Recently in America, Whoopi Goldberg, (interesting how a black woman adopted a Jewish name to fit in with the Jewish-dominated American entertainment industry works alongside American Jewish entertainers like John “Stewart” Liebowitz, who choose the precise opposite strategy), got in trouble with the Jewish activist community for disrespecting the sanctity of the Holocaust.
Whoopi Goldberg, from all appearances a completely benign person, doesn’t really emphatically wish to insist on any perspective that might divide or inflame anyone. In other words, this would seem to be an insignificant, peripheral bit of celebrity drama. But far from being a mere quirk, hers is a fairly common perspective among black Westerners.
In fact, it is an imminently ingrained academic position. This taxonomy of humanity, these ontological presumptions, are shared by people in my country with powerful and malicious intentions, and bring up interesting assumptions that structure interethnic conflict in the West.
This seemingly trivial debacle in fact reveals in fine detail the faults and fineries of the collective survival strategies of both the Jewish and African diaspora in the West. And it shows us how adaptable and isomorphic these strategies are across ethnic groups, when applied to the strange little microcosmic world of South Africa.
We all have tools of survival, but these are worn out quickly when the world changes. There is no rainbow utopia coming, and there never was. Coexistence, whether separated by borders or not, is struggle. It’s also mandatory.
The Black-nationalist rhetorical strategy
On her long-running chat show The View, Goldberg was commenting on the removal of Maus, from some local school curriculum for its use of nudity and rude language. It’s a graphic novel retelling of the holocaust in which nazis are portrayed as cats, Jews as mice, and mitläufer as pigs. Amid the conversation, initially missed by co-panelists, Goldberg remarked that it was “white people doing it to white people”. But having missed this remark, her subsequent one, “[the holocaust] isn’t about race […] it’s an example of man’s inhumanity to man” made the room silent in confusion at the broken Shibboleth.
The holocaust to her, was merely an example of white-on-white violence. As she elaborated in her appearance on Colbert’s show, Jews and gentiles are different “ethnicities”, not “races” – that race is something you can see objectively, and ethnicity is socially constructed (the Israeli Black Panther Party would likely agree). What she is thus saying, is that race is real and biological, and that ethnicity is just learned behaviour. And yet, she still buys into the idea that race is a colonial social construct.
These are seemingly contradictory premises to hold, and yet they persist across the African diaspora. The same is true among black nationalists an ocean away, here in South Africa, as illustrated by the controversy around professor Lwazi Lushaba. But as I have long said, if you perceive a contradiction in someone’s worldview, it is only because you can’t see the unifying principle that they really operate on.
Lushaba, typical of his intellectual tradition (Black Consciousness), is an historically ignorant and narrow-minded man. His argument is that the holocaust was the first time that white people had slaughtered or sought to eradicate one another, and that the horror the West felt after the holocaust was entirely due to the fact that white people were victims. Hitler, he argued, did nothing exceptional in terms of the history of Europeans – that he did nothing “wrong” in “the logic” of “white society”. Lushaba portrayed the Holocaust as an excess of brotherly antagonism, a narrative so alien to any educated white Westerner that it was immediately mistaken for Nazi apologia (of course, Lushaba isn’t exactly innocent on those grounds either, but that’s a story for another time).
So Lushaba, like Biko before him, maintains a narrative of white people as never being cruel to one another, except for this one weird war where we all decided enough was enough because some whiteys got hurt. In contradiction of all known historical evidence, Biko claimed in his book (now treated as something of a political Bible) that the worst any Europeans had ever experienced in war was a little racial admixture and linguistic bastardisation. This is very stupid.
