Vincent Van Gogh, “Sorrowing old Man,” 1890

There are several different approaches to the study of the pathology of White guilt, including linguistic, historical and religious. One needs, however, to critically look at this faulty verbal construct first, a construct which first appeared in America several decades ago, and which has been championed in the media and academia ever since.

At first look, the expression “White guilt” defies lexical rules of Standard English.  Should one accept this expression as a valid tool in social and political communication, one might just as well substitute the adjective “white” with the adjectives “brown,” “yellow,” or “black.” So far, however, no scholar, no journalist has ever ventured to use the expressions Black Guilt or Brown Guilt, for the simple reason that from the semantic point of view these colorful expressions sound silly in the standard English language.  The same lexical rule, however, does not apply to White guilt, an expression that has become by now part of the everyday language. In addition, seen from the educational perspective, the expression “White Guilt” is designed to serve as a guidebook for reeducating and reprograming Whites, or short of that for having Whites expiate their real or alleged sins of racism. Conversely, all other non-White racial categories are automatically exonerated from any guilt feelings and thusly from any need for political penitence.

The difficulty in dealing with the concept of “White guilt” is further exacerbated by the impossibility of having it properly translated into non-English languages in Europe. Over the last eighty years US college social science departments, mostly controlled by crypto-communist scholars, have been in the forefront of crafting outlandish political terms and creating new political concepts which, when translated and transposed into the European media and school curricula sound odd. Moreover, ill-defined American verbal constructs, such as “hate speech,” “ethnic sensitivity training,”” diversity,” “white supremacists,” “affirmative action,” have by now become a linchpin in the US education and legislation. These expressions, when used in other European languages often produce unintelligible verbal and legal equivalents.

Of course Europe has concocted its own bizarre expressions, especially when used during legal proceedings against nationalist dissidents at local courts of justice. A case in point is the German highly obtrusive, abstract compound noun that figures prominently in the German Criminal code, e.g.,  Paragraph # 130, bearing the demonizing subtitle “Volksverhetzung.” This heavy-handed German compound noun is a clear-cut case of linguistic barbarism, having given birth by now to dozens of faulty English translations (popular incitement, sedition, etc.). It is also a word that during court hearings never ever explicitly denotes the defendant’s ethnicity. This word, which German prosecuting attorneys have been tossing around since the early 1990s when pressing charges against social undesirables, has thus far dispatched thousands of Germans to prison for varying durations.

The sticky issue for many citizens in the US and Europe, regardless of their political beliefs is that they often take these expressions as a sign of erudite learning, never bothering to examine their etymology. Or worse, never scrutinizing those individuals who first put those words in circulation. The expression “White guilt,” along with hundreds of similarly ill-defined terms that have sprung up in the USA over the last fifty years, is just an embellished follow-up term of the now defunct Soviet-Speak, which likewise contained a myriad of similar surreal nouns and convoluted phrases, such as “democratization,” “domestic fascist terrorists,”  “antifascist struggle,” “socialist fight against counterrevolutionary bourgeois tendencies,” “economic self-management,” “peaceful  coexistence,” “interethnic  tolerance,” etc.  The Liberal System in the US and EU, along with its legal and academic apparatchiks, is now in the belated process of updating this old Bolshevik language.

Historical Framework of White Guilt

TOO has previously documented the timespan and major architects of this new verbal overhaul whose final objective is the dispossession of White peoples.  One must look firstly at the period starting with 1945 and after, a period which brought about not just a new political order, but also marked the beginning of the use of a new sanitized, demonizing political vocabulary.  Defeated Germany bore the brunt of the new notion of the political, although citizens in the victorious US and the UK swiftly followed suit with their own self-flagellating rhetoric. Words such as “colonialism,” “segregation,” “racial distancing,” “apartheid,” and “fascism,” soon became the metaphors for the absolute evil, with “fascism” now denoting pretty much anything to the right of center. Over the last seventy-five years, the West has embarked on a penitential passion play whose effects can be observed today in most media outlets.  Incidentally, the System’s removal of president Donald Trump from office was in large part due to the fact that Trump’s rhetoric on “fake news” was incompatible with the media’s message of universal love that has inspired the post-World War II narrative as preached by the System.

