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The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1914)
Deconstruction: I Know How to Do It Too
Alex Kurtagic
December 4,
2009
I recently came across an article published by Racism Review where MSU
“sociologist”, Matthew Hughey, citing no sources,
alleged that the early English puritans enslaved the local Indians. His article was an exercise in
historical revisionism, which aimed to deconstruct the trendy multiculturalist
reading of the Thanksgiving celebration, not in order to restore truth to
popular conceptions, but in order to further delegitimize historical White
claims to the United States. He proposed that, because the early Puritans either
viciously shot the local Indians, or wickedly enslaved them, Thanksgiving should
be abolished and replaced by a national Day of Mourning, involving “fasting
and/or service to the homeless and hungry.”
Now, I am not American, but were I not already well educated in the fatuous and
risible mentality of the crazies and haters that comprise today’s academic
oligarchy, I would be so exasperated by Hughey’s propagandistic garbage I would
not know what to do with myself. How could a nation predicate itself on guilt
and mourning without eventually committing suicide? Except, that is what
precisely this Hughey character wants: He wants to destroy in order to
rebuild along communistic lines, thus
bequeathing us an America in which Whites are permanently on their knees,
weeping, ashamed, mortified, mentally, morally, and physically enslaved.
What the likes of Hughey do not realize is that we too know how to deconstruct.
After all, they trained us at university. I am not going to waste my time on
defensive arguments, reacting against Hughey’s ludicrous academic buffoonery.
Instead, I am going to do some deconstructing of my own.
Critical Reader
Not long ago I received a rare critical email reacting to an article of mine published by Vdare.com back in June which dealt with the issue of ancestral birthrights. I had protested in the article that, as the British Empire retreated from its former colonies and became simply the United Kingdom, it forgot about its former subjects and left them stranded in jurisdictions controlled by hostile non-European majorities. As a result, the descendants of former subjects have nowadays to negotiate a tortuous and nonsensical bureaucratic maze in order to bring their citizenship into harmony with their heritage, while those without any blood-ties to the United Kingdom or Europe, can obtain citizenship here without half the trouble.
Of course, as we learnt not too long ago (despite the BBC’s deliberate efforts to suppress it), this lack of trouble is partly the result of a criminal conspiracy concocted by Tony Blair’s corrupt Labour government, which sought to neutralize their political opponents by swamping the United Kingdom with immigrants from the Third World, and thus relaxed immigration controls in order to make multiculturalism irreversible and give themselves a permanent electoral majority. Yet, the fact remains that a retreat from colonialism ought to have been accompanied with legal provisions for the descendants of former subjects who were left stranded in what has since become a foreign country. In a sane world, the former Empire ought to have made it easy for the people who made the empire function to return to their ancestral motherland in the event that they wished to or needed to.
My critic appeared to resent the fact that many had, notwithstanding the legal difficulties, done so, and concluded with the sentence: “I appreciate you do not feel that South Africa is your country anymore but was it ever....”
Never mind that my critic somehow assumed that I am South African (I am not; I
have never set foot in that country). And never mind that my critic was probably
motivated by a sense of grievance. Her statement deserves a reply, for it goes
to the core of the post-imperial problem — which comprises, not only countries
like South Africa, but also any former European colony, including the United
States. The consensus among the liberal oligarchy is that Europeans never had a
legitimate claim to their former colonial territories. Therefore, the question
regarding South Africa (and by extension any other such former colony) needs to
be answered: Whose country was it, anyway?
Postcolonial Theory
Let us address the legitimacy of White South Africans. My critic seemed to hold
the view that, because the Blacks were there first and are more numerous, South
Africa is theirs. This view necessarily relies on the belief that South Africa
is simply land: Only then can it follow that those who first established
permanent residence there or are more numerous have a legitimate claim to it,
while those who came later and / or are less numerous do not.
First of all, my critic’s view regards the Blacks as a single, homogeneous
category. This is convenient, for it enables those with an animus against Whites
(and, sadly, this includes many Whites) to argue that, since nearly 80% of South
Africans are Black, a White minority “stole” the land from a Black “indigenous”
majority.
The truth is, of course, rather more complicated: The Black majority is comprised of no less than 9 ethnic groups: Zulu, Xhosa, Basotho, Bapedi, Venda, Tswana, Tsonga, Swazi, and Ndebele. All of these speak Bantu languages. A linguistic map shows that the corresponding language zones are concentrated on the East half of South Africa — the West is dominated by Afrikaans. The Bantu peoples, however, are not indigenous to South Africa: They, in fact, originated in what is now known as Cameroon and are recent arrivals, having entered South Africa in the 4th century.
The original inhabitants are a tenth ethnic group, the Khoi-San, which is lumped
with various mixed peoples under the category “coloured”, and which is itself
comprised of not one people but two: the Khoikhoi (known as Hottentots by
Europeans) and the San (known as Bushmen). The Khoikhoi, who are a pastoral
people, originated in northern Botswana and occupied the region in the 1st
century; they have mostly disappeared. The San, who are hunter-gatherers,
occupied the region much earlier, arriving at the Waterberg Massif 10–22,000
years ago.
The Khoikhoi and the San intermarried, but maintained distinct cultures. They
were rivals, of course, and the word “San” means “outsider”, a pejorative term
applied by the Khoikhoi to the bushmen to distinguish them from what the
Khoikhoi called themselves: “first people.” There are presently only 10,000 San.
In the 4th century, the Khoi-San were displaced by the Bantu people,
who were more advanced: In addition to herding, they also knew iron and
agriculture; this gave them an advantage.
