White Pathology/Guilt

Immigrant flood unleashes moral status competition, emotional incontinence and hypocrisy

The status war has finally broken out in earnest over the Syrian refugees. The first shot was fired by the glamorous blonde Icelandic blogger who offered to adopt a Syrian child and encouraged her countrymen to let out their spare rooms to the refugees. Around 10,000 Icelanders have responded positively to her Facebook campaign and her picture has been seen around the world as a result. Here’s a video of Dutch welcoming refugees with song.

Then the Finnish Prime Minister weighed in with an offer to let out his second house and got plaudits all around for this selfless demonstration. Again the Finns rallied around and the offers have been pouring in.

But now the big rollers have arrived. Sir Bob Geldof says he will put three Syrian families in his rambling country house in Kent and put another one in his London place. The publicity avalanche generated by this has been predictably huge.

It was very generous of Saint Bob but only fair as the humanitarianism business has been so good to him.  Back in 1985 Bob’s pop music career had long fizzled out when he had the bright idea of a record and concert for African famine relief, the big cause at the time.

His business partner remembered that when they first dreamed it up in a greasy spoon café, Bob was so broke he couldn’t pay for his bacon sandwich. Today Geldof is one of the wealthiest men in the British media — thanks to Live Aid. He really did show that you can do well by doing good. Read more

Empathy and pathological altruism for refugees in an Oxfordshire town

This is a footnote to Tim Murray’s current TOO article, “Pulling at Our heartstring: How the Enemy Within Uses Our Empathy Against Us.” In this Guardian article, note the reference to the famous photo and its effect in motivating empathy and (pathological) altruism:

The school hall was packed, with all eyes fixed on the video screen and its images of overladen boats, lines of refugees and shell-shattered buildings in Syria.

This was no normal Sunday service for the congregation of the Cornerstone Baptist church, who gather each week at the local primary school in Thame, south Oxfordshire.

Sunday’s service was dedicated to the plight of refugees, mainly Syrian, but those from Eritrea and elsewhere too.

The pastor, Paddy Harris, had thrown open the doors to all in the local community, to anyone troubled, especially by recent tragic images, including that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi. To anyone that wanted to find a way to help, he said. Now, more than 100 people – parents with young children, teenagers, the elderly, a whole cross section – had gathered.

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Pulling Our Heart Strings to Bring Us Down: How the Enemy Within Uses Our Empathy Against Us

“If anyone does not take care of his own relatives, especially his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” 1st Timothy 5:8

Dead Syrian child washed up on Turkish beach

Dead Syrian child washed up on Turkish beach

A year ago, I came very close to falling victim to a variant of the so-called “Grandparents Scam.” The scam works like this. Someone posing as your granddaughter or grandson, affecting distress, phones to tell you that he or she is in deep trouble in a distant land. She has been jailed for a given offence, and is too embarrassed to ask her parents for help. So she asks for your money. And you send it.

To pull it off, the scammer must make the victim feel that she is indeed a relative that you have lost touch with. That’s the first hurdle. But the second one is to convince the victim of the urgency of sending the money. You must act now before it is too late. Hurry.

Once the victim’s emotional button has been pressed — and there is little time to stop and think — sending a money order to her fake lawyer post-haste is a likely response. In my case, two imposters —who should be given an Oscar for their performance — succeeded in making me believe that my nephew — whom I had not seen for years — was about to be sent to jail if money was not sent to his lawyer immediately. It is a long story, but I almost bought the pitch. Imagine, a ‘smart’ guy like me. Read more

Hearts of Darkness: Minority Worship and the Scandal at “Kids Company”

Over the past nineteen years Britain’s liberal elite, including three prime ministers, the Creative Director of the BBC, and the rock band Coldplay, have regularly been asked for money by a female Iranian psychotherapist who dresses like a Nigerian transvestite and has the exotic name of Camila Batmanghelidjh. The liberal elite have responded by giving Camila many millions of pounds. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Camila Batmanghelidjh: “Feed me!”
Camila Batmanghelidjh: “Feed me!”

A lot, it now transpires. Camila’s lavishly funded children’s charity, the emetically named “Kids Company,” has closed its doors amid allegations of gross financial mismanagement and waste. “More than 36,000” of its vulnerable charges will now have to fend for themselves in a cruel and uncaring world. Or so Camila claims. Unfortunately for her, even the devoutly liberal Guardian and Independent have begun to raise serious doubts about the reliability of her statements. When inconvenient facts and self-serving delusion meet between Camila Batmanghelidjh’s ears, your money should always be on self-serving delusion to carry the day.

