February 13, 2021
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Two Significant
Essays by Paul Gottfried
Friends,
Since I began this series of short commentaries (in early
2017) one of the authors I have quoted most frequently has been my friend and
mentor, Dr. Paul Gottfried. Along with Pat Buchanan, Ilana Mercer, “The
Dissident Mama,” Clyde Wilson, Jack Kerwick, and a few others, Professor Gottfried’s
occasional pieces (and his always on-target commentary at Chronicles magazine where he is editor-in-chief) make him one of
the most—if not the most—perceptive of
writers currently defending the heritage of Western civilization against the cultural
barbarians now inside the gates and now on the verge of ending our two
millennia-old inheritance once and for all.
What is fascinating is that the observations he has made in
early 2021 would have been generally considered unexceptional, completely
within the standard canon of scholarship and discussion as late as thirty years
ago. But how the times have changed! What was considered normative and reasonable
back then is now dogmatically denounced by “woke” academia and the media—including
much of “conservative” media—as “right wing extremist” or “white supremacist”
or “racist.” Increasingly we cannot,
even with the utmost detachment and care, challenge the shibboleths of the
Progressivists who now run rampant like crazed Banshees in our culture, totally dominate our
educational system, operate the media as a private fiefdom, and cajole practically
all politicians to do their will, without bringing down upon ourselves the ire
and severe punishment of the Establishment. And that “punishment” includes
routinely banning from all social media, job firing, destruction of a person’s
reputation, harassment at work and at home, and increasingly demands that anyone
who dissents, anyone who openly supported Donald Trump, be considered a
potential “domestic terrorist.”
Gottfried stands stoutly and fearlessly against that mindless “woke”
hysteria and continues to write and publish commentaries that draw from the wellsprings
of our Western culture.
I pass on today two recent essays which he published. The
first one is a piece written immediately after the January 6 events at the
Capitol in Washington DC. Unlike so many of our “conservative” leaders,
Professor Gottfried does not wring his hands, do a “Jimmy Swaggart,” and get
down on his knees and beg the DC Elites for forgiveness and apologize abjectly for
everything that we “Deplorables” supposedly have done. Instead, he pinpoints
the utter hypocrisy of not only the Left but also of establishment
conservatives and the GOP, who in effect serve essentially as enablers for
the always-advancing Left.
The words of the post-War Between the States Southern author
Robert Lewis Dabney on the “conservatism” of his day, penned 140 years ago, are
entirely apposite here:
“American
conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward
towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always
advances near its leader…. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of
expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing
serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly
of martyrdom.”
Professor
Gottfried will have none of it.
The second essay examines
the broadened use of the accusations of “racism” and “white supremacy” to
explain how some non-whites (shall we call them “Uncle Toms?”) share in the
guilt that the rest of us share. Some on the Left have begun to employ the concept
of “multiracial whiteness” to explain this, indeed that “whiteness” as a
societal evil goes beyond skin color. It signifies a supremacist attitude which
“dehumanizes” and discriminates against others—the “oppressed”—in society. And is
essentially a political tactic which uses race to its advantage.
Ashamed of What?
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/08/ashamed-of-what/
Let’s stop fixating on
Wednesday’s events. We can deplore them once the Left repents of its far, far
greater sins.
By Paul Gottfried January 8, 2021
People ask me if I feel
“ashamed” about what Miranda Devine describes as “the clueless insurrection” in the Capitol on Wednesday.
My response? I am about as ashamed as Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)
and Juan Williams of Fox News were about the riots and shootings that the
Democratic Party subsidized and even justified last summer.
Unlike those violent riots,
which the Democrats and national media attributed to white racism, and which
came from Democratic voters, the turmoil in the Capitol on Wednesday did not
result in burning and looting. There were no white or black policemen shot and
the only shooting victim (which the media don’t seem to care about since white
Republican lives don’t matter) was a female protestor, Air Force veteran Ashli
Babbitt, by a Capitol police officer.