But this isn’t unique at all. The origin of this argument is Aimé Césaire’s essay Discourse on Colonialism, from 1955:
“they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; […] the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
What he misses is a litany of contemporaneous slaughters of European people which did not receive censure either: the Holodomor, the purges of Poland, the Ustashe, the Turkish eradication of the Greeks and Armenians, the attempted genocide of the Boers, and countless other mass slaughters of whites which never achieved a fraction of the status of the holocaust, never mind the utterly forgotten retributive slaughter, rape, and mass ethnic cleansing of Germans in 1945, which saw 14 million shipped in cattle cars in winter to Berlin, killing around 1 million of them. He is ignorant of the deadly cleansing and apartheid system used by Stalin against Soviet Germans too.
Here my point is simple - white people have been as violent to one another as any race. As Chomsky put it, the world wars were just the culmination of a centuries long tradition of European murdering each other. But the holocaust’s special place has led ignorant men like Lushaba to fixate on it, and like many black nationalists, he envies it, envies the special place it accords Jews in Western discourse.
The idea that the West used to at one point see notions within it as being different races is incoherent to modern ears. But it was once normal to refer to the French race, the German race, and the English race in the same idiom, and the white races as a plural category. And when watching WWII or even WWI propaganda, a consistent theme emerges – a radical opposition to “Germanism”. Germans were seen to, as a race, possess a barbarian quality that had to be crushed and subdued (e.g., AJ Ayer, or even Jan Smuts). The Anglo-dominated West did not enter the war to rescue the Jews. They went to war with the Germans to crush German power and secure global hegemony.
These complications are irritating to black nationalists, because black people are in their eyes the only true victims of racism, which is the highest evil, and they are thus the most injured people on the planet. In one sense, this is a fair judgment – history has been most unkind to the descendants of Sub-Saharan Africa. But seeing oneself as nothing but a victim of a superior predatory beast is humiliating, especially for people of a martial character who prided themselves on their masculinity.
And they feel this, and remark upon the “white-liberal” gaze fairly often. Black people, because of the insignificance of their powers on the global stage, are never critically examined as serious thinkers, and as a result are never treated to the sort of criticism white people would give each other for saying similar things. Instead, they are patronisingly coopted, and their ideas piecemeal appropriated by white and Jewish people for political signalling, eliding uncomfortable details that would disrupt the ideological jousting that occurs in the Western upper classes.
So we, even the far left among us, tend to miss the plot, and end up with the confused nonsense that calls itself “woke” – a white person’s third-stage xerox of black race ideology. What unites these perspectives that could explain the ontology? If race is both real and biological, and also socially constructed, then what is the social superstructure that the colonialists laid over the biological substrate? Well, it is the sense of superiority, and nothing else.
But this has strange consequences. Black nationalism occupies a liminal space where dismissals of the holocaust and envious diatribes about national-socialism become illegible to whites, even as they borrow radical ideas from them, like “blacks cant be racist”. White scholastic articulations of this particular example come as post-hoc rationalisations, but they always end up being contradictory and devoid of reality – prejudice-and-power being a primary example.
Beyond the simple notion of racial superiority, what is persistent in the black nationalist literature, is the notion that Reason itself is a culture-specific construct not shared by black people. This is largely because past Enlightenment thinkers accorded inferior powers of reasoning to Africans. The response to this is the notion, in very crude terms, is that Reason is a game black people can play, but do not want to, because it is an alien cultural trait.
This can be seen in criticisms made by Biko, and by Immanuel Eze, but also by Lwazi Lushaba, borrowing from the only Western philosopher the Black Consciousness movement never criticises:
“Gelven, in an insightful commentary on Heidegger’s magnum opus – Being and Time […] writes; “[…] Even the so-called non-temporal truths of logic are temporal in the sense that they are understood by an agent or mind that is determined by temporal dimensions”. Emboldened by such an understanding, we may with a wry smile return to Europe its categories of reason, rationality, capital and citizenship now visibly branded with their cultural, temporal, and historical markers.
Heidegger. Heidegger, I think, is chosen specifically becasue his notion of reason is culturally embedded and absolute, and reinforces a peculiar logic of ethnic ownership inherent to the black-nationalist worldview – it is always implied that something which originates in a culture belongs to the inheritors of the blood of those people, and the same goes for any other idea.