Kid and Ego

In fact, she reminds me of a cross between Tony Blair and the late Princess Diana. Like Blair, she is a narcissistic confidence-trickster with an unwavering faith in her own saintliness. Like Diana, she is a manipulative autocrat who advances a raging ego by pretending a passionate devotion to children’s welfare. She is expert at the parasitic manipulation I discussed in the article “Verbal Venom.” Mason wasps paralyse juicy caterpillars by injecting them with neuro-toxin. Camila Batmanghelidjh paralysed juicy donors by injecting them with saccharine sentimentality. One example: “the six-year-old she describes finding in his underpants in the snow, unfed by his crack-addicted mother, surviving off scraps from neighbours.” Read more

Thoughts on the German Dispossession

europe without  borders

Meine Ruh’ ist hin,
Mein Herz ist schwer.

Faust, Wolfgang von Goethe

In the late eighteenth century, German literature bore witness to a tumultuous revolt against the Enlightenment’s sentimentality, objectivism and claims to rationality. The rebellious literary and musical movement that attacked these themes came under the umbrella term Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) because of the value it placed on emotional extremes and individualism as encapsulating the European condition. The key figures of the movement included geniuses like Goethe, Herder and Lenz — young men who challenged the conventions of their narrow-minded society in both their writings and their lifestyles. Scholar David Hill writes that “the writers of the Sturm und Drang were impelled by an urge to protest against the aesthetic and moral values of a social world that they felt had become deadeningly oppressive.”[1]

One of the most incisive ‘discoveries’ of the movement was the rejection of the outer forms of national identity — bland bureaucratic ‘citizenship’ and manners — in favor of German  Innerlichkeit (inwardness) and Kultur. It was a rebellion against European man’s habit of becoming entangled in a web woven by his own talent for efficiency and organization. It was, at its most basic level, a rejection of the court system and an elevation of the Volk. Hill describes the movement as “a gesture of dissatisfaction with the properties of a culture that had begun to seem superficial and alien and a wish to discover alternative, more authentic values among the common folk and in nature.”[2] Frustration is arguably the most common experience of the characters of the ‘Storm and Stress’ canon, primarily in reaction to the constraints imposed on the individual by society, its laws and fashions.

I was moved to deeply reflect on these themes of frustration, ‘storm’ and crisis amidst a stifling and misguided society while discussing Germany’s ‘refugee’ crisis with friends from Erlangen. It is a horrifying reality that the entire West is currently under a rapidly escalating assault of mass non-White migration. Make no mistake about it: The gates have been fully breached, and the tide of non-Whites into our nations will only swell further as time progresses. It has already been described as the greatest mass movement of people since World War II, but it’s really much more significant than that. The mass movement of people during and after World War II was largely a European affair, consisting of Europeans moving within Europe. What we are currently witnessing is the largest ever movement in human history of non-Europeans into European territory. Taking into account non-European movement into the more recently claimed European territories of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia, the current migration wave is nothing less than beginning of the end for European man. This, and not some putative future disaster or collapse, is the crucial period in the history of our race. This is the hour of our dispossession. Read more

Repentance has no place in politics

Callot

Jacques Callot (1592–1635) “Miseries of War”, engraving

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic

Below is the interview Alain de Benoist gave recently to Boulevard Voltaire

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Q. Shortly before his death, François Mitterrand said those definitive words to the perplexed Jean-Pierre Elkabbach: “France does not need to apologize.” Mitterand spoke of those famed “darkest hours in our history.” Today, however, “repentance” has become fashionable. What does that mean?

ADB: To put it in its simplest terms, repentance can be summed up as follows: people apologize for some wrongdoings they did not commit in order to please those who were never subject to those wrongdoings. Those about to repent committed no harm; to those receiving apology no harm was ever inflicted.  All of this is perfectly ridiculous. In fact, repentance means making a selective choice in our history by safeguarding solely some specific and same historical periods, i.e., slavery, colonialism, etc., considered “dark” in the light of the dominant ideas whose goal therefore requires official repentance.  A much imagined inherited collective guilt adds up to this major anachronism which consists of “throwing backwards” into the past the value judgments belonging to our present time frame. The past, having being reduced to the “duty of remembrance,” the present, consequently, is bound to become fleeting, self-referential, and existentially empty.

