BLMania And The New Progressive Faith

07/29/2020

Earlier: Anti-Racism As A Religion and JOHN DERBYSHIRE: I Will Not Genuflect To This Church Of Antiracism

[Crossposted from American Renaissance]

Feelings don’t care about facts. The mass hysteria that’s gripped the Western world after the death of George Floyd can’t be explained in rational terms. Police are shooting fewer unarmed black men each year, and most of the shootings are justified. Police are more likely to shoot a non-threatening white than a non-threatening black. In the Floyd case specifically, there’s nothing that shows racial bias by police officers, and Floyd was on drugs and resisting arrest. Minneapolis police procedure allowed neck pressure in some circumstances. Former police officer Derek Chauvin’s conduct wasn’t extraordinary. But the facts are almost irrelevant. We’re dealing with faith, religious ecstasy. We’re in the midst of BLMania.

Collective frenzies aren’t new. Almost every American knows about the Salem witch trials, during which Christians claimed they saw demons and devils. Evil had to be rooted out, whatever the cost. Arthur Miller’s fictional re-telling in The Crucible, originally meant to criticize McCarthyism, now reads like a satire of SJWs.

In 1536, Anabaptists took over Münster, Germany, and tried to establish a divine kingdom. Would-be prophet Jan Matthys cannot have been a charlatan; he must have believed he was chosen by God, because he rode out almost by himself to attack a besieging army. He was instantly killed, but that didn’t shake the faith of his followers. In 1917, hundreds of people in Fátima, Portugal, claimed they saw the sun dance in the sky. The Catholic Church, which often debunks alleged visions and miracles, declared this “worthy of belief.”

Still, because of the doctrine of Original Sin and man’s fallen nature, Christians are reminded not to “immanentize the eschaton” and seek heaven on earth. If Christians are delusional, can go only so far. “Secular” movements have no such restraints. During the last century, tens of millions were butchered in Russia, China, Cambodia, and other places in the name of the Brotherhood of Man, with the revolutionaries often creating cults of personality to replace older faiths and heroes. The Revolutionary Communist Party, which can be found burning American flags around the country, has its own cult of personality around leader Bob Avakian.

During the French Revolution, a “Cult of Reason” was established, with Robespierre as high priest. Busts of the assassinated revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat replaced crucifixes in some churches. During the Spanish Civil War, anarchists burned churches, shot at statues of Jesus, murdered clergy, and desecrated the dead to pave the way for a new order. The Communards executed Archbishop Georges Darboy during the Paris Commune and destroyed the original Vendôme Column because it glorified empire. The famous French protests of May 1968, which strongly influenced the current intellectual climate, had a utopian, religious flavor. Would-be revolutionaries destroyed property as they spray-painted the following slogans:

It is forbidden to forbid
Enjoy without hindrance
Be realistic, ask the impossible.

Ann Coulter analyzed mobs in her 2011 book Demonic. She heavily cited Gustave Le Bon’s famous 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Miss Coulter said a mob is “an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group” and is “intoxicated by messianic goals.” One chapter is called “Imaginary Violence From the Right Vs. Actual Violence From The Left.” This is especially prescient. CHAZ/CHOP “security” in Seattle murdered a black teenager and wounded another because they thought right-wing paramilitaries would attack any second (no one has been arrested for these shootings). As cities burn, NBC reports that “an expert” thinks the real threat is “far right” violence.

The “messianic goal” Miss Coulter wrote of is human equality. The premise is that if existing social institutions are removed, a natural and authentic human equality will emerge. Even the past must be destroyed to make this possible. The French Revolution remade the calendar, with 1792 as Year Zero. All culture and history from the past was irrelevant because everything was to be built anew. Rousseau famously wrote that “man is born free and everywhere is in chains.” This comes from assuming that man is a blank slate and that people are born equal. If there is inequality, it can only be because of unjust institutions or exploitative social forces.

Who is the boogeyman? Many once believed it was the Church: Voltaire’s “infme.” Some blamed kings; Jefferson’s post-revolutionary writings show paranoia about “monarchial” tendencies. Many believe capitalism is the enemy, but I’d argue that most progressives today believe the fundamental problem is “whiteness.”

What is whiteness? Psychology Today says it’s “an unfairly privileged exclusionary category, based on physical features, most notably a lack of melanin.” Many others who study “whiteness” say something similar. Whiteness is a social construct used to justify domination, slavery, and economic exploitation today.