What is frequently overlooked, however, is that guilt-tripping Whites in the realm of politics has been unfolding hand in hand with a gradual criminalization of the White cultural heritage. The destructive role of the Frankfurt school and its mostly Jewish-Marxist scholars in instilling the concept of White guilt has been amply demonstrated (here), although the postwar brainwashing of Whites can by no means be attributed to Jewish scholars and activists only.  I tried, quite some time ago, to summarize the history of intellectual purges in Europe, starting immediately after the end of World War, which gradually resulted in the growth of the language of guilt, leading subsequently to suicidal self-denial of millions of White students and politicians in Europe and the US.  As I noted in Homo Americanus,

Particularly harsh was the Allied treatment of German teachers and academics. Since National- Socialist Germany had significant support among German teachers and university professors, it was to be expected that the US reeducational authorities would start screening German intellectuals, writers, journalists and film makers. Having destroyed dozens of major libraries in Germany, with millions of volumes gone up in flames, the American occupying powers resorted to improvising measures in order to give some semblance of normalcy to what later would become “the democratic Germany.” [i]

Likewise, French intellectual life from 1944–1950 was similarly depleted of hundreds of anticommunist and nationalist intellectuals suspected of fascist collaboration, with many becoming objects of public shaming. Dominique Venner:

Of all professional categories, journalists and writers were hit the hardest. This underlines the ideological character of the conflict and the ensuing purges. The proportion of writers and journalists who were shot, imprisoned, and barred from their profession surpasses all other professional categories. Do we need to be reminded of the assassination of Albert Clément, Philippe Henriot, Robert Denoël, of the suicide of Drieu La Rochelle, of the death of Paul Allard in prison prior to court hearings and of the executions of Georges Suarez, Robert Brasillach, Jean Luchaire […] [or] the death sentence pronounced in absentia or a commuted prison sentence for Lucien Rebatet, Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, etc.?” [ii]

Ironically, it was thanks to the threat of Soviet communism during the Cold War that many previously banned European thinkers and academics managed to resurrect their career.  It didn’t last long.  From 1950–1990, Western intelligence agencies, with the USA at the helm, had to rely heavily on skills of prominent anticommunist and White nationalist academics and scientists in an effort to contain the perceived Soviet threat. With the Cold War over, with the Soviet Union dead by 1990, the System, i.e., the Deep State, began to recuperate again its own crypto-communist repressive, albeit Covid-covered face, the grand finale of which was seen on January 20, 2021, during the System’s staged palace coup in Washington DC.

The religious framework of White guilt

Putting solely the blame on the liberal media and crypto-communist college professors for generating the culture of White guilt is only partially correct.  In order to tentatively elicit a convincing answer regarding the pathology of White guilt one needs to raise some rhetorical questions about Christian teachings. Why are White Christian peoples, in contrast to other peoples of other races and other religions on Earth, more prone to excessive altruism toward non-White out-groups?  Why are guilt feelings practically nonexistent among non-White peoples? One answer to these questions may be found in Christian teachings that have made up  an important pillar of Western civilization over the centuries.  Over the last one hundred years, modern Liberal and Communist elites have aggressively promoted those same feeling of White guilt, albeit in their own atheistic, secular and “multicultural” modalities. One must rightfully reject the Liberal or Antifa palaver about White guilt, yet the fact remains that the Vatican, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the German Bishops’ conference, along with all other Christian denominations in Europe and the US today are the loudest sponsors of non-White immigration to Europe and America, as well as the strongest advocates of White guilt (here).  The Church’s ecumenical preaching about a global city under one god with all of humanity is fully in accordance with the early Christian dogma on man’s fall and his eventual redemption.

It must be pointed out that early Christian apostles, evangelists and theologians who foisted the dogma of man’s guilt were all by birth and without any exception non-Europeans (St. Augustine, Tertullian, St. Paul, Cyprian, etc.)  from North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor and Judea.  Having this in mind, lambasting Islam or Judaism in the present as the sole carriers of aggressive non-European anti-White ideology, as many White nationalists do, while downplaying the Middle-Eastern birthplace of Christianity, cannot be a sign of neither moral nor intellectual consistency.  The Roman poet Juvenal, describes graphically in his satires the Rome of the late first century, a time when the city was swarming with multitudes of Syrian lowlifes, Chaldean star worshippers, Jewish conmen, and Ethiopian hustlers, all of them offering a quick ride to eternal salvation for some and eternal damnation for others (here). Similar messianic, redemptive beliefs about the shining future, under the guidance of prominent early Bolshevik agitators, most of them of Jewish origin, have found their new location, two millennia later, among credulous intellectuals and equality-hungry masses. After the fall of Communism, the same messianic drive to punish the guilty ones who defy modern Liberal and multicultural scholasticism found its loudest mouthpiece among US neocons and antifa inquisitors.