I also heard our Democratic
constitutional expert on Fox News, Jonathan Turley, telling us Wednesday
evening that pro-Trump thugs had “lost their faith” in our constitutional system. It was for this reason that
they “desecrated” our sacred space. I don’t recall similar talk about
desecration when the “peaceful protesters” tried to burn down St. John’s
Episcopal Church across from the White House last summer.
Of course, there was a storm of
media abuse afterwards when President Trump spoke before the historical site
that had been saved from “peaceful protestors.” Nor do I remember anything more
than whispered protest, even on Fox News, when the Democratic Party got howling
banshees to invade
the Senate chamber to
protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice and to
hassle his supporters. It seems that there are big-time desecrations, for
example, when people with MAGA hats commit them, and then there are the
entirely excusable ones that transpire when feminist Democrats invade the
sacred precinct.
No, I am not giving a stamp of
approval to what occurred in the Capitol. On balance, the actions by pro-Trump
forces were not particularly useful for our side, and the death of the lady
veteran was nothing short of disastrous. But let’s not pretend, like Rod Dreher, John Podhoretz, George
Will, Erick Erickson, and most
of the usual suspects that Wednesday’s occupation of the Capitol after an
impulsive speech by the president was a horrible black mark on the Right.
According to these media
celebrities, we should be impeaching Trump right now, less than two
weeks before the presidency falls to a corrupt, senile political hack, on its
way to being turned over to Kamala Harris. We have a duty to punish our side
because unlike the other side, we should be especially virtuous and shun any
conflict, except of course with the American Right. Erickson went so far as to
call on the police to “shoot the protestors.”
I must also take exception with
Miranda Devine, who asserts that Trump’s supporters and Trump himself have now
given the Left “a free pass to persecute their ideological enemies while
enacting their pet cultural Marxist projects and changing this country
irrevocably for the worst.” This is inevitably just what the one-party Left
will do, but not because of what happened Wednesday.
Devine also provides the real
reason—namely, that the Senate is now “in Democratic control, thanks to
Tuesday’s runoff debacle.” Because of the vote counting in that race, which
looked every bit as suspect as what occurred in the same state in November, our
wacky cultural Marxist Left will soon be able to do what it wants with the
federal government. The media will cover for any outrage this Left unleashes,
and Conservatism, Inc. will predictably do its part as gatekeeper for the
politically correct Right.
What happened Wednesday is
comparable to the way other would-be totalitarians take over. They manufacture
crises that justify their unchecked power. The Nazi regime used the attempted
burning of the Reichstag in March 1933 to marginalize opposition. If a
Reichstag fire had not come along, some other pretext would have been devised
to justify the Third Reich’s tightening grip. The Left, once in charge of the
federal government, will unroll with media cooperation multiple examples of
“prejudice” and “discrimination” that it will then proceed to address—e.g.,
imposed gender roles at birth, distinctions between citizens and illegal aliens
(read: future Democratic voters), and the unsettling effects of gender-specific
pronouns. There will also be more lockdowns, probably long after the COVID-19
infection rate plummets because of the vaccine, and green deals in
abundance.
None of this will happen
because of what overly combative Trump demonstrators did Wednesday. It will
take place because the Left is maniacal and power-driven and those on the other
side are led by wusses and nonstop apologists. But let’s stop fixating on
Wednesday’s events. We can deplore them once the Left repents of its far, far
greater sins.
=====================================================================================
‘Multiracial
Whiteness’ Is the Latest Leftist Branding Iron
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/multiracial-whiteness-is-the-latest-leftist-branding-iron/
“White nationalist” and “white
supremacist” serve the same function in our denatured republic as “running dog
of capitalism” did in Maoist China or “parasitic capitalist” did in the Third
Reich.
By Paul Gottfried January 26, 2021
Fraser
Myers recently asked at Spiked how blacks and Latinos
could vote for Donald Trump and in some cases enthusiastically join
demonstrations for him, given the supposedly obvious fact that that Trump is a
white supremacist. According to Myers, New York University professor Cristina
Beltrán answered this troubling question in the Washington Post in
a memorable gloss on “whiteness”:
Whiteness is the politics of aggression, exclusion, and
domination. And multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of
whiteness as a political colour and not simply a racial identity. It is a
‘discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are
produced through the persecution and dehumanisation of others.’