There are three obvious objections to this.

First, it assumes that race is a social construct, not a biological reality.
Second, it assumes that all whites benefit from being part of a dominant political, cultural, and economic force. This is clearly not true.
Third, it assumes that those with power use white racism to exercise privilege. However, almost every powerful corporation openly supports Black Lives Matter and opposes white racial consciousness. Though “whiteness as property” is a common theme in “whiteness studies,” there are benefits to being labeled non-white, which is why some whites fake their racial identity and some groups organize politically so the government won’t call them white.

“Whiteness” has become the explanation for all “the evils of the modern world.”

Critical race theorists are right to say that “whiteness” is socially constructed; what they fail to understand is that they created its modern meaning.

Most race realists, Identitarians, and white advocates know Susan Sontag’s quote that the “white race is the cancer of human history.” She also said America, which is “the culmination of Western white civilization,” is guilty of causing global suffering. The full context is even more revealing: “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.”

In this sentence, she concedes three things that would be politically incorrect today. First, Western civilization is white civilization. Second, despite the pathetic claims of some journalists and academics, Sontag recognized that white civilization isn’t simply built on domination of non-whites, and that it has produced things of great value. Third, Sontag admits that some (if not all) progressive accomplishments such as “the emancipation of women” are products of “this particular civilization.” “Morgoth’s Review” made this same point, noting that when progressives try to destroy “whiteness,” they are dynamiting the foundations of their own liberal, universal worldview.

However, Sontag still thought white civilization was irredeemable because it “eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads” and threatens the planet. Whiteness wasn’t cancer just because it was bad. Sontag meant that whiteness, like cancer, grows, metastasizes, and consumes. It never seemed to occur to Sontag that this universalizing, homogenizing force “eradicated” authentic European cultures too. If “Western culture” is Netflix, Amazon, and Hollywood, I’m with the Third World anti-imperialists.

Still, at least Sontag recognized that whites had a real culture, at least in the past. Her intellectual successors are worse. They accepted her view the whiteness is cancer while denying any value to our culture and our standards. Instead, “Whiteness Studies” and “Critical Race Theory” criticize “white” civilization because of its standards. The National Museum of African American History and Culture identifies objective, rational linear thinking, cause and effect relationships, and hard work to be “whiteness” and therefore “racist.” Everything can therefore be “racist” or in need of “decolonization,” including math, grammar, grades, SAT and ACT tests, bar exams, and artificial intelligence.

This ends in denying truth itself. Claire Lehmann found a slide at an education conference in Washington that said that “if you conclude that outcomes differences [sic] by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.” Actually, bigotry is “obstinate or intolerant devotion to one’s own opinions and prejudices.” We’ve now come full circle, and define bigotry as not being bound by opinions and prejudices. The way many academics and journalists talk about whiteness is worse than anything Susan Sontag said.

This is the thinking of a fanatic religious sect, like the one Jim Jones led. “We were too good for this world,” Jones said before the infamous mass suicide. While progressives haven’t yet gone that far, they clearly enjoy the feeling of “woke” moral righteousness, which has replaced the sense of being “elect” that some Protestant sects once provided. Much as the French revolutionaries replaced saints with Jacobins during the Terror, today’s woke disciples are creating their own saints, with “Big George” Floyd taking the place of Christ. Insufficient adulation for Floyd cost one priest his job. BLMania is even consuming the churches themselves.

Black Lives Matter is more sacred than the American flag or Christ. Federal agents, police, military, athletes, politicians, and many others all genuflect before BLM. Many would never bow before God. This new, powerful faith even has a liturgical calendar and a hymn built on a sacred myth.

Tonight in Portland everyone is singing a lullaby-style “Hands Up Please Don’t Shoot Me” song pic.twitter.com/fKnLNev90v
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) July 24, 2020

Worse, because this creed is impervious to truth, it must always seek new scapegoats (or devils) for egalitarianism’s continuing failure. Despite the constant funding, programs, and repression, equality never arrives. The late Lawrence Auster’s “First Law of Majority/Minority Relations In Liberal Society” holds that “the more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group’s bad behavior.” Likewise, the more blacks fail, the more fictional portrayals of black superiority must be created, from Black Panther to Black Is King. And the more whites give, the more fiercely they must be accused of bigotry for wanting good schools, classical music, or even video games left alone.