However, the whole process, is more than just a fashionable discursive game. On the one hand, it is designed to convince our compatriots that each time, when turning back to their past, they are bound to uncover the horror only.  Here is the corollary: identity is invariably of a questionable nature; novelty, by contrast, must be invariably better. On the other hand, and in an epoch when the victimhood status is becoming highly profitable, the whole point is granting to the alleged victims’ descendants all sorts of  benefits;  from bestowing on them good conscience to granting them moral superiority, all the way to the enactment of  “memorial laws”, plus financial compensations. The focus of those invocations of the past is located in the present: the “dark days” are posited or exploited in order to either legitimize or delegitimize current opinions. Monsignor Nunzio Galantino, the Secretary General of the Episcopal Conference, stated recently that “our welcoming of immigrants is a form of compensation for all the damage we did over the years […]. We owe hospitality to migrants for all what we did to their lands in the past.” Thus, the issue of immigration is being processed under the guise of the mea culpa.  Which in turn enables some minority pressure groups to plead by proxy their victimhood status and prop themselves up as the vigilantes of the present.

Q. During his time as pope, Pope John Paul II also made repentance for certain crimes committed by the Church in the course of its history. One can say in his defense that Catholicism is a religion that requires the faithful to regularly confess their sins …

ADB: What is certain, in any case, is that the dialectic of sin, repentance, atonement, reparation, or “teshuvah“, and forgiveness — all of them belong to the language of religion. They have, therefore, nothing to do with the political process. Across the board collective repentance should not, however, make us forget that European civilization is the only civilization to date calling itself into question, to the point of internalizing its own critique. As Jean-François Mattéi said: “in order to respond to its critics, reason needs to ask forgiveness, because it appears always before its own tribunal.”

Q. Is there a risk for those refusing to repent to fall into the opposite extreme, i.e. to deny purely and simply the existence of the gray areas in our history?

ADB. This, in fact, is a symmetrical risk. All the lands of the world have had their dark days and their shining periods. In a normal state, one teaches young people to be proud of their country by instilling in them the memory of what their country did in a most glorious fashion. This does not mean that the rest of the story did not exist; yet, one must firstly be aware that self-esteem begins with the respect of what was inherited, helping us thus to define ourselves. There is no reason to be proud of slavery, but there is no reason also to be proud of the sack of Béziers, or the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the “dragonnades,” the Vendee genocide, or the repression of the Commune. The whole question boils down to whether we wish to teach the French to be proud of themselves, instead of instilling in them shame or self-doubt.

As for the rest, it is useless and even harmful to harp ad infinitum on civil wars. History is wholeness and one won’t get very far by fingering rosary beads in a durable sequence of Clovis to Charles Martel, to Jeanne d’Arc, and imagine that this is the best way to answer those for whom History of France began with 1789 only. The past is not a “museograhic“ heritage, nor a static essence, but a complex narrative substance whose narration is constantly revisited, allowing a people to tell itself its own story. Wishing, on the one hand, to single out the “anti-France,” or for that matter restricting oneself only to a talk about “France, the land of human rights,” means in both cases to mutilate our history. Marc Bloch rightly said that to be truly French means to be able to vibrate with the memory of the coronation of Reims, as well as partaking of the Federation Feast during the French Revolution, July 14, 1790. This was also the opinion of Charles Péguy — and this is also mine. 

Alain de Benoist  is a philosopher. 

 

The Rachel Dolezal Phenomenon

The case of Rachel Dolezal, the “trans-Black” who is the head of an NAACP chapter and has apparently reported false “hate-crimes” is all over the Internet. It’s hard to know if this is just a case of rent-seeking by someone taking advantage of Black privilege or a case of someone who really does identify as a Black person. Or both.

Regarding the first possibility, in addition to her position as head of an NAACP chapter, Dolezal has parleyed her Black identity into a position as professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington State University and chair of the office of the police ombudsman commission in the city of Spokane (on the application she claimed to be “a mix of white, black, Native American and a number of others.” Reminds one of Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Cherokee ancestry which she made to three separate employers, the University of Texas Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Harvard Law School. Or Vijay Chokal-Ingam. Or non-Jews in Hollywood who pretended to be Jews to get ahead (crypto-gentiles?) (see here, Note 40).

Her story also recalls Brenton Sanderson’s article on Andrew Bolt, the Australian who got in serious trouble when he called attention to the fact that there was a huge increase in the number of people claiming Aboriginal descent after Aborigines were granted loads of benefits. Lots of them look White to me.

The ideological nature of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act [which provides penalties for saying true things related to race and ethnicity] was starkly illustrated in the case brought against conservative commentator Andrew Bolt. In 2009 Bolt wrote two columns pointing out that individuals with very small amounts of Aboriginal ancestry (or in some cases none) were taking advantage of a raft of government scholarships and affirmative action job vacancies by choosing to identify exclusively as Aboriginal. Bolt claimed these people were choosing to identify as Black to leverage their career and social advancement.

Hipblack

 

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