This is not the place to rehash  Friedrich Nietzsche’s own emotional ravings at Christians, nor quote dozens of thinkers and scholars who had earlier described  the psychological link between early Jewish and Christian zealots of first-century Rome and communist commissars of the early twentieth century. Times have changed but the obsession as to how extirpate or reeducate those who doubt the myths of the System haven’t changed a bit.  The psychological profile of US modern-day Antifa zealots and their college professor supporters bears a close resemblance with early uprooted, largely miscegenated, effeminate Christian masses in the late Roman empire.  The Jew St. Paul and later on the North African St. Augustin — judging by their own convulsive contrition — suggest that they suffered from bipolar disorder. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (7:18) may be  the key to grasping the modern version of neurotic White self-haters put on display by  prominent news anchors and humanities professors today:  “And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t.  I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.”

Walter F. Otto, a renowned author on ancient Greek gods [iii] and one of the most quoted Hellenistic scholars, describes the differences between the ancient Greek vs. Christian notion of the sacred. He notes that ancient pagan Greeks laid emphasis on the feelings of shame, unaware of the meaning of feelings of guilt. In his still untranslated book dealing with Christian vs ancient Greek spirituality, he writes:

Mentally sick were their leaders; the weaklings only followed them. The impetus to this  large (Christian) movement came from Paul the Apostle, i.e., from one of those tormented souls who carry an incurable wound within themselves. His furious, bloodthirsty hatred of the new (Christian) faith, his just as furious commitment to it, his ecstatic experience turning him at a single blow from the executioner of Christians into their most fanatical champion — this all  tells  how terrible [Christianity] basically stood and what was to be expected from its spirituality.[iv]

At some point Whites will need to realize that a successful healing of their feelings of guilt presupposes a critical reassessment of their Judeo-Christian-inspired origins.  If Whites in Europe and the US were once upon a time all eager to embrace the Semitic notion of original sin, no wonder that two thousand years later they could likewise be well programmed to put up with a variety of World War II necrophiliac victimhoods, as well as tune in to fake news delivered by their politicians.  Eventually Whites will need to make a decision about where to choose the location of their identity. In Athens or in Jerusalem.

NOTES:

[i] T. Sunic, Homo americanus; Child of the postmodern Age (London: Arktos, 2018), p. 75-76.

[ii] Ibid, p. 88. (Translated and quoted in Dominique Venner,  Histoire  de la collaboration (Paris: Pygmallion, 2000), p. 515-516).

[iii] Walter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods (translated by Moses Hadas) (London: Thames & Hudson, 1954).

[iv] Walter F. Otto, Der Geist der Antike und die  christliche Welt (Bonn: Verlag F. Cohen, 1923), p. 44.

The Crusades: The World’s Debate
Hilaire Belloc.  Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1937; Republished Tan Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois, 1992.

Reviewed by Antonius J. Patrick

Introduction

Despite its publication a little over eight decades ago, Hilaire Belloc’s The Crusades: The World’s Debate is a book worthy of another look on several fronts.  Not only does Belloc present a novel interpretation of the crusading era while providing an array of interesting insights and thoughts, but throughout his analysis the author talks of the role that race and ethnicity played in the conduct of the crusades and in the establishment and tragic fall of the Latin Kingdoms in the Levant.

Ever since the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), Catholic scholarship, mirroring what was taking place within the historical profession at large, either ignored the subject of race, or when they spoke of it, downplayed any differences that might have had an impact on historical developments.  This was not the case for Belloc nor for most historians of his time.

The Crusades were inspired by the Catholic Church and the Papacy which rightly saw the threat that Islam posed to the West and encouraged military action to counter it.  The Mohammedans had taken over vast parts of the eastern half of the Roman Empire and with it control of the Holy Land which they increasingly made tougher to access for pilgrims.  The Crusades were an expression of Christendom’s highest ideals which contemporary secular Europeans could not hope to grasp or understand.  The expeditions initial success, the creation of societies in the Levant and their later collapse tells a lot about the historical epoch in which the movement took place.

Crusades Historiography

Belloc takes a unique perspective on a number of aspects of the crusading era which differ, in some cases, quite significantly from most modern scholarship. Almost all contemporary histories are of the school of thought that the Crusades lasted until at least the campaign of 1295 (the Fourth Crusade) while some, like the late J. Riley Smith, see “crusading activity” going well beyond that time.[1]

For Belloc, the First Crusade from its “calling” in 1095 by Pope Urban II, to its improbable and truly miraculous capture[2] of Jerusalem in 1099, was the most important.  It not only accomplished its odds-defying goal of freeing the Holy Land for pilgrimage, but in its wake established Western feudal-style governance after its military success.

