“Hate” laws

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Jeremy Waldron, in the latest NYRB, has reviewed what looks to be a valuable book by Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the thought that we hate: A biography of the First Amendment. However, Waldron ends his review with a rather insidious plea concerning the legal restriction of public pronouncements about other races and ethnies. Here’s what he says (p. 44) [emphasis added]:

Lewis’s settled position, I think, is that we do better to swallow hard and tolerate ‘the thought that we hate’ than open ourselves to the dangers of state regulation. I am not convinced. The case is certainly not clear on either side, and Lewis acknowledges that. But it is worth remembering a couple of final points.

First, the issue is not thought that we hate, as though defenders of hate speech laws want to get inside people’s minds. The issue is publication and the harm done to individuals and groups through the disfiguring of our social environment by visible, public, and semi-permanent announcements to the effect that in the opinion of one group in the community, perhaps the majority, members of another group are not worthy of equal citizenship. The old idea of group libel — as opposed to hateful thoughts or hateful conversation — makes this clear, and it is no accident that a number of European countries still use that term.

Well, the term “libel” is a good one. But when applied to the libeling of a private individual, whose reputation has supposedly been unjustly tarnished, the libeler has to have made a false statement. If the statement turns out to be true, it is not libel. “Reputation” is a critical feature of social relations. It can take a long time to establish a good one and an instant to lose it. But when an accusation is valid, the person’s reputation deserves to be affected. The same holds for “group libel” when one calls attention to group differences (e.g., blacks have lower IQ) or mentions the activity of ethnic organizations (e.g., the role of the organized Jewish community in ending immigration policies that favored the European majority in the U.S.).

A court punishes a libeler via due process in which both the falsity and the harmful nature of the statement must be demonstrated to the court’s satisfaction. But truth is a perfectly adequate defense. If the truth is harmful or distasteful to a group, that’s just too bad, just as is the case for an individual. Of course, when people are interacting in good faith, there is no reason for not conveying the truth diplomatically and politely.

One must also consider the fact that to be consistent with principle, any law must apply equally to all parties. Therefore harsh criticisms of ‘whites’, ‘white society’, and ‘Western civilization’ would also have to be examined as potential cases of ‘hate speech’. In that case, would the words of Rev. Wright constitute an offense? Or those of the late literary darling of NY intellectuals, Susan Sontag, who retracted her remark that the white race is the cancer of human history by saying that it slandered cancer patients? To do otherwise would be to violate neutrality, one of the fundamental principles of, dare one say it, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ jurisprudence?

Waldron continues:

Secondly, the issue is not just our learning to tolerate thought that we hate — we the First Amendment lawyers, for example. The harm that expressions of racial hatred do is harm in the first instance to the groups who are denounced or bestialized in pamphlets, billboards, talk radio, and blogs. It is not harm — if I can put it bluntly — to the white liberals who find the racist invective distasteful. Maybe we should admire some lawyer who says he hates what the racist says but defends to the death his right to say it, but this sort of intellectual resilience is not what’s at issue. The question is about the direct targets of the abuse. Can their lives be led, can their children be brought up, can their hopes be maintained and their worst fears dispelled, in a social environment polluted by these materials? Those are the concerns that need to be answered when we defend the use of the First Amendment to strike down laws prohibiting the publication of racial hatred.

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Of course people may be offended, deeply hurt even, when members of other branches of humanity look down on them because of behaviors which are indeed widespread within the targeted group. But traditional Mormons (LDS) and Muslims really do sanction polygamy and many of these polygamous families are indeed on welfare. And the organized Jewish community is indeed the main force influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. We should be able to say these things even if those discussed are offended by such remarks.

This is something that Waldron and other racial apologists cannot accept and why his special pleading is insidious. Of course, Muslims who oppose polygamy and Jews who oppose the Israel lobby don’t deserve to be included as guilty of these actions. But they either have a moral imperative to control the perpetrators in their midst or, if that is not possible — as it usually is not — to dissociate themselves from them and their anti-social acts (as many members of many groups have).

Human cognitive systems are evolutionarily preprogrammed to attend to cues for danger and to avoid things that are disliked. Such stereotyping, when applied to other human groups, may not appeal to many people’s moral sense, but it is a form of generalization which is an invaluable and constant cognitive process for all humans — even when the stereotype does not apply to all members of the group.

