional institutions, it corrects itself over time, which a rigid ideology like Marxism simply cannot do. It is far closer to true justice, than any form of Marxist justice, Cultural or otherwise, can ever be.

Therefore, when feminists, anti-racists, and the like tell you that what they are demanding is a form of justice, don’t believe them. It is injustice that they are demanding.

Race and Scriptural Theology

Gerald R. McDermott, who has just retired as the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Theological Seminary and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, has edited a book which is soon to be released by Acton Books entitled Race and Covenant: Retrieving the Religious Roots for American Reconciliation. The subject is remarkably timely, especially considering that the work on it must have begun long before the death of George Floyd sparked the present racial conflagration that threatens to raze all of Western Civilization to the ground. Will this book be an attempt to extinguish these flames or simply another pouring of gasoline onto the fire?

Judging from an article by McDermott that appeared on First Things website last week, I think there are grounds to expect it to be the former rather than the latter. He begins by saying that while Churches are "rightly trying to respond with compassion" to the death of George Floyd, "many church leaders and parishioners are adopting a race narrative that is empirically and theologically suspect." He then provides three examples of what he is talking about. The first is a letter addressed to the clergy of the ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) which was written by four of that body's clergy and published on the Anglican Compass website. A joint-statement by the presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and its seminary in New Orleans is the second. A twitter post from the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut is the third. McDermott says regarding these that "White Christians, many influenced by Critical Race Theory, are eager to demonstrate their virtue by confessing their 'white privilege'." He then offers arguments as to why the Critical Race Theory interpretation of Floyd's death, which is being pushed by well over ninety-nine percent of the mainstream media and which many people seem to think they are obligated to accept uncritically - note the irony - is dubious. The arguments are ones that my own readers will be familiar with by now - the evidence that American police are not in fact racist as an institution, the institutional discrimination in favour of blacks known as affirmative action, and that the narrative is harmful rather than helpful to its intended beneficiaries.

McDermott then goes on to say that "there are even better theological reasons to reject the mainstream narrative." The rest of his article is the unfolding of what those "better theological reasons" are.

Unfortunately, while well-intentioned, and generally aiming in the right direction, his exposition of this theology is flawed by numerous factual errors and a couple of serious misinterpretations of Scripture.

It is not true, for example, that "Nations (ta ethne), in the New Testament world were often multiracial." This would be true if predicated of cities and larger polities such as empires, but not of the term he uses here. His mistake seems to be derived from his equation of race with skin colour. These are related but not identical concepts. Race is derived from words that denote common descent, not skin colour, and until very recently this was still the predominant association with the word. This very much was an aspect of what it meant to be a nation. The general North American confusion regarding the distinction between "nation" and "state" undoubtedly also contributes to this mistake. It is extremely misleading to say "both Greeks and Jews came in various colors" in this context, for while this is true, the colours were not the hues that are commonly associated with races today. Indeed, if we were to speak of the ancient Greeks and Jews in terms of the races first identified as such by physical anthropologists but now generally spoken of as genetic populations for purposes of political correctness, both Greeks and Jews as nations, were members of a single race, rather than transracial entities.

The more important flaw, however, is in his interpretation of Scripture.

Take his interpretation of Acts 17:26 for example. He clearly understands it the same way in which prominent creationist Ken Ham explained it in his book One Blood. He says of it "Ironically, Critical Race Theory teaches something similar: that races as we conceive them are not rooted in biology or anthropology, but are socially constructed." This, however, is to torture the verse into meaning the exact opposite of what it says. This verse, which is part of St. Paul's address to the philosophers assembled at the Areopagus, says that God, and not man, is the author of the nations - ethnic groups not states, Who sets their boundaries, physical and temporal. The "one blood" in the verse identifies the material God used to fashion the nations, not the end towards which He was working. He started with one bloodline, and from it made the many nations. We all share in the common blood and therefore are of the race of Adam, but this is not stated in a way that can be rightly interpreted as consistent with Critical Race Theory's claim that the races today are socially constructed. It flat out contradicts it.

McDermott would undoubtedly recognize this to be true if it were applied to the sexes. Are man and woman not both made of "one blood" as well?

Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory in general, which also asserts that "sex", which it calls "gender", is a social construction. Would McDermott be comfortable with interpreting the Scriptural references to the common humanity of men and women as saying that the sexes are social constructs?

I am certain the answer is that he would not. Yet this directly relates to his main argument which pertains to the Pauline distinction between the old and the new creation. For just as the Scripture states that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek"(Gal. 3:28) it also, and in fact in the same verse, says "there is neither male nor female." Are we to interpret this as meaning that the distinction between male and female has no relevance in the new creation?

St. Paul himself didn't seem to think so. He made numerous distinctions between men and women when it came to authority and teaching in the Church. While some dioceses within the ACNA, like the older Episcopal Church and my own Anglican Church of Canada, do not follow St. Paul's restrictions, apparently interpreting them as being culturally particular rather than Catholic, which is the opposite of the Catholic interpretation if we define Catholicity in terms of St. Vincent's canon, the ACNA has not followed these older bodies in taking the elimination of the distinction between male and female to its logical, if absurd, extreme, which is that if there is no male nor female, then there is no reason to oppose men choosing other men, women choosing other women, or each choosing to decide that it is the other, or something else altogether. Sane and orthodox theologians recognize that this is a nonsensical extrapolation from what St. Paul actually said. This means that "there is neither male nor female" emphasizes the unity of the two in Christ, but not in a way that eliminates either the distinction or the importance of the distinction altogether. If this is true of the unity of the sexes in Christ, it is not logical to deny it of the unity of the races in Christ.

It is also interesting to observe what is curiously absent from his discussion. There is no mention of the Tower of Babel, which is the Scriptural account of how God took the one bloodline of Adam and made the many tribes, nations, and races out of it by confusing the tongues. Nor is there any mention of Whitsunday, the Christian Pentecost, on which people of a multitude of tongues each heard the Apostles proclaim the Gospel of Christ in their own, and were baptized into the one body, the Church. Since the former is the account of a judgement of God upon the old creation, speaking about how in the latter the curse of the former was lifted to establish the unity of the new creation in the Church is pretty fundamental to the topic. Especially since it points in the right direction. Since the Church is where the unity of the new creation is to be sought, her task is to invite people to enter that unity by believing and being baptized, not to support activists, let alone subversive radicals, who seek to impose an artificial substitute for it through political force.