With the view that only the First Crusade mattered, since it accomplished its objectives, the vast majority of the book covers the years between 1095 to 1187 which ends with the tragic Battle of Hattin in 1187, in which Saladin conquered most of Palestine from the Crusaders. As Belloc asserts:

There was . . . but one Crusade. . . . it was the great breaking out of all western Europe into the Orient for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, and within one very long lifetime it had failed; for with Jerusalem in the hands of the Infidel the purpose of the original great campaign was gone, its fruits were lost. [244]

Everything that came in the wake of the first Christian triumph in Asia Minor was something different:

That historical episode, 1095—1187, was the true Crusade, from its inception to its final failure.  All that followed was of another kind. [Ibid.]

Yet, within their initial victory, the seed of the Latin Kingdoms’ ultimate downfall was laid. Strategically, Belloc repeatedly stresses that the crusaders’ failure to secure Damascus proved fatal to their long-term survival.  Without control of the city, the later expeditions were never a serious threat to the Muslim strongholds and were in the historian’s words “the rear-guard action of a defeat.”[4]  The vital position of Damascus in the overall control of the Levant is not emphasized by contemporary historians.

While Muslim rule appeared to be permanent after the defeat at Hattin and especially after the fall of Constantinople, Westerners would later return. After repelling several Islamic assaults on the European heartland, the next sojourn into the Levant was different, but this time the conquerors came not as Christian liberators but as imperialists.

The colonization of the Middle East throughout the course of the nineteenth century up until the time of his book (1937) was accomplished not by Christian knights, princes, kings or inspired by popes, but under the direction of religiously pluralistic nation-states.  Christendom had long been dissolved, and although the new overlords were superior in resources, technology, and skill, their religious vitality was on the wane and would continue to evaporate as the years rolled on.  “We have returned to the Levant,” Belloc laments, “we have returned apparently more as masters than ever we were during the struggle of the Crusades — but we have returned bankrupt in that spiritual wealth which was the glory of the Crusades. . . . [N]or is the Levant held as one whole [Christian dominion], but divided between separate nations to whom the unity of Europe has ceased to be sacred.” [249]

Belloc believed that the West would eventually lose out to a more religiously robust and demographically fertile Islam.  Once Westerners strayed from a Christian social order with its defense of the family, the indissolubility of marriage and the traditional role of women as homemakers and mothers instead of co-equals to men in all aspects of life, a drop off in White birth rates would result.  The now beyond frightening low population replacement rates among Occidental peoples has proven the ever-perceptive Belloc correct.

While a collapse in White birth rates had not taken place during his lifetime, a more ominous event occurred which would shape not only the course of Middle East history, but world events with the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.  With unconditional support from the U.S. government and wealthy Jews throughout the world, Israel would come to dominate the region reducing the neighboring Arab states and extirpating the indigenous Christian population and landmarks.

Race

In the modern era of Political Correctness, one can no longer speak of race, ethnicity, kinship, or “blood” unless one is disparaging Occidental people or their ancestors while at the same time trumpeting the virtues of the assorted non-White peoples of the globe.  Not so with Belloc, who was far from alone among his generation who understood the significance of race in the episodes of the human past and how it played an important factor in the creation of societies.

To Belloc, race did matter, and in his view, it was a significant reason why the Crusades ultimately failed to hold their possessions.  Of course, there were other reasons that the author duly notes—the failure to control Damascus, the lack of reinforcements both in arms and people from Western Europe, the refusal of Byzantium to come to the Crusaders’ aid, and the lack of a strong monarchy in the Latin states.  Race, however, in this instance the “mixing of blood” between the Franks and the Near East population, especially among the leadership, proved deadly.  Few, if any, academics today could write such things.

The miscegenation of the Latin nobility with the upper-class provincials led to an “inferior” ruling elite which lacked the necessary talent, ability, and leadership skills to sustain and build a permanent Christian civilization in Asia Minor.  A stark example of this can be seen in the loss of Edssa:

We have seen that among other causes the mixture of Western with Oriental blood, especially in the case of the rulers, played a chief part.  Now, it was  precisely to this that the first of the great disasters was due. … The loss of Edessa … was mainly due to the character of its ruler, the second Jocelyn. . . .  The mother of the second Jocelyn was an Armenian. . . .  [T]he mixture of blood did here what it so often does; it gave a certain brilliance to the character of the second generation, but that brilliance was accompanied by instability. [192] …

It must be emphasized, for it underlay not only the tragedy of Edessa but all that followed, up to the loss of Jerusalem itself. . . . it was Jocelyn the Second, who with his contemporary, the half breed Queen Melisande, so conspicuously typifies that new and too-sudden mixtures of races which was largely responsible for the catastrophe. [193]

The political structure that the crusaders set up was similar to that of Western Europe at the time—feudalism.  Despite criticism of it and the Middle Ages in general by academics stretching back to the Enlightenment, feudalism mightily contributed to the widespread level of personal freedom and economic growth found in Western societies.  And, it was feudalism’s decline which paved the way for royal absolutism and later the emergence of the totalitarian democratic nation-state.