The egalitarian revolution is a Permanent Revolution. BLMania will constantly devour its children. It will continue until it is stopped by superior power. Even Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility and high priestess of the Anti-Racist Church of the Damned, is no longer pure enough.

“Linguist John McWhorter Says ‘White Fragility’ Is Condescending Toward Black People,” NPR, July 20, 2020
“White Fragility is real. But ‘White Fragility’ is flawed,” Washington Post, June 18, 2020
“Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?” by Jonathan Chait, July 16, 2020

The late Noel Ignatiev, editor of Race Traitor, famously said that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” However, he said that this wasn’t a call to violence against whites. “When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin,” he said. “We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category.” I question this. If I cited Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People to deconstruct Jewish identity, religious claims, and Israel, one might rightly suspect I had an anti-Jewish motive.

Still, let’s assume Ignatiev was sincere. Could we “abolish the social meaning of skin color” today? Skin color is more important as a social category than at any other time in decades. Those with power may say whites are just a “social construct,” but they have no trouble telling who is white and who is not when it comes to affirmative action. The media view almost all economic, political, and cultural issues through a racial lens. Indeed, with a separate black “national anthem,” graduation ceremonies, and separate events for non-whites, we’re seeing the return of segregation. It may even be the beginning of America’s breakup along racial lines.

“Wokeness” holds that whites are racist no matter what we do. “White racism” is the new original sin. Fighting one’s own racism is a lifelong struggle — one that ultimately can’t be won. “Whiteness” is also responsible for great evil. If all whites are racist and “whiteness” is evil, isn’t it best just to eliminate whites? Some whites may even want to join this racial death drive, exhausted, ashamed, and despairing after decades of relentless anti-white propaganda. Even those whites who don’t want to surrender psychologically may see no hope, and become a “defeated and despairing race,” in Steve Sailer’s words.

This new faith even has holy sites and sacred rites. The site of George Floyd’s killing is now a shrine, with white activists declaring it “holy ground.” According to journalist Michael Tracey, the unwashed police generally do not enter this sanctum sanctorum.

At one BLM rally, white liberals literally flagellated themselves:

Woke white liberals get yelled at by Black Lives Matter for being too woke and engaging in self-flagellation. pic.twitter.com/xx5ZdfGat1
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 22, 2020

In Bethesda, Maryland, the white congregation repeated after its black priest:

[Tweet missing.]

And of course, the mantra-like chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” are familiar refrains:

Protestors have turned on their flashlights and are raising their phones as they chant “Black lives matter.” They then took a moment of silence. #portland #PortlandProtest #portlandoregon #oregon #portlandprotests #PortlandOR #oregon #PDXprotest #PDX #clypiancoverage pic.twitter.com/YweiP6SMia
— Clypian (@Clypian) July 25, 2020

What can we call this death-cult? Some leftists, including Ignatiev, called for “abolishing” the white race. It’s tempting to call it “Abolitionism.” However, this word is forever linked with (whites) ending slavery. Some leftists may eventually use the term, but it will never catch on. Still, it is useful because of its vivid history. Many 19th century abolitionists were not peaceful idealists but blood-crazed fanatics, who cloaked their dreams of war and slaughter in apocalyptic, Biblical language. John Brown, whose band began its infamous raid on Harpers Ferry by killing a free black man, is the primary example.

The creed’s violence, militancy, and destructiveness lead me to call it Eradicationism. Like some Christian sects, whites who embrace it want collectively to abandon the world, if not through suicide then by failing to reproduce. Instead of making the world better “for ourselves and our posterity,” they will expunge their blood guilt by ending their line. White Saviors share a curious mix of self-hatred and self-exaltation, something we see when white protesters post themselves indulging in BLMania online.

Eradicationism will be with us for some time. Regardless, our course is clear. Facts are important, but statistics don’t move mountains. Faith does. We must act with faith in victory, in service to a great ideal. Our Western tradition tells us to do our duty to uphold the cosmic order. This chaotic time will be an opportunity for racial rebirth. Steel yourself against this death cult that has hijacked our civilization. Reject BLMania. We were meant for something great. We shouldn’t fear this time of struggle, which is demonstrating what we’ve been warning of all along. We should welcome it. The American experiment in equality couldn’t have ended any other way.

Mr. Hood is a staff writer for American Renaissance. He has been active in conservative groups in the US. You can follow him on Gab and Telegram.

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