Stereotypes are rules of thumb. When we are in an in-group, we tend to exaggerate the extent to which members of out-groups have negative traits. These perceptions are useful for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they make us cautious in dealing with members of the out-group. If I know that young black men are much more likely than whites or Asians to be street criminals, I would be well advised to keep a good distance from a young black man even when a particular black is not a criminal. “Better safe than sorry” is a good mammalian rule. Like it or not, our evolutionary history has been dictated by an eye toward survival, not canonization.

And if the information that young black men are much more likelyto be street criminals is useful in everyday life, then we should be able to state it without incurring the wrath of the thought police — even if it hurts the feelings of blacks.

Typically lost sight of is the fact that hate is a complex emotional/motivational mechanism that evolved as part of a defense system. If it were totally absent, our ancestors wouldn’t have lasted long in the face of the predatory humans of other tribes, ethnies, or races. Why? Because they wouldn’t have been motivated to defend themselves. Remember all those propaganda images from WWII. They promoted hatred toward stereotyped enemies.

Of course today’s politically correct dogma has pathologized “hate”, presumably on the grounds that there is no good reason to have negative stereotypes of certain targets, especially other races and ethnies. To the extent that we can know anything in the social sciences, this is simply untrue.

Often the people complaining most about negative stereotypes are quite prone, themselves, to stereotyping when it suits their interest (e.g., blacks blaming white “racists” and “hate mongers” for their own especially high black crime rate). And it is doubtless true that people do sometimes make mistakes and falsely accuse others (e.g., certain extreme varieties of “Holocaust Denial”). But the solution to that is to educate, inform and explain.

If  a public verbal attack on a group turns out to be malicious accusation where the accuser cannot back up his accusation with facts, then the accuser  might well be held accountable for “group libel,” even if the punishment is nothing more than hostile public opinion. For example, the loss of one’s job as a broadcaster for saying blacks have superior athletic ability because of breeding practices is certainly substantial punishment — especially since the essential notion (that racial differences in talents can arise through differential breeding) is true.  To go beyond that and enlist laws and tribunals of the state to penalize such speech, as a form of “group libel”, would absolutely require following the logic of libel for individuals: prove that the defendant intended to defame a whole group and not just some individuals within it and that what the defendant said was false. This won’t be easy since most people who hold negative views of out-groups probably genuinely believe whatever they may have expressed publicly.

Thus, if “group libel” is so difficult to prove, don’t mess with the First Amendment! The best solution, if ethnic or racial groups cannot seem to resolve their hostile opinions of each other, is that they simply live separately where they can’t get on each other’s nerves. As Steve Sailer says, “It’s what separate countries are for.”

Those tempted to take the anti-hate speech arguments seriously, might want to reflect on the words of Heinrich Himmler, quoted by Lothrop Stoddard who interviewed Heinrich Himmler in Germany back in 1939 and asked “Is any political opposition allowed?”

“What a person thinks is none of our concern,” shot back Himmler quickly.  “But when he acts upon his thoughts, perhaps to the point of starting a conspiracy, then we take action.  We believe in extinguishing a fire while it is still small.  It saves trouble and averts much damage.

Sounds like Waldron’s view of the First Amendment.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to the editor and Travis Woodson for their suggestions on the article.

Anthony Hilton is Associate Professor of Psychology (Ret.) at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Cooter Obama, George Obama: The Onion (Inadvertently?) Beats Real Life to the Punch

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The satirical newspaper The Onion, once a college campus mainstay out of Madison, Wisconsin that in recent years has moved its headquarters to New York for a more national reach, has a habit of creating spoofs that are one step ahead of reality.

Last week, it ran a pretty funny piece on “Cooter Obama,” Obama’s embarrassing half-brother.

Cooter Obama welcomes his brother’s supporters with a jug of “white lightning” before whipping up a steaming vat of flat-possum stew.

Now, it’s being reported by the UK’s Telegraph that the Italian Vanity Fair has found a real — and probably embarrassing — half-brother.  George Obama lives in a hut in Kenya, doesn’t seem to have an identifiable job, lives on a dollar a month, and describes himself as “good with his fists.”

Did Onion writers know something the rest of us didn’t?  Probably not.  Modern life can be so predictably ridiculous that satire is probably a more accurate forecaster than serious pundit divinations (think of the Mike Judge movie, Idiocracy).

Although in this case, the real half-brother might have taken the Onion by surprise, because the supposed comedy premise of “Cooter Obama” is that such a figure would be restricted to whites.  Political correctness restrains us from imagining an embarrassing black or African half-brother.