Like all social systems, feudalism relied on the quality of its practitioners.  While the crusaders brought feudalism to the Levant, its application was inferior to that of Western Europe, mainly because of race as Belloc points out:

In the interval of nearly fifty years there had arisen that large population of mixed blood to which we continually return.  Most of the half-breeds [were] born of Western fathers and Eastern mothers; others in somewhat smaller numbers, sprung from the marriage of Eastern fathers and Western women. [204]

Intermarriage took place among the ruling elites and for Belloc it proved detrimental for the sustainability of the Latin Kingdoms.  The difference in character and quality of the new racial class was unhappily noticed by Westerners:

Of these [half-breeds] a due proportion were nobles: the social equals of the ruling armed class throughout the feudal world.  Some of them (as we saw at Edessa) stood in the highest places.  It was inevitable that the pure-blooded Westerners should look down somewhat on the men of mixed blood. [Ibid.]

While they could do little about it, from their comments and attitudes Westerners understood the disastrous consequences from the dilution of Frankish blood:

[The Frank] had to deal with them; they were necessarily mixed up with his life, often claiming equality and receiving all the outward marks of it. But behind their backs they were now given a slang name—‘the colts’ — and it was not meant to be flattering. [Ibid.]

The historian makes an interesting distinction between what a colony or colonizing means and what took place in the Levant.  “The idea of a colony,” Belloc notes, “connotes the transplanting of men from one place to another and the vigorous growth in the new soil of the thing so transplanted.” [171] In this meaning, colonizing did not take place during the crusading era which proved to be of fundamental importance:

Now, the Crusaders did bring all this Western blood onto the coastal plain of Syria, they did plant our religion, our customs, our social organization.  But the new thing flourished as a thing transplanted, it flourished as a mixture.  There was intermarriage and there was a corresponding change in blood; there was the adoption of Oriental social habits by the descendants of the first Crusaders. [Ibid.]

While Westerners maintained their Latin religiosity, they, mostly because of intermarriage and the difference in climate, became submerged in their host population’s culture:

Men living in Syria had to live under Syrian conditions, or very soon they would not have lived at all.  The kingdom of Jerusalem and its dependencies could not remain wholly like ourselves.  They took on an Oriental color and upon the whole this weakened them in their task, that of resisting the Orient. . . .   That social structure which goes with the climate of the West, invigorated by the northern winter and nourished by the well-watered lands of Gaul and Britain . . . was altered. [Ibid.]

Because of the conditions, perhaps nothing could be done, but the “alteration” was necessary for the crusaders survival which if they had not adapted to the surroundings and from a lack of reinforcements from the West, would not have lasted as long as they did:

It was altered to advantage insofar as it enabled the transplanted to survive — but it was altered to disadvantage insofar as it lessened the pristine energy and tenacity of the transplanted [Ibid.]

Blood lines were instrumental not only in the downfall of the Latin Kingdoms, but in the initial preaching of a crusade by Pope Urban II.  A description like Belloc’s of the character and personality of the first wave of Frankish knights would be hard to find in modern accounts of the Crusades:

The Christian, Western host . . . was mainly Gallic. . . . But the blood told, and the Franci . . . had the weakness as well as the strength of their race as it has been known throughout history. They had its intense energy, its aptitude for arms, its sudden enthusiasms and, in such moods, exalted unity of aim;[2]

In today’s politically-correct environment, an author of such lines would be labeled a “racist” even by the Church which Belloc defended throughout his voluminous writings.  The Catholic Church, after Vatican II, has renounced its role in the Crusades, even though saints, theologians, popes and Divine intervention have all signaled their approval of the undertakings.

In the depth of despair at Antioch, faced with an oncoming Turkish force, plagued by hunger, disease and insufficient manpower, the quality of the Franks came to the fore emboldened by the discovery of the Holy Lance:

Anyhow, the lance head was found, and it worked a moral miracle.  That same French temperament which we must always keep in mind when studying the fortunes of the Crusade, lit a sudden enthusiasm through the army.  It was roused from its lethargy . . . it was filled with the certitude of victory, and in that mood it had sallied out by the bridge gate and won its great triumph over the besieging Mohammedan host. [100]

Despite what has been displayed in movies and television and what has been written in literature and historical accounts, the Western warrior was superior to his Turkish foe in every aspect.  “The French mounted knights, when sufficiently supported by the infantry were certain of victory against the light-armed and light-mounted swarm of Moslem bowmen. . . . Weight for weight, stroke for stroke, energy for energy, the Oriental could not stand up to the Western man.” [93]

Again, it was the “dilution” of Frankish blood that led to the collapse:

The danger would come years on when Western numbers were so depleted and Western blood so diluted that conditions between the opponents would be more equal. [Ibid]

It would be remiss to focus solely on the genetic make-up that shaped the character of the Franks in explaining why the Crusades took place at all.  This was the Age of Faith and despite their personal ambition, those who took up the cross were committed Christians who believed that their sacrifice would eventually merit an eternal reward which Belloc accounts for:

The feudal motive was mixed with the love of personal gain, but it is a misreading of the time to think that the love of gain was the driving power of these men.  And there was not one of them, not even Bohemond, who did not feel the inspiration of the Cross.  The Christian name is perpetually invoked, it is the rescue of the Christian populations in the East which fills the story, and for the common purpose there is always to be discovered, in spite of fierce rivalries, a common action. [70]

Conclusion

Hilaire Belloc’s The Crusades is more than an analysis of the racial make-up of the brave souls which took up the cross and rid the Holy Land of the Mohammedans.  It is an exhaustive account of the factors which made the first wave of Christian liberators so successful and explains why the expeditions and the societies which came in their wake ultimately failed.  Moreover, the book is important for it gives insight on the conditions and the mindset of the peoples of Western Europe when the great movement began.

Belloc’s tome is noteworthy for it shows how the writing of history, as have all the social sciences, succumbed to political correctness.  The author’s masterful weaving of a discussion of race in the narrative is not a display of Eurocentrism or bigotry, but is explanatory—necessary to demonstrate how and why the events of the era came to be.  Ominously, such a historical analysis is no longer possible in the present age.

[1] Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 3^rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 1987, 2014).

[2] While Belloc does not stress it, the First Crusade was aided by heavenly intervention which has been attested to by Crusaders as well as modern secular historians in their narratives. See Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade: A New History (Oxford: University Press, 2004).

The Military Lockdown of Washington DC

The rhetoric of these people was revolutionary: there was talk of “crossing the Rubicon.” A crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Somebody erected makeshift gallows. Some grandiosely claimed, “The storm is coming,” while Alex Jones promised that “1776 will commence again.” In a similar vein Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert controversially tweeted “Today is 1776” while events were still unfolding. For all that, the event was far from a bona fide coup attempt. Inside the building, a protester responds to a reporter’s question, “What’s the plan? I have no idea.” Nick Fuentes, host of America First, described his own involvement in the event: “I was joking about storming the Capitol. We were marching in the parade and I was saying ‘we’re gonna get in there’. I was saying that basically ironically.” Watching the Baked Alaska livestream, it was hard not to view this event as a cross between a goofy carnival and cringeworthy fiasco. A videogame gone terribly wrong.

Imagine storming the Capital of the United States as the government of the country literally fucking flees and then just wandering around the building confused about why the level isn’t ending. — Kantbot

The QAnon Viking did not in fact seize power. There were a few broken windows. They didn’t burn anything down. They didn’t even leave any graffiti. People got bored and left peacefully. As one Twitter account put it, “the most heavily armed population in the world attempted an ‘insurrection’ completely unarmed.” One police officer was filmed posing for selfies with Trump supporters inside the Capitol. “Any chance I can get you guys to leave the Senate Wing?” a police officer asks. “We will,” comes the polite answer. “Occupy, do not destroy,” chant others, “do not break anything.” Obvious parallels have been drawn with the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol building in 2011, or when heavily armed Black Panthers walked into the California state Capitol building in 1967, or when protesters pushed past a police line on Capitol Hill while protesting against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. It was, by any fair definition, a mostly peaceful protest. Most of the people who entered the Capitol simply walked through an open door and took some selfies. They will now be hunted down.

Even libertarians: A Patriot Act against patriots

A giant federal apparatus built to fight al Qaeda will shift some capacity to fighting you… You cheered on lawyers who said they’d release the Kraken. But now you’ve poked Leviathan. — Nicholas Grossman

Not so long ago, in June of 2020, an editor at the New York Times was forced out for publishing an op-ed entitled Send in the Troops in the midst of nationwide riots. “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger,” the papers own journalists furiously tweeted. In July Nancy Pelosi tweeted, “Trump & his stormtroopers must be stopped. … First Amendment speech should never be met with one-sided violence from federal agents acting as Trump’s secret police.” Now the troops are here and journalists couldn’t care less — 25,000 “stormtroopers” locked down Washington DC for Joe Biden’s inauguration — more than in the entirety of Iraq and Afghanistan combined, and larger than the entire military personnel of some European countries. To Wolf Biltzer, Washington was reminiscent of “war zones I saw in Baghdad or Mosul or Falluja.” In downtown Washington a green zone was established, a term previously used for a fortified area of Baghdad during the occupation of Iraq. Such measures are a sign of a deeply dysfunctional society: this is a regime afraid of its own people.