The above criticisms having been lodged, McDermott is definitely on the right tack when he says:

As Green and others have noted, the new anti-racism has become a new religion with its own original sin (white racism), baptismal liturgy (confession of whiteness), and new birth (to wokeness). But there is no redemption, and its ethic encourages people to practice what Jesus condemned, “Do not judge, lest you too be judged” (John 7:1). It imputes motives to others based on skin color—bad motives to one skin color and good motives to other colors. This is racism by another name. It is also sinful judgment. (The "Green" to whom he refers is a black political scientist named Derryck Green whose contribution to the forthcoming book, McDermott had just quoted).

The reason this new religion offers no absolution - apart from the fact that it is a false religion and absolution is only to be found in the true religion of Christ - is because it serves the interests of a seditious and revolutionary ideology. Revolutions are the outcome of thinking that imperfection in society and civilization means that the whole thing must be torn down or burned to the ground so something new can be put in its place. Since the imperfection is inherent in fallen human nature, that which is rebuilt will be just as imperfect as what it replaced, and usually more so. Revolutions lead to nothing but needless and pointless violence, hurt, and destruction. In the false religion of wokeness, whites must perpetually abase themselves and give in to a never-ending list of non-white grievances, because the revolution can never achieve perfection, therefore the revolution can never end. This path leads to never-ending racial strife, not to the racial peace and harmony which is the true meaning of us being "one in Christ."

Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters: Special Charlottesville Edition

- While I am, on principle, opposed to all republics and presidents - states should be headed by royal monarchs - I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and the Donald deserves much credit over his press conference the other day. How refreshing to hear someone tell the truth - that it was not only neo-Nazis and white supremacists participating in the protest of the tearing down of Robert E. Lee's statue, that the antifa counter protesters who unlike the "Unite the Right” crowd did not get a permit were violent thugs, that there was blame on both sides, and that the tearing down of the one statue could lead to the tearing down of others, such as Washington and Jefferson. The press were furious because finally someone who could not be silenced, no-platformed, or ignored was saying these things and exposing them for the unmitigated liars that they are.

- Progressives – in which category I would include John McCain and Mitt Romney - don’t like it that the Donald treated white nationalists and the antifa as moral equivalents. They are, in a sense, correct – the two are not moral equivalents – but not for the reason they think. The antifa are much, much, worse. Spare me the snivelling, hypocritical, handwringing about the one group being racist and the other being opposed to racism. “Antiracist” activists only ever seem to oppose racism when the racists are whites. This is itself a form of racism, racism against white people. The real moral difference between the two groups, is that the one went there to hold a peaceful demonstration after having obtained legal permission to do so, the other went there to shut down the other group with violence. It was one of their own that ended up dying from the violence that day but that does not alter the fact that they were the ones who turned it into a violent event and went there with the intention of doing so.

- In Canada today, those who honour our country’s British history, heritage, traditions, and institutions are frequently accused of being Nazis by the followers of the Trudeau Liberals’ cult of diversity. It was British Canada, of course, that went to war with the Third Reich in 1939, and it was because we were British that we did so. The architect of Canadian multiculturalism was a draft dodger who reputedly expressed his contempt for Canada’s war efforts by wearing a German army helmet and a swastika.

- There are only really two kinds of people in North America today that would – other than ironically or when portraying a role on film – goose step, wave a swastika flag, or wear a Nazi uniform or Klan robe. The first group is the mentally ill. Liberals ordinarily demand that we look upon members of this group with compassion and, if they happen to have committed a heinous crime like beheading a fellow passenger on a bus, excuse them, but they make an unprincipled exception in this case. The second group is government agent provocateurs. In Canada, for example, the composition of the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1970s and the Heritage Front of a couple of decades later, both resembled that of the World Council of Anarchists in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, i.e., almost entirely government agents.

- If, for some reason, you actually wanted to radicalize white people to swell the ranks of a resurgent Nazi movement, the way to go about it would be to do exactly what the liberal left has been doing since 1945. You would reduce their percentage of the population in Western countries through ongoing large-scale immigration and blame them for all the woes of the world while denying them any legitimate means of protecting their collective interests by vehemently condemning any individual or group that attempts to speak for these as racist.

- If you take the way soi-disant “anti-racists” talk about white people and substitute “Jews” for “whites” you will end up with something that sounds like a Nuremburg Rally speech or reads like a chapter of Mein Kampf. Now you know who the real Nazis are today.

- The left have always, first and foremost, been scapegoaters. Unwilling to accept that sin, sorrow, suffering, and woe has always been and always will be a part of human existence east of Eden and this side of the Second Coming, they are always looking for someone to blame for the inevitable failure of their schemes to retake lost Paradise by force. In the eighteenth century it was the king, the aristocrats, and the church. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the bourgeoisie and middle class. For the National Socialists it was the Jews and today it is whites, Christians, males, heterosexuals, and especially, white, Christian, heterosexual males.

- Nazism was a movement of the left not the right. The left began its life in the eighteenth century as the revolutionary movement that deposed the Bourbon monarchy in France. A militant movement, with the flashy slogan “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” and holding the “Rights of Man and of the Citizen” as its ideal, it formed the first totalitarian regime in what is known as the “Reign of Terror” in which, having murdered the king and queen, and whatever aristocrats had failed to flee its clutches, it then turned on its own, as the Jacobin club divided into warring factions, and the Montganards led by Robespierre ousted the Girondists who had led the Revolution in its early stage, sending the latter and a host of their other enemies to the guillotine before eventually being hoist on their own petard. In the nineteenth century Marxism became the leading ideology in the continental left, producing the Communist movement which in Russia, split like the Jacobins into warring factions the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, with the former coming to power to form the Soviet Union. In Italy, when Benito Mussolini left the Communist Party to found the Fascist Party which, when in power, put the Communists in prison, this was yet another example of the left dividing into warring factions, for the repressive terror state of the Italian Fascists resembled nothing else so much as what the Bolsheviks had put in place in Russia. Even closer in its resemblance to the Soviet Union was the Third Reich in Germany, established by Adolf Hitler whose rise to power began with his taking over a German labour party and transforming it into the National Socialist German Workers Party. Hitler, who fully acknowledged his debt to Marxism, gave his party the name of two nineteenth century left-wing movements – socialism, of course, but also nationalism which was recognized as liberal, progressive, and left-wing in the nineteenth century because its basic concept, the sovereignty of the nation, came from the philosophy of Rousseau and had been used by the French Revolutionaries to challenge the sovereignty of the king. The Nazis were revolutionaries rather than reactionaries. That they themselves recognized this is reflected in the words of the Horst Wessel Lied. They were fundamentally opposed to everything that the right stood for, whether it be the king, aristocracy, and church of classical Tory conservatism or the classical liberal individualism and middle class capitalism of the American right.