As a consequence, less-educated black people will tend to construct a neo-gnostic conspiracy of the whole world - white people lied to obscure that black people actually made everything good, and white people made everything evil. Things which are disliked will be repudiated and claimed to be a white invention, things which are undeniably African or black must be elevated somehow, regardless of quality.
This is an extremely narcissistic attitude, but one that is easily seen in broken people throughout history. Germans once played silly games appropriating figures from antiquity for the Aryan pantheon, from Julius Caesar to Jesus Christ, just as the wewuzzes of the internet-educated black nationalist diaspora do with Egypt, Beethoven and Jesus themselves. The Germans, broken by war and reparations, a fragile, radically progressive constitution, and the financial success of foreigners during their darkest poverty, turned to a messianic figure to rescue them, and that man said that if the Germans were united, they could never be fucked with again. Same as black nationalists today.
Black nationalists of course see racism as a white invention. But what that invention is, following the embedded assumptions Whoopi Goldberg articulated, is simply the notion that Europeans are better than Africans – racism as hierarchy. To fight racism, black nationalists have to fight it on two levels – material wealth, and esteem. Hence on the one hand the support for communism and reparations, but also, the persistent attack any notion of virtue in Western society. The West must be dragged or appropriated until it holds the same relative position of esteem on the scoresheet of collective esteem.
And from these simple premises (racism = white superiority; cultural artefacts and ideas are heritable intellectual property; racism is a white cultural construct; we must eliminate racism), all other black nationalist claims about the world become at once sensible and rational. The fundamental aim of black nationalism is to build black solidarity, enough to level the playing field and seize power.
But the bitter fact of the matter is that European culture is superior in a significant number of moral categories which are esteemed by both black nationalists and white liberals. We were the first to abolish slavery. We were the first to realise democracy, mechanised and automated industry, and modern standards of wealth and health. Europeans created the entire global political economy and all the virtues that sustain it. And so a black nationalist must, in these moral categories which it esteems, undermine all cultural achievements of any member of the white race in the public eye, until such time as the culture of their ancestors is esteemed equally.
This requires a moral architecture built not on aspiration and ambition, but on resentment and cynicism. In the end, this project must inevitably revolve around responses to Western European culture, turning blacks neither back upon the culture of their African forebears, nor into a new nation of its own nature, but into the shadow of white society. Racism thus becomes a deadly tar-baby, sucking in short-sighted revanchists ever deeper with every blow they strike. But this is a deep and complex irony I am saving for a different upcoming project.
Let us turn to the Jews.
The Jewish-diasporan rhetorical strategy
The Jewish response to Goldberg was factually accurate – Hitler killed the Jews because they were regarded as racially distinct interlopers threatening community cohesion, racial autarky, and national health. Whether Jews really are a separate race depends on how strict one’s Jewish Orthodoxy is, or where your nationalism sits on the Italian-German spectrum (Italian fascism was initially friendly and inclusive of Jews, until the Axis pact was signed and Hitler placed pressure on Mussolini to get rid of them).
The trouble with Jewishness and race, is that despite many focusing on the genetic heritability of God’s providence in the orthodoxy, others recognise it as a religion into which one may convert, as many hundreds of thousands did before the fall of the second temple and the introduction of the rule requiring three dissuasions to any potential convert. And Jews come in many shades, from the pale north-European Ashkenazi to the mahogany of the Beta Israelis of Ethiopia.
To Jewish non-racialists/anti-racists, the socially constructed aspect of race is the boundary of inclusion, which as Yair Rosenberg’s response to Whoopi elucidates, is broad enough and fuzzy enough to be almost entirely subjective. In fact, this subjective notion of ethnicity is the same one taken by Flip Buys for the Afrikaner people, borrowing directly from a quote by Ben Gurion in the opening chapter of his manifesto on Afrikaner self-determination Die Pad na Self-Bestuur.