The pretence that this was a serious attempt at armed insurrection must be stoked for political expediency. This is a Reichstag fire moment. Having inflated the alleged threat, “making sure something like this never happens again” will be the pretext for an ideological crackdown. It was “one of the darkest days in the history of our nation,” according to Joe Biden. Moral panic, histrionics, demonization and fearmongering are in full display. “This is Liberals’ 9/11,” Glenn Greenwald pointed out, warning of “a new War on Terror has begun, domestically.” Democrats are explicitly comparing the Capitol breach (during which protesters killed, at most, one person) to 9/11, when Al-Qaeda killed 2,977 civilians. The target of this new internal war on terror is not radical Islam, it’s Trump voters and any adjacent political movements, including mainstream conservatism.

Hillary Clinton argued for leaders to immediately pursue “new criminal laws at the state and federal levels that hold white supremacists accountable.” For Biden too, passing a law against domestic terrorism has been declared a top priority. What is it that is currently legal that needs to be rendered illegal? Press Secretary Psaki announced the “building of a NSC capability to counter domestic violent extremism” as well as “support efforts to prevent radicalization” and “disrupt violent extremist networks.” Kamala has argued for a “red flag” law to seize the firearms of White nationalists. On Twitter some Americans responded with the words “about damn time,” perhaps picturing violent skinheads and militant Neo-Nazis. Yet the definition of who counts as a White supremacist has been wildly expanded. It’s a term that has consistently been used to describe Donald Trump.

One talking head repeatedly appeared on CNN calling Trump “the leader of a terrorist organization.” Meghan McCain, daughter of John McCain, suggested on The View: “I’m not against sending these people to Gitmo. … They should be treated the same way we treat Al-Qaeda.” In the eyes of the mainstream discourse, MAGA supporters have moved from being “deplorables” to “domestic terrorists” — for sitting on Nancy Pelosi’s chair. A BBC journalist asked whether Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “are guilty of attempted insurrection” (insurrection is defined as a violent uprising against an authority or government) simply for discussing possible election fraud. The chair of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security called for the two GOP Senators to be put on the No Fly List. Sue Gordon, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, told PBS Newshour “there are elements of this that remind me of the rise of Islamic extremism. … There are probably a fair number of lessons that we learnt against foreign terrorism that we can apply here.” Waterboarding? Drones? Black sites? John Brennan, former director of the CIA, compared MAGA supporters to “insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas,” and described the Biden administration as “moving in laser-like fashion” to “root out” what he deemed “an unholy alliance of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

Representative Steve Cohen told CNN he was worried the troops deployed to protect the inauguration may themselves be a threat — because they are White and male. Perhaps this explains why the New York Times reported that the troops were armed with unloaded assault rifles. The FBI vetted all of the 25,000 National Guard troops coming into Washington — 12 were removed from duty. The National Guard is being purged of political dissidents. “If there’s any indication that any of our soldiers or airmen are expressing things that are extremist views” chief of the National Guard Bureau explained, “it’s either handed over to law enforcement or dealt with the chain of command immediately.” Biden’s defense secretary, who is African, pledged to rid the military of “racists and extremists.” The New York Times reports: “Defense Department officials say they are looking into stepping up the monitoring of social media postings from service members.” While the leadership of the military and the police long ago gave in to PC shibboleths, they are the two remaining institutions where some of the rank and file maintain some allegiance to traditional America. We are now seeing the total consolidation of power, ridding institutions of any last vestige of non-woke opinions.

American democracy in crisis: Illegitimacy and the normalisation of political violence

Both sides have challenged the legitimacy of the other: the end result is widespread lack of faith in the American political system. Hillary Clinton deemed Trump an “illegitimate president” and, sounding like a member of a rebel insurgency, declared herself “part of the resistance.” Even now, Hillary is still obsessed with Russian conspiracy theories: “I hope we do find out who he’s beholden to, who pulls his strings. I would love to see his phone record to see if he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our capital.” Jimmy Carter claimed Trump “lost the election” in 2016 and was “put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” while Nancy Pelosi tweeted “Our election was hijacked.” Russiagate became Russiagategate: the investigation into collusion was itself scandalous. Disputing election results was normalized by the long-running hysteria of the once-respectable press. The peaceful transfer of power is a key element of American democracy. It is, however, a norm that had already been violated: on inauguration day in 2017, Reuters reported:

At one flash point, a protester hurled an object through the passenger window of a police van, which sped away in reverse as demonstrators cheered. Earlier, activists used chunks of pavement and baseball bats to shatter the windows of a Bank of America branch and a McDonald’s outlet. … Multiple vehicles were set on fire, including a black limousine. A knot of people dragged garbage cans into a street a few blocks from the White House and set them ablaze, later throwing a red cap bearing Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan into the flames. … The various protest groups scattered around the city chanted anti-Trump slogans and carried signs with slogans including “Trump is not president” and “Make Racists Afraid Again.”