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The Onion was once more daring on racial issues, but its rise to prominence has tempered that.  For instance, the fake columnist “Amber Richardson,” known for such declarations as “My baby don’t want no medicine,” was originally black.  Now, “Amber Richardson” is depicted as a white woman with a bandana on her head.  (Caution: Rough language.)

It’s not as funny.

The Onion’s still pretty funny (personal favorite headline:  “New Crispy Snack Cracker to Ease Crushing Pain of Modern Life“), but one wonders if it would be funnier still if it were more willing to poke all of America’s sacred cows.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

The Nation-Destroying Naïveté of an American President

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The dullness of President Bush needs no expanding here.  Critics right, left, racial-nationalist and otherwise have weighed in the utter obtuseness of our Commander-in-Chief.

But a recent item from a New York Times’ reporter’s notebook reveals the stunning depths of that naïveté.

In it, Bush, visiting Jerusalem as part of his tribute to Israel’s 60th birthday, was surprised to learn that Arabs and Jews do not date each other.  “No dances?” he asked. The American ambassador, Richard H. Jones, had to step in and tell him, as the item says, that society there is “more conservative.”

Reflect on that for a minute.  The leader of the world’s superpower, currently occupying Iraq and other parts of the Middle East in a military venture that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, is so ignorant of even basic elements of ethnic hostility that he imagines Jews and Arabs, perhaps West Side Story-style, to be dancing giddily together and sneaking kisses under palm trees. Or … pick your musical.  Actually, West Side Story, a neat little bit of early Jewish “deracialization” propaganda, at least starts with the premise that whites and Hispanics don’t normally mix.

No wonder he’s easily controlled by Jewish advocates for Israel.  No wonder he doesn’t understand that you cannot turn Iraq into a democracy.  Of course, we didn’t really wonder about these things, but this anecdote is just too much.  What a dangerous, dangerous idiot this man is.

But not just a generally dangerous idiot — a man who, against every advice, belief and instinct of this website, does not understand that, truly, diversity is not our greatest strength.  We are not “all one race, the human race.”  We are a world of very different racial and ethnic groups, whose evolutionary course has made naturally hostile toward, and competitive with, each other.  No, Mr. Bush, we can’t all “just get along.”

Ah, but President Bush is the perfect product of years of steeping in minority racist advocacy, anti-white activity, and Jewish activism directed toward the deracination of whites against all others.  He probably does really believe that “race is just a skin color,” that ethnic and religio-ethnic conflict can be fixed with the right attitude, and that Mexicans are no different from white Americans, but for a darker shade.

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And behold the damage this has done, both to white Americans whose country is being dissolved with the help of his policies and beliefs, and to peoples around the world (save the Israelis) who suffer from American warfare.

The insistence of policy makers and political leaders throughout the West that racial and ethnic groups are fungible goods is probably the single most destructive idea of the 20th Century.  With the ascension of either Sen. McCain or Sen. Obama to the presidency, it will likely continue into the 21st.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

The White Elephants of Frank Rich

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Only for today’s mainstream media is something illegitimate by virtue of being all-white.  Needless to say, something that’s all-black or all-Hispanic is vivid, authentic and inspiring;  anything all-white is stultifying, boring and evil.

The New York Times’ Frank Rich, a Jewish liberal, complains Sunday that of the Republican Party’s 247 senators and representatives in the Congress, all are white.  This, Rich says, is “the elephant in the room of our politics” and is “rarely acknowledged”.  More on that in a second.

Rich’s piece begins with a lengthy and flaccid complaint that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the black supremacist preacher and spiritual mentor to Barack Obama, gets far more attention than the anti-Catholic and fanatically Christian Zionist Rev. John Hagee, who has endorsed John McCain and whose antics are also caught on YouTube. (Hagee’s anti-Catholic animosity seems directed at the Church for what he sees as the Church’s misbehavior against the Jews.)

It’s a sorry attempt at a comparison for reasons that are 1) almost too obvious to get into (McCain doesn’t go to Hagee’s church) and 2) blogged about already by countless liberals.  It makes you wonder what justifies Frank Rich’s paycheck.

The piece winds through to Rich’s point, which is that the racial discord among Democrats revealed by the Clinton-Obama contest is better than the racial unity of Republicans.  Naturally, because that unity is white, it’s something to be ashamed of, “racial dysfunction in their own house.”

