Intellectually, the white race’s case is easy to defend. It comes down to the very modest claim that whites are just like everybody else. We’re not uniquely sinful, at least not qualitatively. Our history is driven by the same forces and motivations that have shaped other peoples. We should be allowed to positively relate to our predecessors, inherited customs, and ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods just like any other people.
But while the case is intellectually strong, belief in it, even by its advocates, is weak. As C. S. Lewis explains in Screwtape Proposes a Toast
No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
This is certainly true of my fellow racially-conservative whites. The history we grew up with was of our people as at best morally problematic and everyone else as innocent victims. Our big discoveries are that whites aren’t uniquely oppressive and that in any case order does require some degree of force (“oppression”) to maintain. We can never have the confidence of the negro or the Jew or the Muslim, all of whom see the moral superiority of their people as entirely self-evident. Thus we invent “particularism” and “identitarianism”, which begin with abstract principles that every people should be allowed to value and preserve itself. The plausibility of the principle comes from its seemingly obvious truth for peoples like the Native Americans, blacks, Jews, and Muslims. Then, once the principle is admitted, demand that–as a matter of logical consistency–one is forced to apply it even to white Europeans. Not that we intrinsically deserve such protection, but the principle must be maintained for other groups, and it is only securely maintained if consistency is insisted upon. Now, if this were just a rhetorical trick to make anti-white liberals think, that would be one thing. But particularism is in fact my real belief, and the belief of many like me. This is the best we can do for our own people.
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Throne and Altar 
[…] By Bonald […]
“Intellectually, the white race’s case is easy to defend.” Complete hogwash, as is “The history we grew up with was of our people as at best morally problematic and everyone else as innocent victims”, as this can only apply to people born after 1963.
The civilization the entire world is trying to emulate, if only materially, is Western civilization. A quick study of where the rest of the World was in 1850 shows how grim the non-European World truly was. (and I include North America in the notion of “the European World”).
You point of view seem to hinge on slavery, in particular indetured slavery of black Africans mostly in the 18th and 19th century. Let me point out that it was black and Muslims that captured slaves on the African continent and that a great may Jew (some Muslims too) were involved in financing this. Moreover, Neither Muslim or Jews were as a whole much involved with outlawing it.
The assault on our civilization by the Left using slavery is neither legitimate or intellectually sound; moreover its goal is neither freedom or the lifting of “oppression”–It is barbaric and nihilistic destruction.
It is immaterial what “Native Americans, blacks, Jews, and Muslims” think in this. If the are this intellectually and morally dishonest let them cast aside the benefits of our civilization. Certainly, should white civilization is destroyed, these benefits will quickly evaporate and much if the world will be back to where it was before the ascendancy of the West.
Hattip:
Substitute the word “white” with the word “Catholic” and only then does your comment make any sense.
Well, we could become (objective or subjective) white supremacists instead of white advocates.
hattip,
Notice your defense, which is the same I would give. “Other people were doing it too. We’re not any worse than them!” Would it ever occur to a Jew to say that his people are no worse morally speaking than many Gentile groups?
Bruce:
We are already white supremacists. We see the race blind philosophy of white people as inherently superior to the racist philosophies of colored peoples.
Objectively speaking, White, European Civilization is not equal to other civilizations. It towers over them, like a man over children. There is simply no contest.
The folly of white supremacy, is thinking that our civilization has gained such preeminence, because white people are naturally superior, or immune, to the dyscivic forces that have ravaged others. White civilization was so great, because it was Catholic, suffused with supernatural graces. As Europe apostatizes, we see that whites have embraced unprecedented levels of stupidity, madness and race suicide.
So: we’re the best; we’re the worst. None can beat us in greatness; none can match us in folly. Hooray for us.
> Well, we could become (objective or subjective) white supremacists
No, we cannot become white supremacists. Alas, we know too much.
At some point we will have to begin thinking and behaving like a minority, but when that happens there will be no majority for us to ask to treat us fairly. There will just be other minorities. With them we should interact on a quid pro quo basis, being friendly with those who are friendly and hostile with those who are not. What must end is the present arrangement, where we must say nice things about other groups while they say nasty things about us. There will also have to be ostracism of defectors. Our cooperation will still be valuable, but it will be contingent on some sort of reciprocal benefit.
JMSmith:
I don’t think things in reality are likely to proceed in such a reasoned fashion. We like to talk as if we could plan for things and develop a strategy or what have you. But that is just intellectual comfort food: we don’t really have a say in how things are going to go.
Two basic things are presently true of white people:
1) White flesh encloses more militantly tolerant liberalism than all other kinds of flesh combined.
2) White people are far more materially capable of perpetrating far more unspeakable violence on a catastrophically vast scale than all other races of flesh combined, possibly excepting the Chinese.
When (1) collapses under the weight of reality, it is highly likely to give way to (2). Too much colored/’minority’ (the latter in scare quotes because whites are actually a minority, globally speaking) entitlement combined with too much white SJW fifth column treason is likely to give rise to a level of technologically enhanced violence that will make the twentieth century look idyllically peaceful.
I in no way advocate this. The right thing to do is to repent and step back from the brink instead of charging headlong into the abyss.
But I don’t expect that to happen. Things can carry on in a very dysfunctional state for a surprisingly long time; but in the long run reality will have its way with entitled modernity. And when it does, it is likely to arrive in the form of unprecedented technologically enhanced savagery.
Zippy is correct but his (2) has even arrived. The transhumanists (a white project) talk blasely that the human substatrum will not be needed after they upload themselves. What else is this talk but calls for genocide of non-whites?
Here’s a video with my favorite political pundit.
@Bonald
Christianity is what made the white race great, its abandonment has caused us to develop a deep seated self-hatred.
@Mactoul
That is not already upon us. We don’t have to worry about the transhumanists committing genocide, because it’s not possible that they’ll ever reach the point where they want to.
It’s a dark comedy? The leftists want to kill all whites because they are workers of Satan who hates that Christianity has spread to the whole world through Europe, and now conservative whites sort of recognize that our civilization deserves to fail in its present, utterly corrupted state. It looks fairly pessimistic.
“Christianity is what made the white race great”
Christianity and genes.
@AureliusMoner
If Catholicism in the most significant factor. Mexico and South America would very soon be powerhouses like Europe. But it is not so.
Catholicism alone does not seem to do the trick as far as I can see.
I think you could still have a purely Catholic metaphysic explain civilization discrepancies (if you really wanted to). The Book of Mormon explains the darker-skinned race that was inhabiting the Americas as punished for its sinful behavior, and made ugly so that the others would not mix with them.
In the same way, one could ignore IQ and just observe that the many of the non-Western peoples engage in higher rates of sinful behavior, which perhaps drags them down (including their intelligences), rather than the other way around.