The day also saw the largest single-day protest in US history — against a man who had been duly elected. In 2020, when Trump had to be moved to the White House bunker due to violent protests, there was at least an air of sedition. Businesses in Washington DC boarded up ahead of the 2020 election in anticipation of a Trump victory leading to chaos. Biden himself recognized that another Trump win would lead to violence: in the midst of Black Lives Matter riots, he asked rhetorically: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” Black Lives Matter set a precedent, and radicalized the other side.

But now it’s 2021, and for politicians of both parties, the Capitol incursion has been used as an excuse to make grandiloquent speeches about “our democracy.” Unlike Black Lives Matter, who targeted random businesses and innocent civilians, the stormers took the battle directly to the heart of the American power. Nancy Pelosi described the protest as “gleeful desecration of the US Capitol which is the temple of our American democracy.” It isn’t just a building, it’s a totemic symbol. We would all like to believe it’s a symbol of a venerable democracy, the hallowed and imposing forum of distinguished and eminent leaders of the greatest country on earth. The truth is this is the shell of a dead civilization, the creature that lived inside was long ago transplanted to the margins. The new occupiers have spent the last year attacking American history as irredeemably racist, yet now cast themselves as the true patriots standing up against traitors to America.

Regardless of what one makes of Trump’s claims of voter fraud, in a far more fundamental sense, American democracy really is rigged. American politics is unrecognizable as a result of demographic change. The real coup happened slowly — the real insurrection was decades of open borders. These people didn’t steal one single election — they stole the entire country. Had only Whites voted, David Duke would have won Louisiana in 1991. America, far more diverse today than in the early 90s, has disenfranchised the historic White population through decades of mass migration. The protesters at the Capitol seemed to realize this: they can be heard saying “this is our country” and “we’re taking our country back.” The election was rigged by far more than voter fraud:

The election was rigged by the censoring of popular voices and opinions on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google. … It was rigged by the corrupt and illegitimate system of campaign finance where a handful of billionaire donors determine the fate of millions. … It was rigged through decades of flooding America with tens of millions of legal and illegal immigrants … who have openly bragged for years about their intention of outnumbering White, native-born Americans in national elections.

In 2016 people voted for a border wall and the deportation of illegal immigrants. They got endless money for Israel. One of Trump’s few achievements was a much-needed executive order banning Critical Race Theory from the federal government. It was blocked by a federal judge. The courts can topple clear democratic mandates. The stormers didn’t desecrate a noble temple of democracy. If it was sacrilege, as some claimed, it was sacrilege against an anti-White plutocracy that hates us. These are the people that cheered on Black Lives Matter as they burnt down many of America’s largest cities. Democracy is constrained by the mores of the liberal elite: that explains the popularity of terms like Uniparty to describe the Republican and Democrat establishment, and deep state to describe the vast and immovable Washington bureaucracy, all sharing an identical worldview of radical political correctness, an ineluctable woke blob that cannot be voted out of office.

Biden has talked constantly about uniting the country but his agenda is bound to antagonize much of the country. The god-know-how-many-million illegal immigrants Trump failed to deport will now be given citizenship. “There’s a big difference between equality and equity,” tweeted Kamala, along with a deranged video. Across the entire federal government, equality of opportunity will be replaced by equality of outcomes—an implicit acknowledgement that the IQ gap for Blacks and Latinos is too large to overcome with educational opportunities. Biden already followed through with his Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity. In a recent speech he promised “Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses.” It will be the first administration, according to Axios, “to construct economic policy around issues like race, gender equality and climate change, rather than around traditional indicators like gross domestic product or deficit ratios.” Andrew Sullivan concluded, “America is no longer about individual freedom; it’s about identity group power, and its constant management by government.”

People are right to be angry.

I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America. … The world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. … The jury’s still out.

So begins Obama’s post-presidency autobiography. The jury just came in. From LA to Ferguson, riots have, for the best part of a century, been an exclusively African-American activity. Blacks fight for their self-interest through violence, Whites write strongly-worded letters or irate tweets. White people have, for decades, responded to every indignity with supine submissiveness. The Capitol stormers surprised us all: they actually did something. They reminded us all that Whites can still fight back. For a single day, White people stood up for themselves, and that is why the entire establishment is furious. White Americans aren’t going to be silently shuffled off the stage of history.