(Whiteness as inherently “dysfunctional” is a favorite and sadly unchallenged theme of the liberals, the left, Jewish activists and other anti-white operatives.  Conservatives are always on the run against this charge.  Never do they confront it by asking what’s wrong with being part of a predominately white group.)

Rich takes the standard MSM tack here, demanding to know why there aren’t blacks and Hispanics among GOP ranks, and assuming that anything not graced with their presence must be flawed.  But he’s wrong to say that Republican whiteness is “rarely acknowledged”;  in fact, Howard Dean has done just that, and it seems unlikely that many even casual observers of American politics would guess that the Republican Party is a black stronghold.  Rich seems not to get that it’s “rarely acknowledged” in the specific because it’s so relentlessly acknowledged in the general:  Our entire media is geared toward the idea that white is bad, anything else is good.

Rich concludes, “anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades.  Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.”

Frank is on the precipice of truth here, but we know he isn’t going to jump.  Yes, America is plunging toward a white minority.  Yet to Frank, this is a good thing, and whites should prepare by learning to genuflect to new minority power.  To white advocates, it does not bode well.

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And yes, there isn’t any candid conversation on race.  But what Rich means by “candid” is whites rending their garments over their collective guilt and shame and speaking frankly about what goodies should be doled out to other racial groups.  What white advocates mean by “candid” is an acknowledgement of inherent racial differences, the unworkability of racial integration, and the legitimacy of white unity and political power.

Ultimately, the real elephant in the room isn’t the evil of white dominance.  It’s the reality of racial differences.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

More on the “W-Word”

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Greg Johnson’s “The ‘W-Word” makes the point that Hillary Clinton is now actually resisting white dispossession — to the extent that it is her own dispossession — the only way possible by appealing to a latent but real white racial consciousness and solidarity.

There is a certain irony to this situation, which we could enjoy more fully if our own interests were not the victim of the whole process. The Clintons assumed this election would be a cakewalk, and in their minds already saw themselves living another eight years in the White House. They took their victory so much for granted that they were not concerned when Florida and Michigan were disqualified.

Then this mulatto comes along and actually has the nerve to become a serious competitor, and then a real threat, and finally he upsets the whole apple cart. The Clintons figured the black vote was also theirs and never imagined until the last few months that something like this could happen.

The Clinton’s racial liberalism has now become nothing more than ballast, useless weight, or even a drag, which is being jettisoned to attract as many of the voters, i.e., white democratic voters, that they can get, as the black vote is not really in play for them. So Barack Obama — he whose very name increases the surreal feel of the whole all-too-real scene — has been racking up nearly 95% of the black vote, and supposedly most of the liberal white (i.e., the Jewish and ultra-liberal coalition) vote, while Hillary has been getting about 60% of the whiteDemocratic voting base.

The money story is most telling. Obama is obviously getting the bulk of the financial support of the traditional big contributors (i.e., the Jews and their affluent white fellow-travelers) leaving Hillary to borrow money from herself to pay for her campaign. This is all enough to cause me to actually root for Hillary, something I would never have believed possible a few months ago.

What we are seeing here is part of the phenomenon Kevin MacDonald refers to as “implicit whiteness.” In politics it is usually associated with Republican presidential candidates typically getting about 60% or sometimes even a little more of the white vote. But it is something new to see it occurring within the Democratic Party at this level. And this is what it is. There are no real differences between Hillary and Obama on the substantive issues, or even on the symbolic issues, except for the symbolism related to her whiteness and his blackness.

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It may be that in this presidential election cycle implicit whiteness will actually play a more important role, be more obvious and more strongly expressed, in the Democratic primaries than in the general election. This is largely because of the Democratic candidates’ lack of differences on the substantive issues, which enables implicit whiteness to play a greater role in the voter’s decision process.

In the general election there will be pronounced differences on substantive issues, on the Iraq war but much more importantly on the economy and basic pocketbook issues and fears, issues that strongly tend to work against McCain. These differences will weaken the role of implicit whiteness in the decision-making process, probably because by its very implicitness it lacks the coherence to take priority over explicit substantive issues.

