It didn’t take the folks over at the Huffington Post long before they deleted their blog post, “Could it Be Time to Deny White Men the Franchise?”
Its justification for doing so was that its author, a Ms. “Shelley Garland,” most likely didn’t exist. In other words, the HuffPo editors belatedly discovered that they had been the victims of a hoax.
Still, given the staunchness with which the editors defended the article before realizing that they had been conned, it’s unclear as to how or why the intentions of its author are of any relevance to HuffPo’s decision to publish or retract it. After all, it’s the content or analysis presented by the author, and not the author herself, that initially endeared it to HuffPo’s editors.
And as HuffPo’s South Africa editor condescendingly responded to critics, the “analysis” supplied by “Garland” is hardly anything new or revelatory; in fact, it is “pretty standard for feminist theory” and has “been espoused in many different ways by feminist writers and theorists for decades now.”
Indeed. Only it isn’t just feminists, but virtually all leftists, who hold essentially the same view as that expressed in this piece that HuffPo was all too happy to publish and defend.
In other words, that which powers the contemporary left is, ultimately, an anti-white and anti-white male animus.
As long ago as 1967, the leftist Susan Sontag bluntly equated the white race with the deadliest disease on the planet. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” she wrote.
Sontag’s verdict and the reasoning by which she reaches it emblematize the left’s vision of the world. The white race is uniquely evil because “it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”
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America, Sontag maintains, is the proof of Western civilization’s corruption. “If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization.”
While this is undoubtedly “a painful truth” to confront, confront it we must. “The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.”
It is Sontag’s vision that “Shelley Garland” mocked and that the Huffington Post embraces. It is this vision that has hardened into the Politically Correct dogma that dominates academia, Hollywood, our government, Big Media, and the popular culture generally.
While not all anti-white leftists state their contempt as overtly as Sontag did, we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that they aren’t marinating in it. The conventional claptrap of “institutional racism” and the more recent “white privilege,” to note but two popular examples, are but less abrasive ways of indicting whites for being the cancer of humanity.
Richard Wasserstrom is a philosopher whose analysis of “institutional racism,” though anything but original, is instructive inasmuch as it could have easily been articulated by any of his ideological ilk.
Wasserstrom identifies two types of “institutional racism.” “The first,” he tells us, “is the racism of subinstitutions within the legal system such as the jury, or the racism of practices built upon or countenanced by the law.” These, Wasserstrom continues, “very often, if not always, reflect in important and serious ways a variety of dominant values in the operation of what is apparently a neutral legal system.”
This neutrality, however, turns out to be illusory. “The result is the maintenance and reinforcement of a system in which whites dominate over non-whites.”
The second type of “institutional racism” is even more subtle than the first, for it is “conceptual.” “We use concepts. Quite often without realizing it, the concepts used take for granted certain objectionable aspects of racist ideology without our being aware of it.”
What is this “racist ideology?” Wasserstrom explains: “In our culture, to be nonwhite—especially to be black—is to be treated and seen to be a member of a group that is different from and inferior to the group of standard, fully developed persons, the adult white male.”
Many leftists think that the denial of group differences, the ideal of a shared humanity that transcends these differences, itself promotes “racism,” “sexism,” and so forth. Iris Marion Young, for instance, writes that the belief that “equality and liberation entail ignoring difference has oppressive consequences [.]”
In present Western societies, “the privileged groups implicitly define the standards according to which all will be measured. Because their privilege involves not recognizing these standards as culturally and experientially specific, the ideal of a common humanity in which all can participate without regard to race, gender, religion, or sexuality poses as neutral and universal.”
This conception of a shared humanity, however, is made in the image of the “dominant culture,” meaning it is “Anglo, European, Christian, masculine, straight.”
The 21st century left is defined by three convictions: (1) “Racism,” “sexism,” and every other form of bigotry and intolerance are the worst of moral transgressions and endemic to white societies; (2) Whites, specifically white men, are uniquely evil in these respects (the “cancer of the human race”); and (3) Such is the ubiquity of these evils that most whites perpetuate them unconsciously.
Given these beliefs, the honest and remotely intelligent person must ask himself, how can anyone who subscribes to them not want to do at least what “Shelley Garland” proposed in her brilliant hoax article? The only solution, by the leftist’s lights, is to divest white men of all power.
In keeping with Sontag’s language, the only solution is to either drive the cancer into remission or to cure it altogether by eliminating it.
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