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Eye on Hollywood: No Country for Old Men

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While traveling in Greece last spring, I found myself lacking for reading material. At a bookstore in Patras, I found an overpriced copy of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. At the time, I thought it might have been a bootleg copy because pages of narrative seemed to be missing. For instance, one moment the man who appeared to be the leading character was sipping a beer on the steps of a motel and a few pages later we hear about his corpse. Well, maybe that’s just the way McCarthy writes.

As most readers know, the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, have adapted this novel to the big screen, and it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Various blogs have credited the Coens for their “realistic” portrayal of Mexicans—drug smugglers, vicious murderers and all-around threats to the peace of (white) America. I haven’t seen the film yet, but the book does read that way.

In fact, the sheriff in the book (played by Tommy Lee Jones in the film) mulls over the changes that have come to American life. Back in the thirties, someone handed out a form asking teachers what problems there were in schools. Answers were “things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. . . . Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide . . . Forty years is not a long time neither.”

Interestingly, these same forty years were the period in which the traditional WASP leadership of American was replaced by a new one, an “adversary culture” in Norman Podhoretz’s words. David Gelernter, the Yale University computer scientist nearly killed by a bomb sent by the Unabomber, wrote a stunning essay in the American Jewish Committee’s house magazine Commentary about this change. “The perversity I want to understand starts in the 1960’s.” He sees the rise through the ranks of a new class as both unhealthy and ominous. To many readers of Commentary (there were plenty of letters of complaint) it was unforgivable that Gelernter identified Jews as the cause of the problem.

“One dramatic sign was the big influx of Jews.” Perversity resulted from that fact that “the old elite used to get on fairly well with the country it was set over. Members of the old social upper-crust elite were richer and better educated than the public at large, but approached life on basically the same terms.” The new, heavily Jewish elite, Gelernter argued, is not only different from the non-Jewish masses, “it loathes the nation it rules.”

I’ve often wondered if the same sentiment applies to the Coen brothers. Having won multiple Oscars, they certainly qualify as elites. And like many of those in Gelernter’s essay, they are Jewish, having grown up in a predominantly Jewish section of Minneapolis.

Ethan Coen has commented that he always felt the outsider, one who never identified with “flat-voweled Scandinavian-American Minnesota.” That world, of course, is the object of the Coens’ hit film Fargo (1996), a cold world in which non-Jews are far from brilliant and unpredictably violent. Kindly but slow-thinking police chief Marge Gunderson (played by Frances McDormand, Joel Coen’s real-life wife) is able to outwit Minnesota criminals only because they are even less intelligent.

Gaear Grimsrud, for instance, is arguably not even intelligent enough to be considered a real human. He kills without forethought or remorse, and in one famous scene is caught feeding the remains of his crime partner into a wood chipper in back of their cabin hideaway. The red effluent issuing from the machine stands in stark contrast to the white Minnesota snow.

This scene recalls the prose of another Jewish member of the new elite, novelist Philip Roth.  In one passage from Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth mocks the barbarity of white Americans:

Let the goyim sink their teeth into whatever lowly creature crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth . . . let them eat vulture, let them eat ape-meat and skunk if they like—a diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists. All they know, these imbecilic eaters of the execrable, is to swagger, to insult, to sneer, and sooner or later to hit. Oh, also they know how to go out into the woods with a gun, these geniuses, and kill innocent wild deer . . . You stupid goyim! Reeking of beer and empty of ammunition, home you head, a dead animal (formerly alive) strapped to each fender . . . and then, in your houses, you take these deer . . . cut them up into pieces, and cook them in a pot. There isn’t enough to eat in this world, they have to eat up the deer as well! They will eat anything, anything they can get their big goy hands on! And the terrifying corollary, they will do anything as well.

Roth’s worldview, as well as that of Joel and Ethan Coen as presented in Fargo, highlights a strong cleavage in Jewish thinking differentiating Jews from non-Jews. In biblical terms, this was the story of brothers Esau and Jacob. The elder brother Esau, hairy like an animal, is the archetypal goy. Jacob, the clever younger brother, represents the Jew. It’s rather surprising to see how the dichotomy has persisted.

Three decades ago, Hollywood insider Ben Stein added a new dimension to understanding this split. In his 1976 essay “Whatever happened to small-town America?” he explored television’s pronounced hostility toward rural (read Christian) America. Overwhelmingly Jewish, the television elite, like its Hollywood counterpart, imagined that small-town Gentiles naturally meant Jews harm. “As a result, when he [a Jewish TV writer] gets the chance, he attacks the small town on television or the movies.”

Echoing Gelernter, Stein wrote that “A national culture is making war upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced in the same country.” The result is that “in the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed out on television screens and movie screens every day.”