Who, then, has the more legitimate claim to South Africa? The San or the
Bantu-derived peoples?
If the former, then South Africa would once again have a small,
ethnically-distinct minority ruling a majority — a majority of 50 million
people. If the latter, then it gets even more complicated, because only three
out of the nine peoples comprising that group — the Zulu, Xhosa, and Bapedi —
are unique to South Africa; the rest are distributed across borders with
neighboring countries. And the most numerous of those three, the Zulu, are
outnumbered 5 to 1 by the rest of the population. Ultimately, given the patterns
of migration, displacement, and conquest in the region during the past two
millennia, what belongs to whom comes down to which is the more powerful ethnic
group, not to who was there before or who is in the majority.
Secondly, what we know as South Africa today is not simply a land area: It is a
legal entity that includes infrastructure, bureaucracies, and institutions. The
latter were not always there, and they certainly did not exist before Europeans
settled in the region: what they encountered upon arrival were prehistorical
tribes.
Moreover, what we know as South Africa came into existence through the
progressive annexation of numerous smaller states, the land for which, when it
was inhabited, was either sold or given to Europeans by local chiefs in exchange
for military assistance in the effort to defeat their rivals. The land for Klein
Vrystaat, for example, was bought from Swazi King Mbandzeni in 1886. The land
for the Nieuwe Republiek was given by Dinuzulu to Boer and British mercenaries
in 1884 in exchange for the latter having helped him defeat his rival, Usibepu,
in the battle for succession to the Zulu throne. The land for Stellaland was
given to Europeans by Mankoroane after the former volunteered to help him defeat
another chief. The State of Goshem was formed in 1882 with the approval of the
chief Moshette. Griqualand was formed in 1870: The Griqua people are a
crossbreed between Europeans and Khoikhoi. It goes on and on.
From this perspective, Europeans who settled there have a legitimate claim to
South Africa, as they not only paid for it with their money and their blood, but
they also paid for it again by investing their time, their energy, their
know-how, and their creativity in building the country into the most powerful
state in the region.
Had Europeans never settled there, South Africa would not exist: Instead, there would be virgin landscape and a sparse population of prehistorical tribes of hunter-gatherers and subsistence herders and farmers; the resulting map (and this would have to be drawn by Europeans) would contain numerous, small, and unevenly distributed colored blotches, representing a constellation of ethnic groups, of different provenance, of wildly different lengths of residence, with no fixed borders, no agreed names, no common language, and in a constant state of flux, as the various tribes displaced, conquered, or annihilated each other.
Language Map of South Africa
The only real South Africans, therefore, have European origins.
Bloody Foreigners
My critic also seems to hold the view that White South Africans are hypocrites:
happy to live down there while the going was good, but quick to get out and
suddenly remember their ancestral birthrights the moment things got tough. This
view appears confused.
Before 1961 White South Africans born in the dominion were British subjects; and
before 1949 White South Africans born there were British citizens. When South
Africa became a republic in 1961, this change of status was enacted against the
wishes of nearly half of those who voted in the Referendum of 1960. And
certainly this did not take into account the views of those who were not old
enough to vote in 1960, many of whom have since 1994 probably formed a negative
opinion of what was done over their heads by the politicians in their country.
Therefore, it is not fair to characterize White South Africans as foreigners
with a dubious claim to British citizenship, as my critic appears to do. From a
legalistic position, certainly those who migrated to South Africa prior to 1949
never left the motherland, while those who migrated there before 1960 were still
inside one of the motherland’s outposts.
Also, it was the South African government of the day, and not the ordinary White
South Africans, who eventually decided to hand over the whole of the country to
the Bantu Blacks — another group of relative newcomers, as we have already seen.
White South Africans were told by their politicians to “adapt or die” — words
that now seem rather ironic, in view of what has happened to them since 1994.
My critic may want to argue that these White South Africans could have mounted
stronger opposition to their government, and that, since they failed to do so,
even though their government was actively working against their interests, and
giving away the country that they and their ancestors created, they deserved
their fate. After all, were we to do the same here, as many of our number are
already doing and have been for some time, it would be fair to accuse us of
surrendering our birthright. Given their careers, we certainly cannot consider
the Ted Kennedys of this world as having a legitimate claim to be citizens of
the country that they worked so diligently to destroy. And one speculates
whether the Blacks have similarly harsh thoughts about some of their past
chiefs.
Yet, in our case it would not be fair perhaps to lump all South Africans in this
category: Many were engaged in opposition, while others may have been ignorant,
naïve, or misinformed — the same way that many among us are today because our
predecessors ceded control of the media and academia, and because they took no
interest in politics. At most we can accuse them of being neglectful of their
duties as citizens. But we can only hope that those who were and have since
reclaimed their ancestral birthright will join us in the effort to prevent our
politicians from giving away the ancient motherland as well.
As to the Whites residing in the United States in 1776, their situation was
undoubtedly better that those of the Englishmen in South Africa in 1994, in
that, when the British Empire relinquished its thirteen colonies, the US became
a jurisdiction controlled by a White majority, similar to that which had
previously controlled it from across the ocean.
The situation in 2009 is much changed from that of 1776, however. White Americans are rapidly approaching the point where, by a process similar to that which took place in South Africa, they will find themselves in a jurisdiction controlled by a hostile majority — one that regards them as foreign invaders with no legitimate claim to US territory. If not ridiculed, attacked, and stigmatized, malevolent and dishonest pseudoscholarship like Hughey’s will contribute to make that a reality.
Alex Kurtagic
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Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Kurtagic-Deconstruction.html