This ambiguity of the particular sense of the proposition “race is constructed” leas to some uneasy confusion. As a result of the controversy surrounding Whoopi Goldberg’s remarks, the Anti Defamation League got dragged into a controversy of their own. Until a few years ago, the definition of racism was discrimination on the basis of race. It was recently changed to the black-nationalist definition, having been adopted by the intersectionalists and critical theory crowd, whose institutional domination is a powerful lever in public discourse.
Since Goldberg has taken her stance on whiteness, and included Jews into it, Jewish commentators have reacted with a mixture of shock and discomfort. But the ADL, who usually take the lead on issues like this, opened themselves up to ridicule because of their adoption of the black-nationalist theory of racism.
The Jewish Policy Centre, a powerful Jewish think tank, lambasted the ADL for their change of definition. But the definition had been adopted over a year ago, so why now? Because it undermined the one of the key weapons of collective rhetorical self-defence Jews have as a minority in the West.
Almost everybody saw there was something silly in punishing Whoopi for what she said. This is partially due to exhaustion with social ostracism (if I hear the term “cancel culture” again, I am going to become a bloody mountain hermit), and partially due to the beneficence with which white people must view black people to remain in polite society.
As for Jewish society, we have to notice two obvious things. First, the Holocaust is a sacred event to Jews, unmatched in magnitude in the contemporary Jewish consciousness except for the destruction of the Second Temple and the creation of Israel. And second, Jews are a wealthy minority.
Yuri Slezkine, one of the keenest students of modern Jewish history, has come up with a taxonomy for Jews that places them among others of this kind – what he calls “Mercurian peoples”. This divides the Jewish diaspora from the Israelis, who are bonded to the soil. A similar distinction can be seen in South Africa, where Anglos are seen as rootless parasites (in many ways, we are), while of Afrikaners it is said ba na le fatsi – “they have the soil” – in the sense that they are married to the territory they settle on, and show a desire to built to stay, rather than to merely extract and move on. These are Slezkine’s “Apollonian peoples”.
The urbanised middleman stereotype which Slezkine describes includes Chinese minorities in South-East Asia, white Africans, African Indians, and of course, Jews – much the same as Thomas Sowell’s concept of middleman minorities (Sowell’s concept works perhaps better here in SA, since it includes Afrikaners, who have dominated the farming niche in the economy that few others seem to want, even when given the opportunity for free). Modernity provided a boon to those who were culturally suited for service-based professions, since portable, administrative, financial, mercenary, managerial and literate skills became central to the modern economy, elevating such groups above the labouring and land-bound classes.
But this creates a problem. Those who “have the soil” naturally feel entitled to see their own kind dominate the economy, to have a loyal elite who shares social ties with the national community, since community cohesion is vital to security in this mode. What follows is mistrust of outsiders, resentment and insecurity. And of course, those who have fewer ties to the majority and are detached from territorial concerns have far less skin in the game, and will naturally be less concerned with preserving the institutions of the Apollonian societies they live off.
Waves of social instability will fracture a nation, and cause faultlines along class, region, and sub-national ethnicities. To unify a fractured people, nationalism seeks to unite people by proselytism, mass action, coercion, or even violence. It is common expel or wage war against a scapegoat ethnicity to achieve conscious unity. That scapegoat is likely to be the most dissimilar minority in one’s midst, especially if that minority is disproportionately well-off. This creates a perennial problem – as Philip Gourevitch put it, “genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building".
Mercurian peoples will naturally form political interest like anyone else, except these must naturally differ from the majority. And since the majority represents a perennial populist threat, Jewish (and other minority) political rhetoric will seek out coalition partners in the debate over culture and politics – liberals, communists, other minorities, foreign states – anyone who could weaken the potential for hostile populism. Even we in South Africa do this. We seek out alliances and solidarity with the Coloured and Indian populations, the immigrants, traditional African communities, the freemarketeers.