- Nazism was the bastard child of Communism and imitated its parent’s evils – secret police, show trials, mass murders, forced labour and other worse types of camps, etc. - but it was a short-lived threat that died with its Fuhrer in a bunker in Germany in 1945. The same cannot be said of Communism which retained the power that it had seized in Russia in 1917 until 1990, conquered a much larger portion of the world than Nazism had, retained control of it longer – the Communist Party is still in power in China today – and committed atrocities on an even larger scale, having murdered over 100 million people in the last century. It is only Communism that has a vested interest in promoting the idea that its estranged child, Nazism, is a universal threat that can pop up anywhere at any time and if you look closely at the various anti-racist or antifa activist groups today I suspect that you will find that apart from Christophobic hate groups like the Anti-Defamation League and hypocritical money-making scams like the Southern Poverty Law Centre they are virtually all fronts for Stalinist, Maoist, and other Marxist-Leninist organizations.

Pride and Pietas

In my last essay I discussed Nancy MacDonald’s recent cover article for MacLean’s which accuses my city, Winnipeg, of being the most racist city in Canada. I pointed out several holes in the conventional anti-racist narrative to which the MacLean’s article was uncritically faithful. I pointed out, for example, the double standard in the narrative’s definition of racism in that expressions of racial pride on the part of the group consistently identified as the villains in the narrative, i.e., white people are considered to be racist whereas expressions of such pride on the part of groups designated the victims, i.e., non-whites and in this case one specific none-white group, Indians, are not considered to be racist. I had observed that everywhere in the city one can see baseball caps reading “Native Pride.” This does not stir up the kind of indignation that a single instance of someone wearing a cap that read “White Pride” would.

In response to this, a friend argued that it was silly to compare “White Pride” with “Native Pride” because of all the sinister connotations the former phrase has due to its association with websites like Stormfront and organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Now, at first glance this argument does indeed seem to be valid. Whatever else might be said about the “Native Pride” merchandise line it does not have any apparent connections with any sort of hard, zealous, racialist, ideology the way the phrase “white pride” does. Nevertheless, if we pursue this comparison further, I think that it ultimately supports my own argument.

Is there something inherently vicious and violent about racial pride on the part of white people but not on the part of the members of any other race? If yes, this suggests that there is something seriously defective in the collective character of white people but not in the collective character of other people groups. This, however, resembles nothing so much as the theories by which the National Socialists justified their mistreatment of Jews and other groups they considered to be defective. The logic of any argument that “white pride” is inherently vicious but “native pride” or other non-white racial pride is not, leads ultimately, therefore, to a conclusion that itself resembles Nazi theory, except that in it the Aryans have taken the place of the Jews. That this logic must inevitably lead to this conclusion has brought many to the realization that in many, if not most, cases, what is called “antiracist” is simply a euphemism for “antiwhite”.

Now, if the answer to the question is “no”, then either a) racial pride is dangerous and wrong on the part of all groups or b) racial pride is good or at least harmless on the part of all groups. If the latter is the case then the question that immediately arises is why something that is good or harmless only ever seems to be associated with fringe groups among white people. This is not a question for which we need to look far and wide for an answer. The prevailing political orthodoxy of the day defines white racial pride as being dangerous, radical, and beyond the pale. When a thought or sentiment is defined as being on the fringe outside the mainstream than only people and groups who are on the fringe and outside the mainstream will express that thought or sentiment and any person or group that attempts to express it in a reasonable, non-radical, moderate way will find him or itself branded as on the fringe and extreme.

I will provide an illustration of this last point that is relevant to our current discussion. Jared Taylor, a genteel, intelligent, and articulate man, who was raised in Japan as the son of missionaries, holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University, has since 1990 been editor of a publication he founded entitled American Renaissance. This monthly publication features articles that deal with matters of race, intelligence, culture, and immigration, from an editorial perspective that is staunchly pro-white. The articles are well-written, do not use racial epithets or any other sort of vulgar abuse of other races, do not promote violence or other mistreatment of people, and tend to have a libertarian political slant. The contributors are journalists and academics, sometimes writing under pseudonyms to protect their identity. This is deemed to be prudent, if not necessary, because the organizations that have appointed themselves the watchdogs of public moral and intellectual hygiene on matters of race treat American Renaissance as being no different from some publication that uses a swastika for its logo, calls for the establishment of a Fourth Reich, and devotes every article to praising the ideals of Adolf Hitler and demonizing other races.

This, I might add, is typical of the “honesty” one can expect from social justice warriors of any stripe, but especially the antiracists. Dave Wheeler, of the Winnipeg radio station 92 CITI FM interviewed Nancy Macdonald. He demonstrated in the course of this devastating interview just how misleading her article had been. Violence against Indian women that is largely committed by Indian men, as statistics Macdonald herself referenced indicate, was nevertheless presented in such a way as to make it sound like it was the result of white racism. An incident of sexual harassment was discussed in which the information that the person making the offensive remarks was himself an Indian was omitted.

My point, before we get lost down this side trail, was that when a thought or sentiment, such as racial pride on the part of whites, is ruled to be beyond the pale, only those who are on the fringes will express that thought or sentiment. This means that the fact that expressions of “white pride” can for the most part only be found among groups that disturbingly revere Adolf Hitler cannot be taken as evidence that white racial pride is inherently Hitlerian.

Groups that admire Hitler and speak the language of racial violence are small and have no power and influence in our society. The amount of time, legislation, and effort spent in combating this virtually non-existent threat is simply unjustifiable. It is also counterproductive. What makes groups like this potentially dangerous is not so much that they are racial as that they are radical. The forbidding of racial pride to whites while allowing it to other groups will only have the effect of producing more of this radicalism both because it allows for no non-radical expression of such pride and because it will drive young whites angry at the injustice of this double standard into the fringes.

You will recall that we identified two possibilities if white racial pride is not inherently more dangerous than other racial pride. The first was that all kinds of racial pride are dangerous and wrong, the second that all kinds of racial pride are good and harmless. So far we have been pursuing the line of thought that opens up if the second of these possibilities is the correct one. Now it is time to consider the first possibility – that all kinds of racial pride are wrong.

