Editor rebuked!
Do you want to see The Economic Nationalist’s editor thoroughly rebuked? Then check this. I am tannoce there (econnat, spelled backward).
I shall think twice before I use the word “genocide” in that context again. Bad choice of vocablulary, that. It makes one think of Auschwitz, which is not the right image. We live, we learn.
The deeper lesson in the episode should not be missed, however. Even on a self-professed conservative Republican blog like that one, where the editors and posters are good people and patriotic Americans, Political Correctness maintains its murky grip. Western man has quite literally thought himself into a position of impotence, where he accepts the doom he has made for himself, a doom which he has the power, but not the will, to refute. The futility there is on full display.
This blog maintains that any citizen of any race can be a good American; but also that, although Americans have welcomed immigrants of all races, pre-1965 Americans have never consented to become a minority in their own land. Even most of the good people bashing this writer over on that other site do not actually seem to disagree on this point.
Of course, in the post referenced I happened to speak not of pre-1965 Americans but of specifically of the large subset thereof who are white. I broke the taboo and, probably for this more than for the one ill-chosen word, have earned the rebuke.
We Americans very badly need to get over the race taboo. Race has consequences — a fact which, privately, surprises hardly any American of any race. Publicly, we are all required to act shocked that someone should have the audacity to notice the fact. This particular hypocrisy is incredibly harmful. It must stop.
Our ancestors did not build this country, bleed and die for it, that our own generation should carelessly hand it over to more or less random alien peoples. Even if we wanted to, we haven’t the right. We owe it both to ancestry and to posterity to keep the country American.
HJH
January 10th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
They should have rebuked you and did. Racists are not conservatives. It’s racists like you who give real conservatives a bad name.
I suppose that you’ll censor my comment, but you shouldn’t. What you should censor is your own comments, Mr. Harrison.
I don’t think that you understand how truly offensive your ideas are.
January 10th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
I happened to be on-line when your comment came in, Keith (and please call me Howard; we don’t stand on ceremony around here). Although I cannot honestly say that I liked the comment, the comment is civilly worded so of course I approved it immediately. Now that you are known to The Economic Nationalist, further comments of yours will appear on-line immediately, without awaiting manual moderation by me. Is that fair enough?
Your point of view is quite prevalent, so I cannot really blame you for holding it. Your words leave me little illusion that I can sway you by argument, so I will not insult your intelligence by trying. But I do think that we Americans have created a major problem for ourselves by allowing, even requiring, decent people to be insulted whenever the topic of race comes up. Some people think that the differences between races in America are purely cultural. I have my doubts—doubts which, if I have the impertinence to admit them, earn me rebukes like yours.
You have said that you don’t think that I understood how truly offensive my ideas are. That may be, I suppose, but I doubt it. I suggest that the offense taken is largely artificial. Surely I do not intend to offend any American of any race; and a reasonable critic, reading fairly what I actually wrote, would admit this. (If I took offense every time you said, “It’s raining,” then this would not suddenly render your ideas offensive; rather, it would reveal me as being unreasonably eager to take offense.) What I really don’t understand is how we Americans can ever have a productive conversation about race when every time the subject is brought up, someone feels license to be offended. It may be that I wrote something factually incorrect or at least implicitly distorted, and if so I would appreciate your correction; but, Keith, in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Use your feelings. Something is out of place.” Every expression about race cannot be judged an insult, or we can never have an honest discussion on the topic, can we? This blog is not about pre-1965 (that is, black-white) race relations. However, when the topic does comes up, I do feel a duty to do my small part to help to reopen the important civic discussion on race, which has been perversely shut down in America since about 1965 (not that I advocate returning U.S. race relations to their pre-1965 state in most respects; I did not say or mean that). We Americans have progressed as far as we can in race relations by ignoring the problem. Policymaking by taking offense has gone too far. It is time for our country to try some different mode of analysis.
I cannot deny that I resent slightly having to explain myself like this, because other than a possibly unfortunate choice of diction on that other website, I really do not think that I have done anything wrong. Not that I resent you especially; in fact I don’t resent you at all, and I appreciate that you show the courtesy to speak to my face, thus allowing me a fair chance to respond. It’s just the whole intellectual climate surrounding race in America which is depressing. I’d like to change that. I hope that you will help me.
I should say one more thing, Keith, and regrettably I suspect that you might not like it. If race really is irrelevant, then it is not up to me to prove the fact. Rather, it is up to the people who think race irrelevant to prove the fact by the way they live their own lives. If blacks want to show that race is irrelevant, then they can begin by bringing their own crime rates and illegitimacy rates down to white levels. Or I suppose that if whites want to show that race is irrelevant, then they can begin by bringing their penetration into professional sports up to black levels (or, though one hopes not, by inflating their crime and illegitimacy rates, by disdaining correct English, etc.). For my own part, though I would have thought it fun to compete in professional athletics when I was young (I wasn’t good enough), I am on no mission to prove race irrelevant. That simply is not my brief. Empirically, on the surface of it, though the stereotypes admit many honorable individual exceptions, collectively race does appear to be rather relevant. When you and I are asked to assume that that which we see with our own eyes is untrue, then we ought not to accept some eternal mumbo-jumbo about the legacy of slavery or whatever; we must demand real proof.
And there is no real proof, only mumbo-jumbo. There’s the rub.
In any case, thanks for the comment.
HJH
January 11th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Ive see this guy Kieth before. He’s not a conservative