Sounding like a Hollywood informant for Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, Stein concluded that “People are told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their society is in decline, it deserves to be.”

One result of this sentiment was that shows portraying Gentile American life in small towns simply disappeared. The change on American television in the early 1970s was so abrupt that Wikipedia even has an entry on it called “The Rural Purge.”

Another result was that when images of small towns did appear after this purge, what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life” was featured. Thus, for example, the fictional Ohio town of Fernwood depicted in Fernwood 2 Night “is full of bigots, Klansmen, quacks, hillbillies, and religious frauds.” Fernwood 2 Night was produced by Norman Lear whose All in the Family is perhaps the quintessential anti-white TV show: stupid and bigoted Archie Bunker surrounded by enlightened liberals and assorted multi-cultural types who delight in making fun of him.

Having grown up in a small town, I have far different memories of life in such a place. Put simply, it was a wonderful area in which to grow up, and I always consider it superior to what is available in American cities and suburbs today. One of the biggest changes is to the people themselves: in my youth nearly ninety percent of Americans were of European descent, while today that figure has plummeted to around sixty-five percent.

Another difference is that the non-WASP elite today, the one that “loathes the nation it rules,” is composed even more of the elite Jews Gelernter and Stein discussed. With the huge rise in crime against whites and the vast array of preferences in society for non-whites, I’m probably not the only person to think that McCarthy’s title No Country for Old Men could just as easily read No Country for White Men.

Come to think of it, as I consider the rise of non-white Hollywood stars, I realize the subtext of many movies is just that. For instance, Remember the Titans (2000), a high school football story starring Denzel Washington, is really an allegory about the replacement of whites with non-whites. I wonder how I’ll react to the Coens’ version of McCarthy’s book.

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

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: A White New York Times Editor Converts to Judaism

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Just how powerful is Jewish influence over the prestige media in America?  So powerful, non-Jews are willing to sell their souls — literally, if selling a soul can be literal — to prove their fealty to Jewish power and achieve journalistic success.  Consider the revealing essay of Dana Jennings, a New York Times editor, appearing below an illustration of a baseball hat reading “My Other Hat is a Yarmulke” in the “Week in Review” section on Sunday.

Jennings, born Protestant in New Hampshire, describes a conversion that came about because of his Jewish wife and interest in the supposedly more open-minded religion of Judaism.  The marriage happened in 1981, and the conversion, not until 2004.  Along the way, “I sought, and found, solace, refuge and a way of being in the Judaism of my wife and sons … found a depth that had been missing from the religion of my childhood.”

Jennings amazingly claims his conversion “isn’t much different from other American journeys to a new faith — whether it be from megachurch to Zen monastery, or from mosque to the Cross.”

Jennings is deluded.  It is impossible to observe the saturation of big media, especially the New York Times, with Jewish reporters, editors, owners, columnists and opinion writers, and come away with the conclusion a non-Jew journalist’s conversion was a simple matter of “yearning for a different faith.”  A very convenient yearning, as it happens.

Imagine, for instance, a Times staffer’s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity.  How often do you think that’s happened?  And what do you think the reaction would be?

Right. Horror-stricken faces, uncomfortable silence, snickers and whispers.  I can even imagine a confrontation over the matter, after a few drinks at a party.

But Judaism?  Think of all the new opportunities for warm chit-chat Jennings now has with the Jews of the New York Times, as well as the power elite in his New Jersey suburb and synagogue.

Years ago, while working at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a cub reporter, I watched as one white gentile reporter, a woman, married a Jewish man, and considered conversion.  Another white gentile reporter, also a woman, had already done so, and was buried in the conversion classes.

A third reporter, a Jewish woman, proudly told us that she was reclaiming her Jewish surname after it had been Anglicanized for a generation by her father.  I suppose this was meant to demonstrate heroism and ethnic authenticity, but given that the paper’s top editor was Jewish and there were Jews in “power positions” all throughout the paper, it looks in retrospect more opportunistic than heroic.

The point is that Mr. Jennings is hardly unique. A full investigation would probably reveal many other instances of white (or even black and Hispanic) journalists converting to Judaism, marrying Jews, adopting Jewish goals and values, taking care to focus on Jewish cares and concerns, and so on. (As I’ve written in the past, journalism in America — the New York Times being a good example — is overloaded with stories by, for and about Jews and their concerns.)

I might also note that converting to the religion practiced by the power elite in any society is not unique.  Once upon a time in America, you might have had conversions to Christianity for the same reasons. (One of my  ancestors converted from Quakerism to Episcopalianism to better maneuver socially on the Upper East Side.)  But today’s conversions — to Judaism — show you who holds the power now.