There are grounds for considering this to be the right possibility that are firmly rooted in the ethical tradition of Western civilization. Just as the problem with Hitlerite groups is not so much that they are racial as that they are radical, so the basis for considering all racial pride to be wrong is not that it is racial but that it is pride. This, of course, runs contrary to the thinking of today’s social justice warriors who encourage pride on the part of part of groups that they regard as having been unfairly excluded from Western society throughout history – they have even adopted the term “pride” as the name for the movement for inclusion on the part of one of these groups – but social justice warriors are almost always wrong about everything so the fact that something runs contrary to their way of thinking is evidence in its favour.

The Greeks, as the saying goes, had a word for it. That word was hybris. Its connotations evolved from the deliberate humiliation of others to a defiance of the rule of the gods but beneath these connotations the general sense of a haughty, arrogant, pride remained consistent. The Greeks considered it to be the greatest of human failings. In Homer’s Iliad, the hybris displayed by Agamemnon towards the equally proud Achilles brings disaster upon the Achaeans assembled against Troy, as Zeus decrees that the war will swing against them until Achilles rejoins their ranks. At the end of the classic Western epic Achilles own hybris, displayed in his treatment of the body of the defeated Hector, brings the threat of divine retribution upon him. Hybris was the chief fatal flaw of Athenian tragedy and had even been criminalized in the reforms of the Athenian lawmaker Solon.

That pride was the greatest of human sins is also the judgement of the Christian Church, which built its moral theology upon foundations in both Greek thought and Hebrew Scriptures. The latter, of course, preached brokenness and humility – the opposite of pride –as the way to God’s favour. Psalm 51:17’s “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” and Micah 6:8’s “what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” are but two of the best known examples. The Hebrew Psalms and prophets frequently depict God as laying low the proud. In the New Testament this is taken further, as St. Paul tells Timothy that he who desires the office of a bishop must not be “a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6). The implication of this is that pride is the source of all sin – the sin that led to the devil’s fall from grace. This was stated explicitly in the book of Ecclesiasticus or Sirach: “For pride is the beginning of sin” (v. 10:13) and is a point that is repeatedly reiterated by St. Augustine of Hippo who identifies pride not only with the sin of the devil, but with the original sin of man as well, based upon the nature of the serpent’s deception (“ye shall be as gods”). St. Thomas Aquinas defended St. Augustine’s identification of pride with the first sin of man in the Summa Theologica (Article I of Question 163 of the Second Part of the Second Part). In the traditional order of the Seven Deadly Sins, superbia or pride, is listed as the worst.

If, on the basis of the long Western tradition of identifying pride, hybris, or superbia as the worst of all sins, we argue that racial pride is always dangerous and wrong, not because it is racial but because it is pride, this must apply to other forms of pride, one’s embraced and endorsed by political correctness such as “native pride” or “gay pride”, as much as those condemned by political correctness such as “white pride.”

There is a danger, however, that in making this particular judgement we will throw out the baby with the bathwater, or in this case the virtue of pietas with the vice of superbia. Pietas is the Latin word from which our English word piety is derived. It was the virtue that consisted of doing one’s duty, first to one’s parents, then, by extension, to one’s ancestors, kin in general, and to one’s country. It was regarded as one of the most important virtues by the Romans who associated it with one’s duty to the gods which is how the term piety came to be associated with the concept of being dutiful in religion. A similar association underlies the argument in Plato’s Euthyphro, in which Socrates challenges the title character’s assertion that piety required him, out of duty to the gods, to prosecute his father on a trumped up charge of murder.

What is the Christian view of pietas?

While Christianity makes it very clear that in the hierarchy of duties, one’s duties to God must come first – “He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matt. 10:37), in other respects, as with pride, Christianity’s understanding of pietas was quite similar to the classical view. The association of one’s duty to one’s parents with one’s duty to God would seem to be present in the Ten Commandments. These include obligations to God alone (“thou shalt have no other gods before Me”, “thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”, etc.) and obligations to one’s fellow men (“thou shalt not steal”, “thou shalt not commit adultery”, etc.). The former are at the beginning of the list, the latter at the end. The commandment to “honour thy father and mother”, however, immediately follows the commandments that contain obligations to God. Indeed, if the commandments were thought to be divided equally in number between duties to God and duties to man, this one would have to be numbered with obligations to God. When the Lord Jesus challenged the Pharisees as to why they used their traditions to get out of obeying the commandments of God the commandment that He pointed to specifically was the commandment to “honour thy father and mother” (Mk. 7:6-13). This could hardly be coincidental. That we have special duties to our kin apart from our duties to mankind in general and that these duties are associated with our duties to God is clearly present in the thought of St. Paul when he wrote “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8).

How does this pertain to the topic at hand?

Those who would deny racial pride to one race – white people – while affirming it in other races, usually require white people to adopt an attitude of impiety – the opposite of pietas – to their ancestors and in many cases even their parents. We are required to denounce our ancestors as the villains of history, to demonize them, to take the side of every other people group except our own, and if our own parents have ever used racial epithets, displayed politically incorrect racial attitudes, or otherwise offended against the current political orthodoxy, we are required to denounce them in order to prove that we ourselves are enlightened and pure, in a manner that is reminiscent of the way in which children were expected to behave in police states like, for example, the Third Reich.

It is time we think long and hard about what this tells us about antiracism and the politically correct orthodoxy of the present day.

Antiracism is Worse than Racism

While some maintain that there is no gradation of evil, that “sin is sin” and that it is all the same there is little basis for thinking this to be the case. If we did not distinguish between greater and lesser evils there would be no basis for passing laws against certain bad acts while allowing if morally disapproving others. To be consistent we would have to either criminalize everything we considered to be bad or give up the rule and protection of law. Either option would make human existence unbearable. Out of practical necessity, at the very least, we need a hierarchy of goods and evils. Some might qualify the claim that all sin is the same by saying that while we as humans distinguish between greater and lesser evils, in God’s eyes, all sin is sin. This is not the doctrine of orthodox Christianity, however. All that the Scriptures affirm on the matter is that God does not judge as man does. This means that His criteria, for distinguishing between greater and lesser evil, is not necessarily the same as ours, not that He regards all sins as being equal. The Scriptures very much affirm the idea of a hierarchy of goods and evils. If there were no hierarchy of good and evil, statements like “this is the first and greatest of the commandments and the second is like unto it” and “these shall receive the greater condemnation” would be nonsensical.