And
so now we understand. “Whiteness,” or what Beltrán elsewhere designates as
“multiracial whiteness,” does not refer exclusively to Caucasians as opposed to
black people or to some other race. It is holding a “discriminatory worldview”
that causes someone to engage in the “dehumanization” of others. This may be
what President Biden (or his speechwriter) had in mind when he went after
“white nationalists” but conveniently forgot to mention Black Lives Matter and
Antifa as persistent hellraisers. And white supremacists are people we should
ostracize and strip of their rights because they practice dehumanization.
Moreover, the disease of “whiteness” has befallen nonwhites as well as
biological whites, and we would do well to reeducate these bigoted nonwhites,
particularly the ones who wore MAGA hats and voted for Trump.
Allow
me to make another point that may strike some readers as strange. The main
struggle in which we are now engaged as a society and civilization has little
to do with race. Blacks, like Muslims in Europe, have an assigned function that
comes from those higher up in the food chain. Their job is to aid the cultural
Left as an auxiliary force. They are there to help predominantly white elites
crush and humiliate other whites, a.k.a. the Deplorables or les Ploucs in
France. Therefore, minority members who misbehave should be severely
disciplined, lest others in their ranks insist on their own thoughts.
This
is not to say that those minority groups recruited by the Left don’t have
issues, e.g., dysfunctional societies, unjustified or exaggerated resentments
against police, or atavistic tribal prejudices. As the young West Indian
economist Lipton Matthews points out on the Chronicles blog,
a black upper class controls the black underclass by engaging shamelessly in
race hustling. There is a gaping financial disparity between these race
hustlers and those whom they manipulate, and so the attacks on whites launched
by such notables as U.S. Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Reverend
Al Sharpton may be intended to hide an otherwise embarrassing truth.
But
such problems are not the main causes for the upheaval in our society or the
disintegration of civilizational norms. Even if all the radicalized minorities
departed, we would still be faced with the challenge of affluent, and
influential whites who are promoting and paying for the derailment in progress.
The usual suspects would go on causing mischief, including the financing of
rioters, unless we found some way of replacing them or drastically limiting
their influence.
The
focus on critical race theory is not really meant to make blacks feel good
about themselves. It is an enterprise pushed by those whites who run our
cultural and educational institutions. It is designed to degrade other whites,
whom our leaders profoundly despise. The same is true for the pulling down of
monuments, starting with Confederate Memorial statues and then going on to
those of Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Jesus, and so on. This too is being
done to humiliate ordinary, patriotic, God-fearing Americans, and white vandals
are often on the forefront of the destruction.
The
cat is finally out of the bag about the identity of supposed “white
supremacists.” We are not speaking here about white people who set out to do
harm to nonwhites. We are describing those whom financially secure leftists are
out to debase and ruin. And they don’t have to be white to become targets of
these leftists, since “whiteness” is not primarily about skin color. It refers
to those whom the powerful classify as “dehumanizers,” and therefore set out to
dehumanize. Terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” serve the
same function in our denatured republic as “running dog of capitalism” did in
Maoist China or “parasitic capitalist” did in the Third Reich. They are terms
that the powerful apply to those whom they deem enemies of their “unified”
regime.
Presumably,
Joe Biden in his newest incarnation opposes “whiteness” in the same way as
Professor Beltrán and Spiked. This branding iron is reserved for
the opponents of an advancing leftist agenda. And this new form of denigration
couldn’t have come at a better time, or so our rulers might imagine. Since
American whites have been beleaguered with talk about white privilege and
systemic racism, it may be easy to frighten them into submission by condemning
them as white supremacists. Members of other races will naturally avoid contact
with carriers of the whiteness bacillus, which has now spread even to
nonwhites. Beltrán’s “multiracial whiteness” will soon find a place in the
rhetoric of our socially radical rulers.
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