(For an interesting gauge along these lines, try reading the New York Times wedding announcements some time, and tally the percentage of ceremonies performed by a rabbi.)

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What is surprising, however, is that a journalist as clever as Mr. Jennings would trumpet his awkward attempt to join the Jews and not see how transparent his motivations are.  I can even imagine Jews themselves laughing about a line like this:  “We Jews speak of the ancient sages Hillel and Rabbi Akiva as if we just had an expresso with them at Starbucks.”

But we should thank Mr. Jennings for his revelations.  We now have one more explanation for why big media treats Jews as the center of the universe, and whites as non-existent. The producers of that media themselves — even if white — strive to shed their own white existence and adopt a Jewish one.

None of this, of course, makes for “spiritual enrichment.”  It’s craven, unprincipled and pathetic, and it hastens both the spiritual — and perhaps literal — death of whites.  The conversions we really need are to a healthy and self-affirming white group consciousness.

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

Who Is Responsible for Fatherless Black Families? The Reverend Jeremiah Wright: A Memory from the Army

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Few people I know had a more abrupt transition from their college education to the workplace than I did.  I was enamored of the liberal arts, majoring in philosophy, with a minor in English literature.  Practical studies were anathema.  But then I graduated.

I soon learned that there is not much you can do with a B.A. in philosophy.  I recall visiting an employment agency shortly after I graduated.  “What is philosophy?” the lady interviewing me asked, noticing the degree on my application.  “It’s the study of the larger questions in life — truth, meaning, beauty — that kind of thing,” I responded.  There was a pause.  “Well, did you learn to type?”

So it was that I joined the Army, as an enlisted man.  That experience, particularly the six weeks of boot camp, brought an intense dose of reality therapy — particularly racial reality, given that my boot camp and many of my assigned units were 30%–40% black.  I needed that therapy, but it was painful.

I began thinking about some of my Army experiences recently when I was listening to the speech given on Christmas Day, 2007, by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the now retired pastor of Barack Obama’s  Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.  Here is an excerpt from Rev. Wright’s speech:

Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people.  The Romans were rich, the Romans were Italians, which means they were European, which means they were white, and the Romans ran everything in Jesus’s country.  It just came to me within the last few weeks you’all why so many folks are hating on Barack Obama.  He doesn’t fit the model.  He ain’t white, he ain’t rich, and he ain’t privileged.  Hillary fits the mold . . . Hillary never had a cab whiz past her and not pick her up because her skin was the wrong color . . . Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home — Barack was.  Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people . . . Hillary can never know that.

There are many statements in this speech that are untrue or noxiously ethnocentric, or both.  But one statement in particular stuck in my craw:  “Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home —  Barack was.”  The inference seems to be that white racism is the cause, or at least a major cause, of fatherless black families.  I don’t buy it.

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In the Army I was a legal clerk.  One of my tasks was to help prepare basic legal documents for the troops.  One such document was an affidavit of paternity, by which a soldier acknowledged that he was the father of a child whose mother he never married.  With the passage of decades I do not recall the precise purpose of the affidavit, but I believe it entitled the mother and child to certain Army benefits. I do recall rather vividly, however, the day a black sergeant — I will call him Sergeant Smith — came in to sign an affidavit of paternity.  He and I chatted, and he cheerfully told me that this was the fourth affidavit he had executed while in the Army, all for different women.  He was not embarrassed by this fact.  To the contrary, he was proud of it.  His attitude suggested he had no particular intention of taking responsibility for the children he had spawned and that executing the affidavit was about all the women should expect from him.

I went into the Army a liberal on racial matters, and when I encountered Sergeant Smith I was still in transition to more realistic views.  Smith’s cavalier attitude moved me a long step forward in that transition.  I remember asking myself “Who is going to act as a father for this guy’s kids?”  By the time I left the Army a few years later, I was confident I knew the answer: No one.  During my time in service I met so many black males who had the same attitude as Smith toward fathering children (I’m not saying I didn’t meet a few irresponsible whites as well) that I concluded this “beget and forget” attitude was a core trait of a wide sector of black culture.

Statistics bear out the accuracy of this conclusion.  According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2005, 69% of black births were to unmarried mothers, a rate that has been increasing for years. And the social consequences of fatherless families are horrendous.  Crime rates, drug and alcohol abuse, emotional and behavioral problems, school drop out rates, and a host of other social ills are much higher, sometimes by several multiples, in fatherless families than in families with an active and committed father.