The grounds for thinking that all sin is equal are at their best, very weak. The grounds for thinking otherwise are much stronger and so we can safely accept the proposition that there is a hierarchy in which some goods are better than others and some evils are worse than others. We will take this proposition as being established, therefore, in making our argument that antiracism is a greater evil than racism.

“Now wait a minute,” some of you might be saying “by saying that antiracism is worse than racism aren’t you saying that a good is worse than an evil?”

That racism is always an evil, and antiracism, which by definition is opposition to racism, is always good, is certainly the conventional opinion these days. The conventional opinion, however, is seldom a good guide to what is true. Conventional means that which is generally agreed upon. Like the words convene and convention, which it is closely related to, it comes from the Latin for “to come together” and suggests the idea of people getting together and coming to an agreement. However effective that process might be in helping people live together peacefully it is not how truth is arrived at.

Tradition is a much sounder guide to truth than convention. Tradition, from the Latin for “to hand over or pass on”, is that which has been passed down to us through time. Convention and tradition are both forms of established thought. Convention is that which is established because of its acceptance by the majority in the present. Tradition is that which is established because it has endured the test of time. While tradition doesn’t generate truth any more than convention does it has a much better perception of truth and is thus a better guide to truth.

Let us take a closer look then at this particular conventional opinion, considering its two parts separately. First there is the assertion that racism is always evil. Is this assertion true? The answer to that depends upon what we mean by racism.

Racism is a word that is used and overused everywhere in society today. One would think that due to this ubiquity there would be a universal consensus as to the meaning of the word. That such is not the case was recently illustrated for us here in Manitoba. Last fall a Winnipeg lingerie shop put on a burlesque show to raise funds for Osborne House, a shelter for battered women. Through e-mail, Eric Robinson, Deputy Premier and Minister of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs in Manitoba’s provincial government and Nahanni Fontaine, an advisor to the government, discussed how they felt this was inappropriate and in poor taste. In the course of this discussion, Robinson said that it was an example of “the ignorance of do-good white people.” This summer, the content of these e-mails was leaked to Barbara Judt, CEO of Osborne House, who condemned the comment as hateful and racist and filed a complaint with the provincial human rights commission against Robinson.

This generated an ongoing public discussion and in the course of that discussion it became apparent that there was a great deal of disagreement over what constitutes racism. Robinson is of Cree descent and his comment, if racist, was racist towards white people. Some took the position that racism can only be committed by a more powerful group against a less powerful group and that because Robinson belongs to a less powerful group, historically oppressed by the group his comment was about, his words could not therefore be racist. Tim Sale, for example, took this position in an article that appeared in the August 31st issue of the Winnipeg Free Press (1) and it was echoed by several people whose letters were published in the weeks following.

Others, whose letters were also published, found this position to be absurd and offensive. They took the position that racism consists of negative thoughts about and actions toward people of other races and that racism is racism regardless of who is on the giving and receiving ends of it.

The second group probably represents the views of the majority of Canadians. Their understanding of racism is certainly more in line with the definitions found in most standard dictionaries. Where then, do Sale and the other members of the first group get off saying that racism is a one way street, going from powerful to less powerful, from white to non-white, and never the other way around?

After the triumph of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960’s, progressive academics rethought their concept of racism. The left had just won everything they said they wanted: the Supreme Court of the United States had overturned the legality of the “separate but equal” concept in Brown v. Board, the President had ordered the National Guard to enforce the integration of institutions of higher education in the deep South, de jure segregation was now illegal, and the Civil Rights bill had passed, outlawing various sorts of private discrimination, paving the way for the legal shakedown industry and the reverse discrimination of affirmative action quotas. Their total victory, however, threatened to rob progressive academics of one of their favourite pastimes, i.e., complaining about how deeply and horribly unfair and racist their society is. They therefore came up with a new concept of “institutional” or “structural” racism, racism that does not consist of conscious and overt negative thoughts and acts towards others, but which is built into the very structure of society, supposedly generating special privilege and power for white people while keeping others down. The progressives redirected their energies towards attacking this kind of beneath-the-surface “racism”, thus allowing them to maintain their image of themselves as public tribunes, fighting for the downtrodden against an unjust system, even though that system had given them everything they had demanded.

There is therefore now a vast difference between what progressive intellectuals mean by the word “racism” and how ordinary people understand the word. Most people think that racism means hating or disliking other people either because they are of a different race than you or because they are of a particular race that is the object of such hatred. Most people think of racist behaviour as ranging from mild forms, such as the use of racial slurs and insults, to extreme forms such as lynching and ethnic cleansing. Progressive intellectuals, however, tend to think that white people who do not behave like that and do not dislike people of other races are nevertheless guilty of racism for being unconscious of their “white privilege” and thus “indifferent” to the racism built into their society. Moreover, progressive intellectuals tend to see explicit statements of racial hatred towards white people and racially motivated acts of criminality and violence towards white people as not being racist but rather being understandable, if undesirable, responses on the part of the oppressed to the unfairness of society. Ordinary people, when they learn how the progressive intellectual views things, tend to think he is crazy, if not from another planet altogether.

If asked whether racism is always bad, most people would probably say yes at first, but if pressed on the subject, many would begin to quibble. Ethnic jokes might hurt someone’s feelings, they may say, but they are not on the level of genocide. If the same question were put to progressive intellectuals they would firmly insist that all racism is bad, but if pressed about verbal and behavioural expressions of racial hatred towards whites on the part of members of groups that have been historically oppressed, they would probably offer arguments why this isn’t really racism. Both ordinary people and progressives, in other words, hold to the position in theory that all racism is bad, but neither group is willing to take this position to its logical conclusion.

How is racism defined in the dictionary? Perhaps that will help us decide whether racism is always bad or not.

If we turn to the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, we find that it offers us two short definitions and a full definition with two parts. Here is the first of the two short definitions:

poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race (2)

If we accept this as our operating definition, then I would say that all forms of racism are bad and I suspect most people would agree with me. I would add the clarification however, that if racism is “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race”, it is always wrong, because it is always wrong to treat people poorly and not because this particular form of poor treatment is motivated by race.