This is a “chisel strategy” – one chips away at the ideas and social coalitions which constitute a possibility of hostile majoritarianism, in order to preserve one’s way of life as a successful minority - in the West, the key division to exploit is the left-right distinction, where one can see Jewish lobbyists and intellectuals making common cause with the Christian right on foreign policy while befriending the left on social policy.
Thus the complimentary “dissolving strategy”, which aims to foster tolerance and acceptance of difference by diluting or rebuking the traditional cohesive norms of the community through a cosmopolitan ethic, liberal tolerance and cultural pluralism. Consequently, Jewish political rhetoric in the west has for some time seen black people as a sympathetic coalition partner, but also as a useful wedge to extract liberal concessions from Western society.
Many Jews consider themselves non-white (or “white-passing PoC”, in newspeak, though regarded as white by Palestinians with matching skin tone who identify as non-white while celebrating Hitler - an ouroboros of idiocy), largely because of the holocaust and the way German ideas of Aryan supremacy translated in the Anglosphere’s notions of whiteness, fusing the age-old animosity between Jews and gentiles into an unbroken historiography of racial blood-feud. Many Jewish people as a consequence, despite being visibly white, overwhelmingly genetically European, and acculturated into Western society for centuries, range themselves in diametric opposition to it.
As outsiders to Western society, they find themselves overwhelmingly on the political left – seeking out those political ideas that weaken the tendencies to ethno-nationalistic or religious homogeneity which carries the ever-present threat to ethnic or religious minorities.
But the chiselling and dissolving, which attacks both unity and pride, can destabilise society if it is too successful, and create the very conditions ripe for fascism, since after a certain point, only violent fanaticism can rescue a nation from oblivion. A firm case can be made that this is what we have done to black South Africans.
The Southafricanisation of all Strategies
English Liberals in South Africa prefer the dissolving strategy, and are a particular focus of Lushaba’s ire - the preface to his PhD focuses on the patronising and scornful attitude condescended to by liberals upon the girls of the traditional Reed Dance. Open borders, multicultural inclusion. Zuma bad, Ramaphosa good, PutSAFirst bad, Zimbabwean migrant labour chisels good. Both strategies go hand in hand.
The Afrikaner-nationalist’s dominant rhetorical strategy itself is a sort of chiselling strategy – the various African nations are emphasised over their blackness (blackness only becomes more important in white spaces). Separate development was the only potential means of avoiding the present condition, though it was too late by the time it was even given a name. We conservatives, just like the liberals, would very much like to see black South Africans pursue less of their black nationalist project, because it comes with a threat to our survival, as similar projects do everywhere else.
Black people may be a favourite chisel to wield in the West, but because Jews are also comfortable in high society, it makes black Westerners suspicious of them, as Louis Farrakhan demonstrates. The same goes for us and Coloured South Africans – to them, we are useful allies against black majoritarianism, but they also bear witness to our relative wealth and proximity to powerful institutions, and the long history of our crimes of exploitation and violence against them, and our comfort among our own kind, which truthfully make us a fickle ally.
Black political rhetoric’s primary aim regarding Jews, whether expressed through antisemitism or philosematism, is to build black solidarity and power in white society. As a disempowered group, finding elite coalitions is traditionally out of reach for black westerners. But in South Africa, the black struggle is against local inequality, and the international political economy, which is dominated by the West, and of which much of the white minority is an integrated part.
This creates fertile ground for the propagation of theories identical to those found among white nationalists – the Zionist Occupied Government or “zog”, identical in structure to the theory of White Monopoly Capital, which posits that whites (irrespective of Jew or gentile) own everything in SA, and that the ownership achieved through Black Economic Empowerment is just a deputisation of token askaris to guard the white man’s factories.
The peculiar local reality is that South African Jews have persisted in adopting the chiseling and dissolving strategies, not against blacks, but against whites, even though we are defeated and our territory burst. Even though the black majority considers them white and complicit in apartheid domination. This is now a case of ideological inertia, driven by long cultural memories from Europe, and stoked by Afrikaner antisemitism.
