A Tweet from Britsh-American conservative author, Andrew Sullivan.
I’d have to agree. The idiots criticizing his Tweet are (deliberately) misunderstand it.
This is the thread he was responding to:
I understand Jesse Singal’s point. The last time that a group of white people in Europe rallied around a racial identity, they decided to wipe out everyone who was not part of that racial identity.
Furthermore, one of the problems I have with Robin DiAngelo and the Social Justice crowd and the term POC (people of color) in general is that it overlooks the fact that Europe has been a bloodbath of tribal conflicts every bit as much as Asia, Africa, or Pre-Columbian North and South America.
The Britsh looked down on the Irish since… forever. The Germans hated the Slavs and vice versa. The idea of all Europeans as “white people” is historical fiction and very new.
Trying to lump all white people together for modern political purposes is obscene. For example: the Scotch-Irish who came to the US to escape persecution in Europe found themselves discriminated against in the new country of the US by the descendants of the British who settled here first. They packed up and headed into Appalachia and were by-and-large, not slave owners. They were just too poor and lived on too poor a plot of land to require slave labor.
I’d add that unifying POC is just as historically fictitious. What does a child of a Chinese family who came here in the 1800’s have in common with a child who came here as a refugee from Maoist China? And what do they have in common with the child of a Japanese family who came here in the 1980’s during the Japanese economic boom? And what do they have in common with a black child who is the descendent of slaves, and what do all of them have in common with a child of African immigrants from Nigeria who came here in the 1990’s? What about the children of parents from India? The child of parents from the lowest caste who came here to escape persecution is very different from the child of parents from an upper caste who came here as educated professionals.
But Social Justice wants us all to believe that everyone who doesn’t have European ancestry has a common heritage of historical oppression in the US which was done to them by every one of European heritage, regardless of circumstances.
Trying to break the world down into White vs. POC is simple and simply evil.
This is why I do not believe that Sullivan’s point and Singal’s point are mutually exclusive.
Sullivan is correct, the Social Justice is constructing a narrative, not unlike the one that was used to justify two thousand years of oppression against the Jews, to justify hatred of white people.
The history of Jewish oppression in Europe, long before the concept of race was established, was that of the Jew as the Christ killer. All Jews bore that guilt and were regularly made to suffer for it.
The Social Justice equivalent is that of the white person as the universal oppressor. Regardless of the actions of individual white people, being white makes you a possessor of blood guilt called white privilege.
I’m not the only person to have noticed something like this.
Blood Guilt, Jewish or White, Is a Dangerous Lie
The myth that Jewish people in subsequent generations carried “blood-guilt” for Jesus’ death, for instance. That nonsensical claim got thousands of Jesus’ distant cousins killed, and millions driven into exile. The demands came from mobs that wanted to loot their stores, steal their homes, and trash their monuments. However often Christian leaders tried to counter that falsehood (and yes, they should have tried harder) mobs used it as a pretext to bully, rob, and murder. This blood libel on the Jews certainly helped prepare the way for the Holocaust.
Today, a more potent myth among Muslim zealots blames Israel for the dismal failures of Arab states. It calls Israel an “apartheid state” squatting on land where Jews never lived at all. (Archaeology be damned.) The same left-wing groups in the West that speak of “white privilege” also talk of “Jewish privilege.”
Now the overtly Marxist group Black Lives Matter demands that every American take a knee, and send it money. We aren’t allowed to question the crackpot, radical leftist program it calls for. If we won’t tear down every statue in America, dissolve the police, and abolish the nuclear family? Then we’re the equal of brutal cops. We bear the blood guilt of George Floyd, just as Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld bear the blood guilt for Jesus, in bigots’ minds. Question this blood-guilt theory, and you’re guilty too.
The big picture point that Sullivan was making is:
Identifying a group as collectively guilty of some past evil and using that as justification for collective punishment and oppression is the foundation of traditional antisemitism. It is also what is being done by Social Justice to white people. It is in this that anti-whiteness is similar to anti-semitism.
To use the format of the old SAT Analogy Questions:
Jews : the death of Jesus :: White People : slavery/colonialism
The evidence that Sullivan is correct abounds:
From this, the language that is used to attack white people bordering on the genocidal.
But the similarity between traditional anti-Semitism and anti-whiteness doesn’t end there.
Social Justice hates Jews, except for the useful idiot Leftist Jews, and only for as long as they are useful.
See, we Jews are evil because we’re Jews. But we’re more evil because we’re white. In fact, we are the zenith of evil because we’re super white, even whiter than regular white people in all the ways that matter.
Also, to argue that Israel is the only enthostate in existence is insane. Israel isn’t an ethnostate, but ignoring that, it’s clear he is unaware of the laws that protect Arabs in every Arab oil state (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Dubai) and how those countries import “lesser” Muslims (from places like Pakistan and Indonesia) as slave labor? Or perhaps the ethnostate of Japan, which doesn’t recognize people born in Japan but of non-Japanese heritage as full citizens. Or China which operates as a Han Chinese ethnostate.
But I digress…
Collective guilt and collective punishment, especially over a canard, is a hallmark of tyranny and fascism. It was employed against the Jews for thousands of years by anti-semites and is being employed now against white people by Social Justice activists.
Once upon a time Jews were driven out of their homes and murdered over the blood libel, the accusation that they killed a child to use their blood in to make Matzoh.
Today, white people can be canceled and fired for any accusation of racism, no matter how tenuous or even non-existent. What was the destruction of business and property during the George Floyd protests except a pogrom?
The parallels line up.
Moderate and conservative, well-intentioned white people are the new Jews.
We Jews have leveled up to super-hated status.
And in the halls of academia and Leftist media/activism, it’s 1934.
We know what comes next and it is going to suck.
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