This raises the question of what constitutes poor treatment. Sometimes this is an easy question to answer. To assault or murder someone, to steal or damage his property, to have an affair with his wife, to go around town spreading malicious gossip about him – each of these things falls under the category of treating people poorly. It is wrong to treat anyone this way, regardless of his race. Sometimes, however, it is more difficult than that.

The progressive left has complicated matters by declaring equality to be the ideal standard to be striven for. If we accept equality as an ideal, then by our standards to treat people as if they were not equal is to treat at least one of them poorly. Much discussion of racism is based upon the idea that all races are equal and deserve to be treated equally and that racism is deviation from that ideal.

As I have argued elsewhere, however, equality is more of an idol than an ideal. (3) The problem with making equality into the ideal is that it clashes with justice. Sometimes it is right to treat people equally. Other times it is wrong to do so. It is as wrong to steal one man’s property as it is to steal another’s. Therefore, we should treat both men equally in refraining from taking what is theirs. Sometimes, family relationships, friendships, and other ties, place duties upon us which require us to act towards specific people in ways we are not required to act towards others. In this case it would be wrong to insist upon treating everybody equally. In theory, equality might be thought of as a form of virtuous generosity, treating a perfect stranger as if he were your best friend. In practice and in reality it is more likely to mean treating your best friend as if he were a perfect stranger.

If we accept the progressive idea that equality is the standard and that it is wrong to treat people differently this greatly changes the meaning of “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race”. Here we see how the conventional idea of racism, so defined, under egalitarian presuppositions, runs up against traditional ideas of virtue and vice.

Ever since ancient times, that which the Romans called pietas has been considered to be one of the chief virtues. Pietas was an attitude of faithful duty towards one’s parents and kin, one’s country, and the gods. We will use the Latin word for it, because its English equivalent and derivative, piety, has lost much of its meaning. Pietas was piety, both filial and religious, and patriotism all rolled into one. It is the subject of Plato’s Euthyphro. (4) Marcus Tullius Cicero, believed it to be implanted in us by instinct as the law of nature. (5) Virgil made it the chief virtue of Aeneas, the last survivor of Troy and the ancestor of the Romans, in his Aeneid.

Lest it be thought to be merely a pagan virtue, note that the Ten Commandments given to Israel by God at Mt. Sinai start with duties to God and end with duties to man. The commandment to honour one’s father and mother falls between these duties and if the commandments were divided equally between the two sets of duties, would have to fall under duties to God. Note that when Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for using human tradition to nullify the commandment of God, this is the commandment to which He made specific reference. That was hardly a coincidence. St. Thomas Aquinas distinguished between a pietas towards our earthly parents, which was a mere human virtue, and a pietas towards God that was a gift of the Holy Spirit, but maintained that it was appropriate to use the same word for both because the latter is directed towards God as Father. (6)

Do you see where the conflict exists between the egalitarian and conventional understanding of racism and the classical and Christian traditional view of pietas? The former teaches that we are to treat all people equally and that it is wrong to treat people differently because of their race. The latter teaches that we owe special duties first to our parents, then to our kin as a whole, and finally to our country and that the same virtue of pietas is involved in faithfully and lovingly fulfilling these duties as in fulfilling our duty to love and worship God. Since the idea of having special duties to our parents, kin, and country is not compatible with the idea that we should treat all people equally, i.e., the same, progressive egalitarianism would seem to condemn pietas as a form of racism.

This is not just speculation about where progressive teachings might lead. Antiracism promotes impious thoughts and attitudes in practice.

This leads us to the second part of the conventional opinion about racism and antiracism, the assertion that antiracism is always good. This assertion is a conclusion drawn from the first assertion, that racism is always bad. If racism is always bad, then surely antiracism, which is by definition opposition to racism, must be good.

Well, we have just seen that pietas, which was considered a virtue by pre-modern, traditional civilizations, which was considered to be the chief virtue of ancient Rome, was commanded in the Ten Commandments and considered to be a spiritual gift by St. Thomas Aquinas, would fall under the category of “racism” if we accept the egalitarian standards of progressivism, the parent ideology of antiracism. Therefore, either Moses, Jesus Christ, and all Western philosophers until very recently were wrong in insisting that we have special obligations to our parents, family, and country or the assertion that racism is always bad is simply not true. If it is not true, then the conclusion that antiracism is always good, which depends upon racism always being bad, cannot be true either.

In fact, as we are about to see, antiracism is not good at all. Rather it is an evil that masquerades as a good, a vice that wears the mask of a virtue.

Our first charge against antiracism is that it promotes impiety. It has caused people to revile and dishonor their parents, their ancestors as a whole, and their country.

This was illustrated in the television cartoon Family Guy a few years ago. In the episode entitled “Chick Cancer”, the character Brian makes a comment that contains a racial stereotype of black men. Stewie, to whom he addressed the remark, responds with shock: “Whoa! What was that?” Brian’s reply is “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that was my father talking” and is told by Stewie “You gotta work on that man”. (7)

Stewie’s response of antiracist shock to Brian’s racial slur provokes filial impiety from Brian as a self-defense. Granted this is a conversation between a talking cartoon baby and a talking cartoon dog but it mirrors reality in the sense that it reflects the kind of shame and disrespect towards one’s parents that antiracism provokes among young people.

Another form of impiety antiracism promotes is disloyalty to friends. Sometimes this is done explicitly, as in the song “Racist Friend” by Jerry Dammers, songwriter for the British ska group The Specials, which tells people: “If you have a racist friend/ Now is the time, now is the time/ For your friendship to end.” (8) More often it is done indirectly through guilt by association which a favourite tactic of antiracists.

The most obvious form of impiety promoted by antiracism, however, is that towards ancestors and country. It is quite common these days, on college and university campuses and even in high schools, to hear “socially conscious” students express deep shame for the actions of their ancestors or for their country’s past. In the vast majority, if not all, of these cases, it is the racism of their ancestors or country for which they are expressing shame.

The students who make these impious statements are almost always white students. This brings us to our second charge against antiracism. It is not just that antiracism is hypocritical and holds to a double standard. While that is included in the charge, it is much more serious than that. Antiracism is, ironically, itself a form of racism. It promotes impiety towards parents, friends, ancestors, and country among white people alone and promotes hatred towards white people on the part of other people.