And so we have people like Jack Markovitz, who came out to support the EFF as they rallied to threaten some lower-class Afrikaans school children in Brackenfell, or Kim Heller, a woman who has devoted years of her life to promoting the most openly genocidal black leaders while selling her self as a “fellow white” who “realises her privilege”. She is a very intelligent person, but either very corrupt, deeply spiteful, or both. Others, like professor Stephen Friedman are simply old Struggle loyalists. But they all engage in a very dangerous game by supporting black national-socialism.
The fact that black radicals (even moderates) tend to be virulently anti-Israel, and highly focused on the Jewish component of “white monopoly capital” seems not to have registered with them. The ANC and the more radical types still bear a grudge against Israel for supporting the apartheid state, and local Jews for their profiteering off the Group Areas Act clearances (e.g., Coloured people’s removal from Constantia).
Those who have realised the folly of this (the majority of the former Jewish population of South Africa, in fact) have already left the country, seeing the destruction wrought by the ANC. Those who remain tend to do so because there are still many comfortable niches in which to avoid the consequences of ANC rule for the time being.
But the attack on the cohesion of one’s own etic ethnic group is not unique to this particular situation – Jews in the past have even sided with the Nazis, out of a desire to assimilate, and a feeling of distinction to their more Orthodox countrymen. Max Naumann and his followers supported German National-Socialism right until they were confronted by the obvious nature of the persecutions. By then it was too late, and they rotted in concentration camps.
In the last few decades in America, Jews have had to deal with very little in the way of persecution by historical standards. But times area changing. Support for Palestine over Israel is becoming less and less taboo in the ruling class, demonstrating a significant loss of vital soft power. And as the demographics of the West shift, Jews are becoming targets of street violence again. But the people attacking Jews today are increasingly black people and Muslims.
For example, in Jersey City, the attackers were part of an extremist wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites that believes Jewish people are imposters (as one acolyte put it in 2007, “Negroes are the real Jews”) and worthy of death. One attacker posted about how Jewish people controlled the government and referred to Jewish people as being part of the “synagogue of Satan,” a phrase derived from the Book of Revelation that has become an anti-Semitic calling card.
NYT:
…for residents like Joanna Galilli, this area in northwestern Paris represents a tactical retreat. It has become a haven for many Jews who say they have faced harassment in areas with growing Muslim populations. Ms. Galilli, 28, moved to the neighborhood this year from a Parisian suburb where “anti-Semitism is pretty high,” she said, “and you feel it enormously.”
“They spit when I walked in the street,” she said, describing reactions when she wore a Star of David.
Which probably explains Eric Zemmour, who also has the experience of living as a member of French society in Algeria as the Pied-noirs were expelled.
It also explains the editorial shift in Tablet Magazine (one of the finest publications in the mainstream) to anti-wokism – they have realised that the now-unstoppable wave of cultic idiocy that is intersectionalism and postmodern degeneracy has little care for the violence inflicted on Jews, unless it is done by white people, who have learned to be a lot more quiet and less self-confident as the years have worn on.
Being a Jewish minority in a high-trust homogeneous society which considers antisemitism a taboo is ideal, but being a Jewish minority in a heterogeneous society only works if none of the neighbouring ethnicities tolerate antisemitism. That is a much harder game to win, and one that requires far too many strategies to coordinate.
If one thing can be grasped from Whoopi Goldberg’s little debacle, it is that nobody really listens to or understands one another. Jews do not listen to blacks, who don’t care about Jews so much as resent whites, who are trying to simply escape demonisation as the new cultural revolution rolls on.
Whatever happens to Whoopi, I’m sure she will be fine, but here down South, and in the boroughs of the Western metropoles, the nature of her rhetorical persuasions will remain vital warnings into the brittle nature of ethnic relations in a multicultural society.
How to Cancel Hitler
While the holocaust retains a sacred position in common memory, that memory is fading, and the main historiographical taboo is increasingly becoming colonialism, which has the Belgian Congo and the Nama-Herero genocide on its scorecard. On the right, attention is being increasingly drawn to the scale of carnage committed by the communists, which for many makes Hitler seem less special.
And since the entire post-war order is centred on the narrative created from the ashes of WWII to justify the brutality of the Allies (let us not kid ourselves that these people were doing it to save the Jews, they were not), the holocaust occupies a unique place in history.
As many people right and left have observed, Adolf Hitler is the most influential individual of the 20th century. Today, our Western political morality still centres on his legend, and the narratives that surround him. All enemies of Progress are compared to Adolf Hitler in one way or another, and in the United States, we saw not only Donald Trump, but Barack Obama and George Bush, compared to Hitler by their less articulate critics.
The universalisation of Hitler’s worldview as an essential feature of western culture by the Frankfurt School has seen white supremacy become the fulcrum along which all political discourse is conducted today. In South Africa, we see the parallel in our recrimination of superficial similarities to apartheid – critics of vaccine passports deploy a facile comparison to apartheid, and the continuity of apartheid as colonialism “of a special kind” has served to knit these threads together for South African writers.
The temptation for political outsiders remains the simple inversion – once a political order is identified as being undesirable, the resentful outsider will tend to invert all its values and practices, declare all its historical opponents his friends, and declare all sins it denounces as being virtues. This is all too apparent in younger progressives tempted to entertain the stupid and depraved government programs of Bolshevism and Marxist Third-worldism. The new Liberal-progressive synthesis of intersectionality and Critical Theory (what we now call “woke”) is founded on this precise, idiotic impulse, which has given black nationalism the podium it ill-deserves (among other things).
In the same way, many on the right, awakened from their quiet conservative slumber by progressive intrusions into their cultural strongholds, have resorted to some form of race-nationalism. This has resulted in this tiny minority of political illiterates and lunatics becoming easy targets for elements of the progressive order who wish to paint the entire white race as an existential threat to all of humanity, and justify a continual ratcheting of state repression and persecution of ordinary conservatives engaging in reasonable political activism (for example the FBI’s use of counter-terror legislation to target parent-teacher associations critical of anti-white and sexually libertine curricula in the United States).
After the war, many German philosophers and historians wrangled with how to remember the holocaust, and what lessons to learn from it. The Historikerstreit, as this academic struggle was called, was won rather decisively by those adjacent to the Frankfurt School who argued that an eternal collective guilt had to be preserved which could never be paid off. As a consequence, German politics is perpetually seized by a fragile neurosis.
On the one hand, many Germans pride themselves on having no national pride or sense of identity. Merkel’s highly divisive policy of accepting millions of undocumented immigrants was based on the negation of national interest for the sake of morality, and compared the Syrian refugees to the Jews. As a result of the violence these immigrants inflicted on the native population, Germany was forced to push them into other neighbouring countries, and made the EU impose migrant quotas. The political fallout threatens to tear apart the EU today, and is played out in the eastern border regions, as Russia and Belarus collaborate to funnel middle eastern migrants across the Polish border as a destabilisation tactic.
On the other hand, the German opposition party Alternative fur Deutschland has absorbed a great deal of angry German nationalists, many of whom entertain fantasies of restoring the reputation of the mid-century national-socialist regime. This has made them easy targets for political criticism, and attracted cranks and outsiders who have made the party extremely unstable, and placed a hard ceiling on their political ambitions, as they become ridiculed and scorned by the majority of the population.
In South Africa, Hitler is no less an object of fascination, though usually as a distant Platonic Form to which white South Africans are compared through our ancestors in positions of local political authority. The emerging academic narrative increasingly sees Hitler not as a bad man – many student activists and academics have tried to reduce the singular significance of Hitler, though all of these are black. These are usually national-socialists themselves, though in the name of black power and decolonisation in the Haitian sense – a Kristallnacht for “settlers”. What they accuse Hitler of, is being an ordinary white person – boorish, uncultured, homicidal and greedy. The program of the Frankfurt School has reached its apogee.
We cannot speak sensibly about politics in this way. In order to escape this vicious cycle of recrimination and false purification, we must find a way of “cancelling” Hitler – not in the sense online progressives use the term (erasure), but in a different sense, that employed by the notoriously convoluted German philosopher Georg Hegel. In his dialectic theory, political thought proceeds through positive affirmation, then negation, then finally a full rational incorporation into discourse through aufhebung – a sort of cancellation of polar significance: the negation of the negation. But this is not a simple inversion like the first negation; it is the synthesis of the binary antagonism.
To do this, we must make Hitler human again, and confront the violence which pervades the human spirit. The holocaust may have been unique in some ways, but it does not stand alone, sui generis – genocides occur periodically through history, and the horror which awaits its witnesses is a vision of the human soul. Rwanda, Mfecane, Cambodia, Haiti, the Holodomor, and countless other slaughters of greater or lesser magnitude occur every generation somewhere on earth. And they must nonetheless be seen with the gravity they deserve.
The Way Out
Hitler teaches us nothing if he is just “white”; he teaches us nothing if he is seen as a demon. But if he is seen as a human being, with all the frailty that entails, and his victims are seen as human beings, with all the venality that entails, we stand a chance of apprehending lessons which help us evade similar excesses of human depravity, not only from being committed in our name, but of happening to us in the name of his negation.
The necessity of this for South Africans is that we are increasingly seeing National-Socialism for black people emerge ever-stronger with every year. Philosophers like Ndumiso Dladla, Lwazi Lushaba and Mogobe Ramose remain potently hostile to minorities, and their political equivalents in the ANC’s RET faction, the EFF and elsewhere, remain a perennial reminder that civil conviviality is a fragile state of affairs.
The irony is that the solution lies at least partially in the remarks of these anti-colonialist thinkers - to forget the universality of the West, and remember it is just one part of the world, just one culture, just one set of ethnic relations, and that these are not only different elsewhere, but are not even eternal within it. It is imperative to forget out taboos and realise that ethnic coalitions and conflicts are inevitable, and humanist universalism is a pipe dream, especially when it is founded on historical crimes.
There is no rainbow utopia coming, and there never was. Coexistence is struggle. It’s also mandatory.
It's really a shame you don't have a wider audience. In a less benighted age, you would. Maybe posthumously?
I felted and had the feeling that you would say the Jews are essentially right... Disappointing... Perhaps that's why you are still on YouTube «maybe you aren't». I am sorry to burst your bubble, but JooTube wants us gone, they hates us vociferously, and if you think that M*ng*l* and company did WHAT (((THE WINNERS OF THE WAR))) said they did «just see what Thucydides says about this «hint, it is about what winners do to history books», including the 'stache guy, you are roundly mistaken. Just read the available literature «NOT newspapers, NOT quotations in English «the exception would be if they are really ORIGINAL from that time, NOT JooJooBa history books that quote one another and babble about Joo Joo Ba Soup the NAHhhhhtsis did of them, boo hoo, very »believable« »... You know what, see what Churchill himself said, Roosevelt, AND WHY THEY were 'compelled', to say the least, to enter that war». Go to Bitchute, start with that famous Joo Joo Ba guy's «still alive» documentary 'At the Gates of Auschwitz'. I am not going to even start this. I am 30 years old, and I knew of this at 21, I am turning 31 in a few months, so 11 years ago, counting with 21. Maybe you know what I am talking about, but IFF still you thought ALL THAT CRAP IS REAL... like, six bazillion in the holobunga «in crematory chambers (that were around three or four [NOT much more than this] were available in the camps) that can only turn to ash a human body in more than 3 THREE days, make the math». Then you are hopeless. But you seem VERY intelligent. Maybe there is hope.