Liberal-in-transition though I was, even when I was in the Army I could not credit the idea that the prevalent fatherlessness of  black families could be ascribed to a supposed white racism.  The Ku Klux Klan was not forcing Sergeant Smith to impregnate black women and then abandon them.  To the contrary, Smith’s procreative adventures seemed a gesture of defiance toward white mores.  If there is free moral choice in this world — and I believe there is — Smith made his choice as freely as many of the rest of us have chosen to act the role of fathers for our children.

I do not know what has become of Sergeant Smith and his children.  I do know that a year after his visit to my office I learned he had impregnated another woman.  I can surmise that at least some of his five (or more) children followed their biological father’s dad-free example in spawning children of their own.  And I can surmise as well that much of the daunting social costs from this irresponsible parenting — the crime, the substance abuse, the morass in public education in most large cities —  is being borne, and borne rather patiently, by the white society that Mr. Obama’s former pastor so fervidly castigates as racist.

Travis Woodson is an attorney practicing on the West Coast.

Derbyshire on MacDonald

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British immigrant commentator John Derbyshire is at it again, firing a tiny salvo in the direction of evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald. Since discovering MacDonald’s corpus of writing on Jews, Derbyshire has had a like-dislike relationship with the author’s work.

In a column on VDARE last week, Derbyshire said he was satisfied with the account of an interview with MacDonald as told by Jon Entine, author of Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. Entine surprisingly quotes MacDonald as saying “I’m a scientific racist” and likens MacDonald’s work to (you guessed it) The Protocols of Zion. Entine then summed up MacDonald’s work as making the argument that “Jews have an almost diabolical, biologically programmed plan of dominance.”

Diabolical? As in the devil? Can any fair reader of MacDonald’s social science prose make such a claim?  For his part, MacDonald vehemently disagreed with Entine’s version. “I never wrote anything like ‘the devious nature of Jews.’ Such a statement would be an outrageous overgeneralization. Rather, I simply stated that Jewish identification and interests among the Boasians were unstated in their public writings and that the movement was couched in the language of science and universalism.” What, then, could Derbyshire mean when he claims “Entine’s account seems fair to me”?

Derbyshire’s first major piece on MacDonald appeared in the March 10, 2003 issue of The American Conservative under the title “The Marx of the Anti-Semites.” There his take on the book was mixed, beginning with “The Culture of Critique includes many good things. . . . Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field.” Derbyshire even validates an important point of MacDonald’s work: “These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned with—Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on—were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were.”

But Derbyshire then concludes that “This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term, an anti-Semitic book.” Perhaps, however, MacDonald can be forgiven, since, as Derbyshire muses, MacDonald suffers the defects of being “prickly and unworldly.” Yet the mildly generous Derbyshire nonetheless leaves the reader with the ominous conclusion: “I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls that my interpretation is the correct one, and that there is not malice lurking behind MacDonald’s elaborate sociological jargon.” (See MacDonald’s reply.)

To be fair, Derbyshire is the proverbial writer caught between a rock and a hard place. While he aims to write honestly — wherever the chips may fall, as he implies — he’s also exquisitely aware of the risks a non-Jew takes when writing in a forthright manner about things Jewish. Worse, as a self-described minor name in American journalism, he fears that any criticism of Jews may well spell career destruction.

Derbyshire made an excellent case for this risk in a remarkable exchange with Joey Kurtzman, a Jewish editor of the website Jewcy.com, asserting:

So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT — not ever again — be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.

Despite this conscious awareness of why he won’t give MacDonald’s work the praise it deserves, Derbyshire continues with his mixed feelings: “I found his first two books tough-going, jargony, and not very well written.” Later, he complains about MacDonald’s “rather unscholarly language in speaking about the ‘manipulation’ of Gentile culture by Jewish intellectuals, and so on.”

Elsewhere, however, Derbyshire felt otherwise (and to his credit, he is a smart enough writer to admit to contradicting himself at times): “Kevin has interesting things to say . . . He ought to be heard.” “The Culture of Critique is an interesting book. (It is also, by the way, better-written than most books by academics.)”

He even admits that he finds the parts about the “partly malign influence of Jews on modern American culture very persuasive.” And then it’s back to snark, referring to MacDonald’s work as “some rather abstruse socio-historical theories cooked up by a cranky small-college faculty member.” This last crack, of course, recalls Judith Shulevitz’s nasty comment in her 2000 Slate article: “A man in his 50s, MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a third-rate school, California State University in Long Beach.” (She was wrong; MacDonald was and is a full professor.)

Worse, in his VDARE column last week, after agreeing with Entine’s smear of MacDonald, Derbyshire repeats his praises for Yuri Slezkine’s exposé, The Jewish Century. (See MacDonald’s review of Slezkine.) Derbyshire writes that he finally understands the importance of the assertions about the Jewish role in the Bolshevik revolution. As Slezkine tells us, “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.” Estimates are that up to twenty million non-Jews died during this “rise of the Jews,” prompting Slezkine to call such Jews “Stalin’s willing executioners.”

One might question the orientation of Derbyshire’s moral compass when he can reconcile the above with his claim that Jews add far more to a nation than they take away. Spain, he believes, suffered greatly for expelling its Jews, and America without its great wave of Jewish immigrants indisputably “would have been worse off.” Indeed, he believes “American conservatism is proud of its Jews, and glad to have them on board.” Needless to say, critics of Jewish neoconservatives, among others, would likely disagree. For one thing, the attachment of Jewish neoconservatives to an open borders immigration policy will in short order, if it hasn’t already, leave precious little to be conservative about.

Derbyshire’s own opinion of MacDonald is that “he is a plain reactionary, at least so far as the Jews in America are concerned. . . . I think MacDonald is in love with 1950—with the old Gentile supremacy.” But for members of MacDonald’s group of European Americans—the overwhelming majority then—1950 was on average probably far better for them than today’s America.

And what’s wrong with a group trying to retain supremacy? As historian Jerry Z. Miller’s recent Foreign Affairs essay reminds us, ethnonationalism is the rule around the world (most notably, for purposes of this essay, in Israel). Viewed in cross-cultural perspective, the immigration policies throughout the West that will inevitably lead to the displacement of white populations are provincial indeed.

Oddly, it is Derbyshire who seems to be caught back in 1950, when Jews were, in his view, responsible for “the wonderful vitality of American popular culture.” But should we today classify South Park’s scatological holiday special “Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo” or the equally vulgar performances of Sarah Silverman as part of this “wonderful vitality”? More than a few observers have concluded—to borrow a phrase—that American popular culture has gone to hell in a handbasket. And it’s been progressively more Jewish the whole way, as argued in the preface the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique that you reviewed.

Again, when you write that “it’s a scandal that Kevin’s books are not more widely reviewed and read” and that shutting them out from the public forum is “absurd and unfair,” I applaud you. In the end, however, your Jewish sparring partner Joey Kurtzman comes across as the greater booster of MacDonald’s work. Recall that Kurtzman wrote:

MacDonald has presented us with a fascinating and genuinely novel examination of the history and internal workings of the Jewish world. His trilogy is a hell of a read. To any Jewcy readers tired of pious, ‘hooray-for-us!’ Jewish historiography, or just interested in seeing traditional Jewish history through a kaleidoscope, I happily recommend it.

Let me propose a deal: we readers will try to be more sympathetic if you will try to more forcefully challenge the (largely Jewish) forces which now compose what Buckley once called “the prevailing structure of taboos.” You know it won’t be easy; after all, one of your exchanges was titled, with reference to Jewish power, “Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You: Criticizing Jews is professional suicide.” But your own vow to write honestly demands that you try harder.

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

Stuff White People Like: The beginnings of racial self-consciousness?

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Christian Lander’s stuffwhitepeoplelike blogspot is getting huge traffic and some media attention. Of course, it’s not all white people they’re talking about, mainly yuppie/progressive/educated/non-race-conscious whites with disposable income.

Some of  what these white people like is pathetic, like having blacks as cultural heroes:

[Mos Def] is everything that white people dream about: authentic (”he’s from Brooklyn!”), funny (”he was on Chapelle show!”), artistic (have you heard “Black on Both Sides?”), an actor (”he’s in the new Gondry film!”) and not white (”I don’t see race”).”

(Note: For those readers who haven’t heard of him, Lander writes that despite being white, Michel Gondry is another cultural icon that white people like, most likely because he did cool things like direct David Chappelle’s Block Partyand lots of music videos for bands like Daft Punk. His latest is Be Kind Rewindwhose title alone should make it a white person classic. Lander says “it might be the biggest event in white person film since The Royal Tenenbaums.”)

Another of Lander’s examples shows the powerful sense of guilt that seems to haunt all whites, even for trivial stuff like not recycling:

If you are in a situation where a white person produces an empty bottle, watch their actions. They will first say ‘where’s the recycling?’ If you say “we don’t recycle,” prepare for some awkwardness. They will make a move to throw the bottle away, they will hesitate, and then ultimately throw the bottle away. But after they return look in their eyes. All they can see is the bottle lasting forever in a landfill, trapping small animals. It will eat at them for days, at this point you should say ‘I’m just kidding, the recycling is under the sink. Can you fish out that bottle?’ And they will do it 100% of the time!

So the bad news (not exactly news) is that whites are not at all racially conscious and even look up to non-whites as cultural icons. And they are excruciatingly scrupulous about doing the right thing, even when it comes to recycling a plastic bottle.

But the good news is that whites may at least be beginning to see these traits as white. As Gregory Rodriguez (who doubtless eagerly awaits the minority status of whites) notes in a Feb. 25 L.A. Times op-ed:

As unusual as Lander’s site is, it is also part of a sociological trend among whites who live in increasingly non-Anglo cities and regions: their transformation into a minority group. Whites used to think of themselves as standard-issue American — they had the luxury of not having to grapple with the significance of their own racial background; they were “us” and everyone else was “ethnic.” Not anymore.

Demographic shifts have put a new kind of pressure on that category of people who were once just considered the norm,” says Mike Hill, author of “After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority.” “White identity is becoming particularized and minoritized. No longer the normative category, it’s becoming one of many identities.

This pressure naturally leads to a greater sense of self-consciousness as the new minority begins to negotiate their relationships with members of other minorities (everyone else).

Exactly right. It’s a very small and even grotesque beginning, given the traits that Lander points to. But perhaps at long last white people will start thinking of themselves as a group — a group with some very peculiar and maladaptive traits. Does any other group worship cultural icons from another race?  Is any other race so incredibly prone to guilt that they have an anxiety attack for failing to recycle a bottle. People like this doubtless feel a sense of moral uplift when they vote for Barack Obama.

Being so spectacularly guilt-ridden and self-hating is perhaps viable in a society that is overwhelmingly and permanently white. But such attitudes are suicidal in a society rapidly becoming non-white.

Part of the white delusion is to suppose that deep down, everyone is just like them and could be made to be just like them with a little tinkering:

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

A great way to make white people feel good is to tell them about situations where poor people changed how they were doing things because they were given the ‘whiter’ option.

In fact of course, there is no reason at all to suppose that the non-white future will be at all like these pathetic self-haters. There is no reason whatever to suppose that the soon-to-be non-white majority will be so fastidiously moral and anxiety ridden. Unlike whites, these groups are aggressively asserting their interests, and there is little reason to think they will stop when they become the majority.

Indeed, quite a few of the prospective non-white majority have the same negative opinion of whites that these progressive whites have of themselves. Mos Def is their cultural icon, but he is also a “socially conscious” rapper, who is nothing if not deeply ethnocentric and none too fond of white people.

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But these white people are still living in a dream world where they lunch onexpensive sandwiches and agonize about getting the exactly right high-performance bicycle.

It’s going to be a rude awakening.

Lander points out:

Too many white people don’t like to be reminded that they’re white. They like to think that white people are those evil corporate right-wingers or the uneducated masses who vote the wrong way. But ‘enlightened whites’ are white people too and have just as much of a group mentality as they think the red staters have.

They do indeed have a group mentality, but one that is leading them to oblivion. Making the group mentality explicit and then deconstructing it for its child-like ignorance of real-world realities is certainly a start.

American Renaissance Conference: The Eleventh Chair

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Eds: The following item raises the interesting question of which other peoples, in particular Jews, ought to be regarded as allies, or even friends, in our quest for saving Euro-American people from on-going displacement and eventual destruction. It’s an incident that occurred at a recent public meeting organized by Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance magazine. How many individuals of an ethny need to behave in a way that hampers our cause before we simply write them all off as seriously unhelpful if not downright untrustworthy? Can we afford to waste time sifting the helpful from the harmful? Or do we try to avoid wasting much time on the sifting while accepting their help when offered, but not allowing them into any position in which undetected deleterious types could do us any harm?

This piece also illustrates cultural incompatibility, which, by itself, can pose severe problems for forming useful alliances.

Pulling the eleventh chair up to a table set for ten

All of the narrow rectangular meeting tables were immediately removed when the meeting broke Saturday afternoon. They were then replaced with large banquet rounds set with ten chairs: a place setting for each chair on the table for the evening’s banquet. I’d arrived early. I have to use a cane now, I walk slowly and feebly, and I hate being jostled in a crowd so I was already sitting comfortably in my seat when the crowd poured in through the ballroom entrances.

The rounds filled quickly. More than a few tardy dinner guests had to scramble to get a seat. The tables were close together. I had my back to the New York/New Jersey table. In a very few minutes, only a few stragglers were still milling about amid the matrix of banquet staff who had started to service their tables.

Suddenly, someone hit my chair with another chair. I was particularly nonplussed by the consequences of the impact. I had been in the process of leaning forward to pour myself a glass of water when I found myself up on the chair’s two front legs with my face practically in my salad.

I regained my balance and instinctively turned to see that it was a young man who had hit me and he was anxiously trying to jam an eleventh chair under the table next to mine. He had opportunistically exploited two empty chairs that had been briefly occupied but whose occupants had risen to talk to an acquaintance a few yards away.

I don’t remember anyone ever telling the young man that the entire table was already occupied but I do know that no one checked the intruder’s advance. The ten chairs were more loosely arranged to make room for the eleventh and the “bull in the China shop” sat down and began eating his salad.

I’d partially turned around to face my table but not completely. I am an elderly woman now, increasingly wary of angry young men at my back where I can’t see them and I kept as careful an eye as I could and my ears wide open to observe as best I could what was going on at that table behind me.

I was then able to overhear the fascinating exchange that soon took place as the two men who had been talking with an acquaintance returned to the table to claim their seats. There were now eleven guests on eleven chairs at the table.

The table itself had only been set for ten.

“Waiter, Waiter!”

“Yes sir?” the approaching waiter replied.

“I didn’t get a salad. I don’t have a salad.”

The problem registered on the waiter who was glancing around the table counting the place settings.

“Sir,” the waiter replied, after finishing his count. “There is no more salad.”

The disappointed guest replied in New Yawkese.

“Whaddya’ mean there is no more salad?”

The waiter understood that there was a single dinner allocated for each of those place settings. He left the table, consulted with the chief waiter and then delivered the salad but explained that there was simply no room on the table for an eleventh place setting and someone had to move.

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All eyes now turned to the intruder who had begun talking loudly from the very first moment he drew his chair up to the table. His behavior demanded that everyone at the table acknowledge him. I could not hear everything he said, but got the general tone when one of the young people corroborated my darkest observations by asking him directly: “When will the sarcasm end?”

The intruder continued to aggress, focusing his attention on one then another occupant of the table as I could tell from the movements of his head back and forth and the volume and staccato of his voice. The two young friends who had left the table for a few minutes to talk deferred to the intruder and withdrew to look for seats at another table, but they returned disappointed a few minutes later. There were no more seats and the wait staff at all the other tables had robotically refused to set an eleventh place setting at any table whose predetermined maximum comfortable limit was ten.

There was going to be a confrontation.

And there I was, just where I didn’t need to be; adjacent to a heated argument. It got so bad Jared Taylor was called to investigate the commotion. He leaned over the table, eloquent as always, and said a few words but soon withdrew without quelling the conflict which simply devolved into a telling low-intensity verbal joust driven by the aggressive manner of the intruder. This in turn provoked a defensive reaction by the rest of the table.

The intruder and the eleventh chair remained.

He stood his irrational ground and ruined the banquet for everyone at the table forcing them all (and me from my discrete distance of course) to suffer his outrageous behavior. Those at his table who were not engaged in the thread went mechanically through the meal resentful (I am certain) of the additional anxiety that they were forced to bear throughout the entire meal.

Some of the conversation I was unable to follow, but I heard two arguments that bear repeating that identified the intruder and why he conflicted with his hosts.

The intruder, who initially said he was an “agent of ZOG” (I understood the ‘Z’ to stand for Zionism), identified himself as Jewish. The protagonists in the thread, I was later able to conclude, were not Jewish. They were European American Christians. They differed on a few fundamental issues:

The intruder refused to acknowledge that he had indeed created a problem at all when he drew the eleventh chair up to a table that had been set for ten. All attempts to make him do so were repulsed. He would simply repeat the same things over and over. Regardless of the logic that was offered him, he continued to aggress. This was not a rational issue for him. He was fatefully engaged.

On the other hand, his protagonists were simply inconvenienced. They were not as forcefully engaged in the thread and seemed genuinely resentful of the intrusion rather than purposefully combative.

At one point the Jew loudly commented, “You can’t be self-hating. Everyone is selfish at the core. Nobody does an altruistic thing.” and one of the other men at the table asked him why he would raise such an argument.  His point was that the phrase “self hatred” as commonly used necessarily assumed an individual’s betrayal of his group. If “self hatred” did not exist, then group consciousness and perhaps even loyal groups did not exist; this obviously contradicted the Jew’s remarks.

The Jew was clever in defending his position of radical individualism, but one of the non-Jews in the thread responded:  “You are suggesting a total individualism that leaves no room for group consciousness. The people at this gathering cherish their group identity. Why foist that nonsense on us when you know we know better?”

The matter dropped like a rock.

The next argument I heard was over the phrase “Holocaust denial.” The Jew said there was a table full of “Holocaust Deniers” over there and one of the men asked him in response, “They call themselves Holocaust Revisionists. Why do you modify the phrase to polarize their position? That’s not how they see it.”

The Jew said, “What difference does it make whether it was four million or six million? It was murder!”

The non-Jew responded, “They’re historians. They’re supposed to get the details right. It’s what they do. I disagree that it is a yes or no question, as black and white as you suggest.” But he’d started his response without realizing the Jew had already dropped the matter completely, thereby avoiding having to deal with this response. They then drifted off into another thread I was unable to hear and I returned to my meal.

When dinner was over, the after dinner speaker was introduced, and most of the table occupants turned their chairs toward the speaker and away from the intruder. The conversation was over. Just before the speaker finished, the Jewish intruder got up from his eleventh chair and left without saying a word. When I sensed him withdrawing his chair from under the table behind me I braced myself for the inevitable impact. I don’t know that anyone cared to see where he had gone. The anxiety level surely dropped and there was perhaps even a sigh of relief.

I turned to finish my cheesecake.

The “Jewish question” surfaced in one guise or another in almost all of the speeches that were given at this year’s American Renaissance Conference. It is a source of increasing tension; and here was the entire problem, telescoped and enacted in front of me, in the clash over a place setting.

There are certain social rules one assumes everyone knows.

You do not pull the eleventh chair up to a table set for ten.

Eye on Hollywood: The Interpreter

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Nicole Kidman is a stunning woman.  Standing at just under six feet tall and sporting strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, she cuts an impressive figure.  Needless to say, she is white.  In her 2005 film The Interpreter, however, her heart clearly lies back in black Africa, where she once had an African lover involved in national politics.

Multilingual, fastidious, idealistic and dedicated to her work as a interpreter at the United Nations, Kidman’s character Silvia yearns to restore the hope that a once promising leader has destroyed in his nation of Matobo.  (The fictional leader President Edmond Zuwanie and the country bear a strong resemblance to real life leader Robert Mugabe and the disaster that is Zimbabwe, though in the film Zuwanie is played by an actor who is nearly white.)

This racial emphasis is important because Silvia wishes to kill Zuwanie for his transgressions against “her people” (and not just her family members that have been murdered).  Forcing Zuwanie to read from a book he had written years before, Silvia gazes at the accompanying picture of a small African boy and tenderly utters “That little boy was my country.”  To drive home this message, she closes the film by telling her almost-lover (Sean Penn), “I’m going home.”  “I never had time to tell you how much I miss Africa.”

Perhaps this is merely an interesting twist to a Hollywood romance.  On the other hand, it can be seen as a celluloid depiction of what Hollywood stars are doing with their real lives.  To wit, many not only agitate on behalf of oppressed non-whites (think Richard Gere and the Tibetans), some have actually adopted non-white children or had their own with non-white spouses.

For her part, Kidman and her then-husband Tom Cruise adopted two children, one, Connor Anthony Cruise, an African-American born on Jan. 17, 1995. This would have made Connor ten years old when The Interpreter was released, so perhaps Kidman’s sentiments in the film were drawn from this family link.

Director Steven Spielberg, of course, is the “godfather” of the movement, with two adopted African American children, Theo and Mikaela.  If Spielberg is the godfather of the movement, then Madonna should be its godmother.  In 2006 she adopted a young boy from Malawi in southeastern Africa.

Some stars, on the other hand, have their own children.  Nicolas Cage, for instance, met his Korean American wife Alice Kim when she was his waitress.  Cage was 40 at the time and Alice 20, and they now have a son, Kal-El.

For sheer theatrics, however, Angelina Jolie takes the cake.  While married to Billy Bob Thorton, she adopted “Maddox” from Cambodia. (Naturally, Maddox was named Hollywood’s best looking kid by  Life and Style magazine.) Then she adopted a six-month-old girl from Ethiopia, now named Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt (Brad Pitt is Jolie’s current significant other).  Finally, she adopted a three-year-old boy from Vietnam, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt.  When Jolie and Pitt had their own baby, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, in Namibia in 2006, Pitt confirmed that their newly-born daughter would have a Namibian passport.

Jolie is no slouch when it comes to crossing borders: gossip columns are abuzz with talk of her rumored lesbian relationship with Japanese American model Jenny Shimizu.  (In turn, Shimizu has been heard to make claims that she was involved with Madonna at the same time she was with Jolie.) Perhaps we could call a film made from this relationship Guess Who’s Coming to Brokeback Mountain.

There is no question that in recent years Hollywood has widened its horizons when it comes to depicting its heroes, nearly all of whom were white in the past.  Whether there is any causal connection (in either direction) to the real-life racial crossings made by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars remains to be seen.  One point seems clear: Many in Hollywood have begun to believe Hollywood’s own propaganda.

Kidman, Madonna and Jolie, though, can certainly afford to live such exotic, non-traditional lives. But the working and middle class white girls who respond to this propaganda by imitating such behavior are rarely rewarded with red carpets and paparazzi.  Yet Hollywood, for its part, seems in no mood to show the downside of this kind of diversity.

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