Think back to the earlier part of our discussion where we discussed the current progressive view of racism, that it is embedded in the structures, institutions, and cultures of Western countries so as to give privilege and power to whites and withhold these from other people, so that whites are guilty of racism even if they have no conscious negative thoughts or feelings towards other people and other people are not guilty of racism, even if they express hatred towards whites or commit crimes against whites based upon that hatred, because these are expressions of frustration on the part of disempowered people against an unfair system. What other effect could this idea have than to encourage white people to disavow their ancestors and their countries and to encourage other people to hate white people? To be antiracist, in practice, means to be antiwhite.

Antiracism’s antiwhite racism is not the mild ethnic joke variety of racism either. In Europe, the United Kingdom, and Canada, antiracist progressives have passed hate speech laws which make it, in some cases a crime, in other cases actionable under civil law, to express views that might expose someone to hate because of that person’s race. Although these laws are written in race neutral language, they are ordinarily only ever enforced against white people. The complaint Barbara Judt made against Eric Robinson was newsworthy because it, very unusually, concerned a comment that was pejorative to white people. Even when Chief David Ahenakew, another rare non-white defendant in hate cases, was charged in Saskatchewan with promoting hatred ten years ago, it was not white people but Jewish people he was accused of hating. In the United States of America, where the Bill of Rights theoretically prevents the passing of hate speech laws, hate crimes laws have been passed which require stiffer sentences for crimes where racial prejudice is the motivation. As with hate speech laws in other countries, in practice hate crime laws are seldom invoked unless the criminal is white and his victim the member of another race. “Hate” laws, of either variety, clearly exist for no other purpose than as forms of legal harassment targeting white people.

At this point, let us introduce our third charge against antiracism, even though we are not quite done yet with the second. Our third charge against antiracism is that it makes mincemeat out of the truth.

Antiracists treat racism as if it were a sin that was the unique property of white people. This can be seen in the way “hate” laws are enforced, in progressive theories about why only white people can be racist, and in the way antiracist watchdog organizations keep tabs on the most insignificant activities of the most obscure white identity groups while all but ignoring racist groups from other races. Yet antiracism is itself evidence that the opposite is true – that white people are, if anything, the least racist people on the planet and always have been. Antiracism draws upon many source ideas including liberal individualism, humanism, and Marxism. Whatever the merits and demerits of these ideas may be, they all have this in common, that they are the product of Western, European, civilization. They are, to put it bluntly, white ideas. Most antiracists are themselves whites who have renounced any sense of identity with their own people. The only other people group that I can think of that has a problem with this kind of internal self-loathing is the Jewish people. Yet according to physical anthropologists and population geneticists Jews are part of the same race as Europeans.

Oops. My bad. I said race when I should have said population or genetic cluster or whatever current euphemism is being used by population geneticists to keep the antiracists off their back and allow them to do their research in peace.

This brings us to the other way in which antiracism makes mincemeat out of the truth. Antiracists, like progressives in general, tend to subscribe to the founding mythology of modernity, in which the Catholic Church is believed to have held Europe in superstition and darkness before the dawn of Renaissance humanism and the “Enlightenment”, in which man threw off the shackles of religion, left the darkness, and set his feet on the path to truth, by following the light of reason and science. While much of this is pure malarkey – the foundations for the expansion of science were in fact laid in the medieval times by Christian scholars (9)– in the last half century antiracist progressives themselves have acted the way they accuse the medieval Church of behaving.

When the late Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, professor of educational psychology at the University of California in Berkeley published a paper in the Harvard Educational Review, questioning how effective IQ boosting programs like Head Start actually were by offering evidence that much of human intelligence is due to a hereditary g-factor, progressive antiracists began protesting outside his office and disrupting his lectures. (10)

When the late Dr. J. Philippe Rushton, British born professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario presented a paper to a general meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Fransisco in 1989, a police investigation was ordered in Ontario. (11) His “crime”? He had put forward the theory that racial difference could be explained by the r/K selection theory. (12)

Earlier in the 1970s, the co-author of that theory, Harvard University entomologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson had come under attack by antiracists for his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. (13) The antiracists even went so far as to physically assault Wilson, dousing him with water at a 1978 meeting of the AAAS. (14)

My point is not that the theories these men espoused were the truth. Their materialistic presuppositions, in my opinion, blinded them to the most important aspect or dimension of reality. (15) In this, however, they were no different from their antiracist opponents. My point is that the antiracists condemned these men as “scientific racists” because their theories, and the data upon which they based their theories, contradicted the antiracist idea that the only biological differences between the races are differences in appearance, and that any other differences are cultural and/or caused by the legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in general. This idea, to which antiracists inflexibly adhere, did not arise out of scientific observation but is entirely political in origin. In 1963, Dr. Carleton S. Coon, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, resigned as president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists when the association voted to censure a book as racist and unscientific while admitting in a show of hands that the vast majority of them had not even read the book. If materialism kept both sides in this debate from the full truth, by blinding both to the spiritual aspect of reality, the antiracists willingly removed themselves a step further from the truth, by subjecting science to political dogma, in a manner worthy of Trofim Lysenko.

What is most apparent about antiracism, in this approach to truth, is just how ideological it is. For the purposes of this discussion, we will define an ideology as a rigid set of inflexible doctrines, lacking the internal self-correction mechanism of a tradition, that are believed to contain the technical blueprint for solving most if not all of the world’s problems. Antiracism is by its very nature an ideology. It is an inflexible belief in the equality of the races and the rigid conviction that racism is the root of all evil which if extirpated will bring justice, peace, and happiness to all.

Racism, on the other hand, while it can be ideological, as it was in the case of National Socialism, more often than not is not. This is an important reason for considering antiracism to be the worse of the two evils. A racist might be a person who, for some reason or another, dislikes a particular racial group but who does not allow that dislike to overrule his sense of fairness and cause him to mistreat members of that group and who does not make his dislike of that group the most important thing in his life. While there are ideological racists, for whom race is the lens through which the world is to be viewed, who see life as a Darwinian struggle for existence between the races and build their entire life around this idea, most racists, at least in my experience, are of the former type.

Auberon Waugh had the right idea, I think, about ideological racism and antiracism when he wrote:

For myself, I see nothing to choose between the National Front and the Race Relations Board. Both are a collection of bores and busybodies and both are harmful to the extent they are taken seriously. (16)

Of course, the Race Relations Board, like its Canadian equivalent the Human Rights Commission, has the power to impose its ideas upon people. Everyone must therefore take it seriously, if they wish to avoid a great deal of unpleasantness, whereas the National Front has no such power, and is taken seriously only by its own members the Race Relations Board. Therefore the Race Relations Board is the more harmful by far.