And so far McCain has done nothing to strengthen implicit whiteness in his favor, in spite of its vital importance to his chances for victory. On the politically permissible substantive issues that would most effectively mobilize implicit whiteness — above all controls on non-white immigration, and after that, political and economic nationalism — McCain is taking the opposite tack. And even in symbolic gestures, such as his Selma bridge stunt, he seems to be doing his best to fatally weaken the one thing that could give him victory. Hillary now seems to see this in her own primary contest, but probably too late. It seems that McCain so far is not learning the lesson of her mistake.

His choice of a running mate will probably be his most important chance to mobilize implicit whiteness in his support. Mitt Romney’s early appeals to the populist concerns of implicit whiteness, such as non-white immigration and the outsourcing of jobs, actually had McCain on the ropes for a while after the Michigan primary. But then Romney went off-message (perhaps he got advice to back off the issues that center on white interests) and lost momentum, allowing McCain to recover and regain the lead. In the last few days before he bowed out of the race, Romney attempted a cautious return to the white-centered issues that gave him his only success, but by then it was too little and too late. Choosing Romney would provide McCain with some connection to issues that appeal to implicit whiteness, a starting point which he can develop further if he chooses to do so.

Richard McCulloch’s website is at www.racialcompact.com.

Eye on Hollywood: The Race Films of Denzel Washington: Déjà Vu All Over Again

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Last fall, in my capacity as a frequent contributor to this website’s print companion, The Occidental Quarterly, I addressed a crowd of citizens concerned with the well-being of Europeans and European Americans. My presentation had the long title of “Cultural Displacement and the Jewish Experience: The Entertainment Industry as a Case Study.” Perhaps fitting in a world moving away from the printed word, I had about twenty minutes of film clips to hold the attention of the audience.

My focus was on two films, Crimson Tide (1995) and Remember the Titans (2000), both starring African-American actor Denzel Washington. Washington has appeared in over a dozen films that prominently feature a racial angle. His first big-screen appearance, Cry Freedom (1987), set the stage for his anointed celluloid calling: addressing race problems in the way Hollywood wants America to think about race. In Cry Freedom Washington played Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist who died at a police station in South Africa. Two years later he appeared in Glory as an escaped slave who joined the Northern army during the Civil War.

Mississippi Masala (1991) was an innovative look at interracial romance (good) and hostility to interracial romance (bad) as seen through lenses of white, black (African American) and brown (immigrants from India). This was immediately followed by Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), which was mirrored in some respects by the later race film The Hurricane (1999), a story which explicitly argued that black boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter was framed and imprisoned due to white racism.

Philadelphia (1993) is among the more clever vehicles for discussion of racism and discrimination, as it depicts the plight of a closeted gay man (Tom Hanks) dying of AIDS. Hanks plays successful young lawyer Andrew Beckett who is fired from his law firm after a colleague notices lesions on his face caused by AIDS. The film uses reverse bias to show the audience that it is inhumane to have any prejudices at all. Washington plays the part of B-grade lawyer Joe Miller, a macho African America who despises homosexuality. The irony set up by this plot is obvious: of anyone, a black man should know the evils of prejudice and discrimination. His subsequent education becomes the hoped-for education of benighted viewers.

Crimson Tide (1995) is a more subtle Washington approach for taking a stand against white racism. The issue of race and power in America is introduced in the opening scene, which tells us that the three most powerful men in the world are the President of the United States, the President of Russia, and the commander of a nuclear ballistic submarine. At the start of the film, the commander (played by Gene Hackman) is white. Washington plays a more educated, peace loving officer who eventually takes control of the boat and prevents an unnecessary nuclear strike.

Chastised, the white commander exits the stage, which would seem to be the subliminal intended cue for white men in general. This explicit portrayal of role reversal exists as part of the greater narrative from Hollywood film and other media, academia, the courts and the government in which whites are removed from their niche and replaced by non-whites.

Remember the Titans (2000), perhaps more than any other Hollywood movie, presents the template for the planned replacement of the American majority. Ostensibly a heart-warming tale about a group of high school football players working to overcome racism in turbulent times, the barely buried subtext is that whites will gladly — altruistically — hand over to blacks every favorable niche they have. The football team represents American society in microcosm: black, white, and tense. Only through the replacement of the white coach and white players by black counterparts can amity be realized. In the film, most whites accept this displacement with but slight resistance.

For a longer essay on this topic, I plan to view all or at least the majority of Denzel Washington’s films. Of the more recent ones, Antwone Fisher (2002) certainly fits the race genre, while reviews suggest American Gangster (2007) does as well. It was while viewing the 2006 Déjà Vu, however, that I discovered an unwelcome twist to the typical Washington-character-as-moral-exemplar format: In Déjà Vu the morally flawed or racist white is portrayed as nearly demonic. And his evil is directed at a perfectly innocent black woman, as well as at Americans more generally.

Déjà Vu accesses Americans’ memories of three traumatic events—the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina (complete with its overtones of racist whites). Like executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the villain in Déjà Vu is a young white “patriot,” who has planted a bomb on a New Orleans ferry, killing 543 innocent Americans in the process. The central victim is Claire, a beautiful young African American woman who was actually killed prior to the ferry explosion. Washington, as ATF agent Doug Carlin, falls in love with her as he voyeuristically watches her through a kind of limited time machine.

Carlin was distraught when he first viewed Claire’s lifeless body, still drenched in the same kind of gasoline as the victims of the ferry bombing. The fingers on one of her hands are missing, apparently sliced off in the explosion. In an effort to prevent Claire’s death and the ferry bombing, Carlin studies the actions of the bomber and travels back through time to thwart him. It is here that we see Claire’s demise in real time.

The fanatical white bomber is played by James Caviezel, who previously had portrayed Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. To throw investigators off, he attempts to inflict injuries on Claire that would be consistent with injuries sustained in the ferry bombing. Here we see the demonic as enacted by a white man upon a helpless black woman.

Claire is tied to a chair, arms behind her back. Then, in preparation for her immolation, the bomber pours gasoline over her hooded head. Next, he sadistically brandishes pruning shears as he approaches the thrashing black captive. As she screams through her hood, the bomber slowly picks up her hand and prepares to cut off her fingers. Hence the missing digits.

Any normal viewer would react with horror at such an unimaginable instance of evil. Further, he might even equate such evil with the race of the villain in the film. The idea that popular images translate into harmful stereotypes has a long pedigree, both in academia and in the public mind as well.

Ethnic Notions, for instance, is a documentary exploring “the deep-rooted stereotypes which have fueled anti-black prejudice.” Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture and White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture do the same in book form. Slaying the Dragon and Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re)Educational Videotape do so for the sexual objectification of Asian women in Hollywood films that “whites” allegedly produce.

None of these distinguish between European-derived whites and Jews, of course, despite the fact that the latter have dominated Hollywood from its inception. See, for example, Neal Gabler’s wonderful An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. For the multicultural project as a whole, however, it is white males (clearly understood as non-Jewish) who are the principal oppressors of the rest of the world. Among the ranks of the victims, Jews rank near or at the top because of the Holocaust, a narrative that is constantly reinforced by Hollywood.

In the last two decades or so, there is simply no correlate among minority images to equal the constant barrage of negative images of white males. For instance, rarely do truly negative images of Jews appear in American film, and the image of the black male has undergone a 180-degree change. From the savages and rapists of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 classic Birth of a Nation, film audiences are now treated to a steady diet of films with stars who have joined Sidney Poitier in the category of black film icons: Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, Eddie Murphy, and Samuel L. Jackson, with the possible additions of James Earl Jones, Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker, Danny Glover and Cuba Gooding Jr.

Contemporary viewers are unlikely to ever see the blood-curdling violence of ‘true crime’ attacks by black males on innocent white victims in cases such as the Wichita Massacre (five young whites raped and/or murdered), the Knoxville slayings, or the pre-Christmas murder of a family of four whites by a slightly built black man in Ithaca, NY. Instead, the news media focus far more on the alleged crimes of white men, as in the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax or the Jena 6 fraud.

How Hollywood spins its powerful tales of good and evil, and how those tales invariably present and reinforce racially-coded messages, is a long and complex story. But it should give one pause that in a society that was created and once dominated by whites, a consistent message is emitted portraying white males as so often vile and evil. Not only are minorities who identify with the film victims of white mayhem likely to internalize a desire for revenge, but many whites themselves will subconsciously respond by wanting to punish the white evildoers. This process of white “altruistic punishment” can be likened to a body’s immune system going haywire and destroying its own healthy cells.

To be sure, one film alone is unlikely to establish a lasting image of any character or race. Rather, what is important is to identify the common characters and scenes that are repeated over time. Further, merely looking at one set of creators for one film — in this case director Tony Scott (brother of Ridley Alien, Kingdom of Heaven Scott) and screenwriters Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio — will not establish which power ultimately controls the film industry. What is needed is an appreciation of the ideological hegemony within Hollywood and the determination to investigate its productions over a long period of time. Such an effort may then shed light on why the white male is so often depicted as violent and evil. In real life in America, many others provide their share of evil doing, yet we rarely see them on the screen.

Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

A Spreading Fire

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Punctuated Equilibrium

It is easy to become discouraged when contemplating the stranglehold the Israel Lobby has on American policy in the Middle East.  One could compile a long list of actions taken by our government at the behest of the Lobby that serve the interests of Israel but not America. Exhibit A in this list is the neocon-promoted war in Iraq with its enormous cost in lives, in money, and in political instability.

In the face of this great power, it is sorely tempting to go along to get along on this issue, or just hunker down with a twelve pack and watch junk TV and ballgames as the U.S. sinks into an economic and foreign policy black hole.

But while the Lobby is powerful, it is not all powerful. As in the Jonathan Pollard case or the AWACS deal for Saudi Arabia, it has lost a game or two. And ironically as it gets more powerful, it increasingly impels mainstream figures to take a stand.

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Consider the following:

  • The recent indictment of Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel.  Kadish is accused of passing US military secrets to the same Israeli who was the handler for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard.  The Kadish indictment shows there remains at least some integrity in our federal prosecutorial system on matters relating to Israeli lawbreaking.  Indeed, Joseph DiGenova, the US attorney who oversaw the spy prosecution that ensnared Pollard, in commenting on the Kadish indictment was direct and outspoken in accusing Israel of lying to the United States and of conducting “a much larger espionage operation with sleeper cells in the United States than we understood or could have known at the time.”
  • The still pending trial of former AIPAC foreign policy director Steven Rosen and analyst Keith Weissman on charges of conspiring to disclose classified national security information to Israel.  Despite Rosen’s and Weissman’s arguments that they have a First Amendment right to disclose classified information and AIPAC’s expenditure of $2.5 million for Rosen’s legal bills, Judge Ellis has refused to dismiss the case, although he has granted a multitude of postponements.  It is true that the case receives little attention in the media and true as well — unfortunately and disgracefully — that President Bush is likely to pardon Rosen and Weissman (and Larry Franklin, the codefendant who earlier pled guilty).  Nonetheless, the fact that the government has persevered in prosecuting this case shows an intent by some elements of our government to send AIPAC a message that it is not above the law.
  • Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and his recent attempts to open a dialogue with all of the Palestinian leaders, not just those of whom Israel approves.  For such misdeeds the likes of Abe Foxman, Marty Peretz, and David Horowitz have implied or openly stated that Carter is anti-Semitic and a “Jew hater.”  But such attacks have not dissuaded Carter from continuing to speak out on these issues.
  • The efforts of organizations such as Grant Smith’s Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (“IRmep”) to monitor and counter the actions of AIPAC and its affiliates.  Smith is a dogged researched who makes ample use of Freedom of Information Act requests and other research tools.  By such means he has obtained,  among other things, the transcripts of the 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in which Senator Fulbright uncovered evidence that AIPAC or its predecessor was acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Israel.  Using these tools,  Smith makes a strong case in his books Foreign Agents and Declassified Deceits that AIPAC has long and repeatedly violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Logan Act, and federal election laws.  IRmep is a small organization, but it is an active and uncompromising one.

So, some strong willed persons are taking action against the Israel Lobby.  Let’s join them.  Here are some things we can do:

  • Join IRmep or similar organizations.  These organizations are generally quite small, so giving them your support can have a real impact.
  • Invite some friends over for dinner, and after they see that you are almost normal, let them know you read books such as Walt and Mearsheimer’s  Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Carter’s book on Palestine, or Kevin MacDonald’s books.  You may bolster their courage to step out of line themselves.
  • Send letters of support to those such as Walt, Mearsheimer, Carter,  and others who dare to speak out against the Lobby and its policies.  These people receive enormous and often false and mean spirited criticism from the Lobby and its minions.  A simple but sincere letter from a supporter may mean a lot to them.
  • Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper.  Or maybe write a book or article yourself.  The dissolution of our once great country is giving us plenty to write about.

Do these things because they are the right thing to do.  Don’t worry overmuch (here I am preaching to myself) about how great an impact you will have.  In the words of Emerson, “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”   The important thing is to be active, not passive, despite the long odds of success.  Activity breeds more activity, in yourself and others, like a spreading fire.

Travis Woodson is an attorney practicing on the West Coast.