Nor is it merely the Race Relations Board or the Canadian Human Rights Commission that ideological antiracism has at its disposal. The schools, universities, and churches as well as the news and entertainment media have become its propaganda arms. Government child protection agencies have used the racism of parents as an excuse to remove children from the home. (17) Its attempts to root out incipient racism and nip it in the bud at younger and younger ages might be comical (18) if it were not so Orwellian.

In this ideologically driven effort to mobilize the institutions of an entire society for the purpose of indoctrinating all of its members with a simplistic message and eradicating a chosen scapegoat, antiracism resembles nothing so much as the Nazism it believes it is protecting us from.

If you think that comparison is unfair, that antiracists are the white knights protecting society from a resurgent Nazism ready to break forth the moment they let their guard down (how mighty white of them) then consider what antiracism has actually looked like in practice. In Canada, the UK, Europe and Europe a system of thought control has been imposed, that punishes white people for expressing even the mildest of racist thoughts, with stiff fines, gag orders, expulsion from schools, the loss of jobs and/or careers, and occasionally jail time. The system encourages people to turn in their relatives and friends and goes without a large public outcry, in part because the news media are complicit in the process and refuse to report on it, and in part because antiracism has dulled people’s sense of outrage by convincing them that the victims are racists, and therefore deserve what is coming to them. Meanwhile, the system metes out punishment, not just to the accused racists, but to those who speak out against the system who are lumped with the accused racists.

In other countries, the effects of antiracism have been far more severe. Here we return to our second charge against antiracism, that it is a form of racism directed against white people, and that it is not the mild ethnic joke or stereotype variety of racism either. It was antiracism, that motivated the UK and other Western countries to oppose Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia, leading to the rise of Robert Mugabe, the transformation of Rhodesia into the dysfunctional hellhole of Zimbabwe, and the murder of the white Rhodesians. (19) When South Africa gave in to the demands the world, again motivated by antiracism, was making on it, it led to the rise to power of the African National Congress, which has gradually been recreating what happened in the former Rhodesia. The murders of the white Afrikaner or Boer farmers, vastly underreported by the world press, have been classified as the start of a genocide. (20)

“Those are extreme examples.” “That sort of thing could never happen over here.”

Perhaps. It is interesting, however, that during the last several decades, as progressive antiracism has become the entrenched ideology in Western countries, white fertility rates have dropped below population replacement levels and remained low, as these countries have opened their borders to mass immigration from non-white countries, opting to replace rather than reproduce their populations. (21) The dates have already been projected for when whites will become minorities in the United States and Canada and those dates are not far off.

What do you suppose is going to happen to white people in these countries when they become minorities in countries where the official ideology, drummed into everyone from earliest childhood in schools, on television, and in popular music and film, all dissent from which is punished by social convention and/or hate laws, teaches that racism is the ultimate sin, that only white people are guilty of it, and that only non-whites are its victims?

The answer, if you have not already figured it out for yourself, can be found in Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints, first published forty years ago. (22) Read it if you dare. (23)

(1) Tim Sale, “Eric Robinson may be rude, but he is not a racist”, Winnipeg Free Press, August 31, 2013, A17, http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/eric-robinson-may-be-rude-but-he-is-not-a-racist-221899441.html

(2) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

(3) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/02/demon-idol-of-equality.html

(4) In this dialogue Socrates, who is awaiting his trial on a false charge of impiety, encounters a young man who thinks he is pious but who embodies impiety, by seeking in the name of the gods to lay a capital charge against his father. The two enter into a discussion of the nature of piety. While most commentary on this dialogue focuses on the arguments, do not overlook the fact that in the end, Euthyphro is dissuaded from pursuing his impious suit.

(5) Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Inventione, 2:22.

(6) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Q. 121, Article One. See also Q. 101 on the virtue of pietas.

(7) “Chick Cancer”, Family Guy, Fox Broadcasting Company, original airdate November 26, 2006.

(8) Jerry Dammers, “Racist Friend”, recorded by The Special A.K.A. and released as a single in 1983 and on album In the Studio (2 Tone Records, 1984)

(9) James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Lay the Foundations of Modern Science, (London: Icon Books Ltd., 2010).

(10) http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/02/local/la-me-arthur-jensen-20121102

(11) http://psychology.uwo.ca/facultyremembrance.htm


(12) The theory basically postulates that species fall upon a spectrum between r-selection, in which parents have a lot of offspring but invest little in each particular offspring and K-selection, in which parents have fewer offspring with a larger investment in each, and that certain combinations of traits can be associated with either end of the spectrum. Rushton applied the theory to differences between populations within the same species, i.e., mankind.

(13) This book, published by Harvard University Press in 1975, like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene which came out a couple of years earlier was largely made possible by the research of W. D. Hamilton, particularly that found in his two part “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour”, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1964. Hamilton proposed a theory that explained the paradox of how socially cooperative or even altruistic behaviour could improve the fitness of an individual organism’s genes. Wilson’s book was more ambitious than Dawkins’. He proposed a new discipline, a synthesis of ethology, anthropology, and other disciplines that concerned social behaviour among animals and humans. As the proposed name of the new discipline suggests, it is based on the idea that all social behaviour can be explained biologically.

(14) Wilson tells the story of the antiracist attack on him, led by his Harvard colleagues Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, in his autobiography Naturalist (Washington D. C.,: Island Press, Shearwater Books, 1994). See also Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

(15) For an excellent rebuttal of this materialistic worldview see Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle, (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000).

(16) Auberon Waugh, “Che Guevara in the West Midlands”, originally printed in The Spectator, July 6, 1976, reprinted in Brideshead Benighted (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), p. 155.

(17) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/unrepentant-nazi-mom-aims-to-get-her-kids-back/article1365488/


(18) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139735/Babies-develop-racist-traits-aged-months-coming-contact-races.html Note the quotation from Lisa Scott about reducing or eliminating the biases.

(19) Ian Smith told the story in his memoirs Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal and the Dreadful Aftermath (London: Blake Publishing Ltd., 2001).

(20) http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html


(21) My essay “The Suicide Cult” discusses how this policy, and the ideology behind it, is an ideology of racial and national suicide: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/suicide-cult.html

(22) Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints (Petoskey: The Social Contract Press: 1995) which is a reprint of the 1975 Scribner edition, translated by Norman Shapiro from the original French edition published in 1973.

(23) The text is available online here: http://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt