The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Cultural Survival Instinct

Posted on | May 21, 2013 | 40 Comments

The counter-jihad blogger known as Fjordman has an essay up at David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine about the situation in Norway.

Norway’s immigrant population is small compared to that in the United States, but the problems arising seem much worse:

In May 2011 [Labour Party activist Eskil Pedersen] pressed criminal charges against a Member of Parliament, Christian Tybring-Gjedde from the rival Progress Party, for “racism.” The case was soon dismissed. Tybring-Gjedde had stated that in the Grorud Valley in Oslo, which has one of the densest concentrations of immigrants in the country, blond girls have to dye their hair dark to avoid harassment, children are threatened with violence if they have pig meat in their lunch box and native boys risk being physically assaulted by immigrants who think they don’t get enough time on the local football team. These are merely truthful statements. In fact, reality is often much worse than this.
The reaction of Eskil Pedersen and others of his ilk to hearing that the natives no longer feel safe in parts of their own country due to the immigration policies supported by the ruling elites is to try to silence political opponents who speak truthfully about this.

“Blond girls have to dye their hair dark to avoid harassment”? And a political leader who calls attention to this problem is subjected to criminal prosecution? Whose “racism” is really the problem, when it is the blondes who are harassed? Norway’s problem is two-fold:

  1. Unlike the United States, it has no cultural tradition of assimilating immigrants;
    but also
  2. Very much like the United States, it has a substantial number of immigrants who have no desire to be assimilated.

Permit me to hypothesize that a nation which is self-confident — which believes in the virtues of its own culture, traditions and institutions — will be more successful in assimilating immigrants, even though this same cultural self-confidence may manifest itself at times as “racism.”

Excuse the scare-quotes around “racism,” but in recent decades the word has been employed so promiscuously that its meaning has been lost and the word itself has become an obstacle to understanding. Ethnic hatred is one thing — and certainly Muslim immigrants harassing blond girls can be as easily accused of that as anyone — but “racism” is nearly always employed to accuse the majority population of hating minorities whose victimization (real or alleged) becomes a political weapon for the Left.

Eskil Pedersen is just as much a member of Norway’s majority as Christian Tybring-Gjedde, whom Pedersen accused of “racism.” But the embrace of immigrants as victimized minorities enables Pedersen and his party to smear Tybring-Gjedde’s party — to discredit them in the eyes of the respectable bourgeoisie who, in Norway as elsewhere, do not wish to be associated with “racism” — in such a way that the actual problem (i.e., social friction caused by the presence of unassimilated immigrants) cannot be addressed in terms of policy.

Are we discussing policy, or are we just calling names? Whenever the Left’s policies fail (as they inevitably do), they resort to name-calling and accusations of bad faith as tactics to distract the public from the failure and to demonize the Left’s critics. Because the intelligentsia are generally allied with the Left, however, such cheap political tactics are dressed up in the respectable garb of science. Fjordman describes how this has happened in Norway:

In May 2013, on the day when he was about to formally receive his Freedom of Expression Prize, [University of Oslo Professor Per] Fugelli stated that people who worry about such things as crime related to Gypsy gangs or certain types of organized crime need a sedative for their baseless “anxiety.” Professor Fugelli, a medical professional, recommended that politicians should take a Valium pill before they speak about issues related to immigration. . . .
It’s . . . not the first or only time that Mr. Fugelli has indicated, jokingly or otherwise, that individuals who disagree with his views should be treated medically for their alleged delusions, with or without their consent.
During the Multicultural craze of the 1990s, the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen in an essay entitled “The psychotic racism” warned against the possibility of “race wars in the streets” as a result of mass immigration. . . . The solution to these problems [Eggen argued] was not to limit mass immigration but to limit criticism of it. According to Eggen, xenophobia and opposition to mass immigration should be viewed as a mental illness, and the solution to xenophobia “is that you should distribute medication to those who are seriously affected. I have discussed this with a professor of Social Medicine, Dr. Per Fugelli, and he liked the idea.” Fugelli had apparently suggested putting anti-psychotic drugs in the city’s drinking water.
This may sound too extreme to be meant seriously, but Fugelli has continued to chastise all those who are critical of mass immigration. Eggen warned that arguments about how ordinary people are concerned over mass immigration shouldn’t be accepted, because this could lead to Fascism: “One should be on one’s guard against people, especially politicians, who invoke xenophobia on behalf of others. And if certain people begin their reasoning with phrases such as ‘ordinary people feel that,’ one shouldn’t argue at all, one should hit [them].”

This tactic of “diagnosing” opposition to the Left’s policies as mental illness and incipient fascism is familiar to those who have studied the Frankfurt School — Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, et al. — and the origins of Cultural Marxism, otherwise known as Critical Theory or, in the vernacular, political correctness.

As with everything the Left does, understanding their motive is the key to understanding their method.

When the prophecies of Marx and Lenin failed — when the proletariat masses did not rally to the revolutionary banner, rise up and slaughter their capitalist oppressors — the Frankfurt School intellectuals elaborated in new language an old idea of Marx’s, “false consciousness.” If a member of the proletariat did not act in accordance with the Marxist prescription of his class interest, then he was obviously blinded by some sort of religious or cultural belief that the capitalist regime had propagated as a means to make the slave embrace his slavery.

“False consciousness”  interprets the individual’s allegiances to faith, family or flag as impediments to the realization of the Left’s radical-egalitarian utopian dream. Accusing the average American (or average Norwegian) of “racism” or “xenophobia” or some other irrational prejudice, diagnosing the Left’s opposition as suffering from psychiatric disorders that threaten the nation with fascism, are tactics so familiar that it is truly surprising that so few people recognize them as what they really are, a species of Marxist propaganda.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West has been suffering a Cold War hangover. Most people never bothered to study the origins and history of Marxism as a philosophy, nor were the methods of Communist subversion ever widely understood. With the collapse of the Soviet threat, most in the West dismissed the danger as having passed, even while a host of intellectuals who had invariably allied themselves with Marxist-Leninist enemies during the Cold War era embedded themselves in academia. This is how the discredited ideas of a failed revolutionary philosophy have been rehabilitated, and invested with an artificial aura of intellectual respectability, over the course of the past two decades.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

What do the Norwegian Left’s accusations of “racism” tell us about opponents of mass immigration in Norway? Nothing useful. But these accusations do tell us a lot about the accusers: The Left is fearful of debating policy on its merits, and therefore resort to dishonest smears intended to discredit their opponents. And unless these opponents are strong-minded enough to reject the proffered diagnosis, there is the danger of internalizing the Left’s deceptive critique and developing a defensive flinch-reflex. Anthony Bialy examines the disgusting weakness of the West’s apologetic elites:

Those who feel compelled to apologize for liberty continue to puzzle why we’re so wretched, but they’re sure we painted a target on ourselves. Winning sides don’t ask how we’re supposed to placate our enemies . . .
The perverse tendency to self-loathe is manifested most horrifyingly in America by those who think we have to qualify the freedom to live as we wish. . . .
The assumption that Muslims possess uncontrollable rage over the slightest perceived slight is a scary reflection of the faith if it’s true and of the patronizing pacifists who accept it as doctrine if it’s false.
Life must be tough for despicable lunatics who can’t decide between whether villains didn’t commit the crimes of which they’re accused or if they’re heroes for assaulting the innocent. Do the most doltish of dunces want to free Jahar because they think he didn’t do it or are sick enough to embrace his unbearably hideous assault? Is Mumia a framed victim or someone who stuck it to society by executing a police officer? Their blogs are never clear.

America cannot survive if we embrace the self-loathing worldview of such idiots. If we are afraid to defend our own culture because it is unfashionable among the intelligentsia to do so, we’re like those blonde girls in Norway, dyeing our hair dark to avoid harassment.

 

 


Category: Culture, Intellectuals, Norway, Racism

Comments

40 Responses to “Cultural Survival Instinct”

  1. herddog505
    May 21st, 2013 @ 9:55 am

    The problem is that racism does exist. However, if I may stray into Godwin territory, the left uses it like nazis used the misbehavior (real or fictitious) of SOME Jews to justify their hideous policies. O’ course, treating people as groups – SOME white people are racists so ALL white people are – is a common liberal trick. It seems to me that it should be easy to refute this argument, but people are so conditioned to think that racism IS pervasive (if not universal) that it’s tough to even discuss it without… being accused of being a racist.

  2. Louis Nettles
    May 21st, 2013 @ 10:01 am

    quick someone call Giovanni Henriksen.

  3. richard mcenroe
    May 21st, 2013 @ 10:20 am

    Hmmm… what KIND of drugs? I could use a break from leftist-soiled reality….

  4. robertstacymccain
    May 21st, 2013 @ 10:27 am

    The persistence of tribalism or ethnocentrism — to remove the tendentious pejorative of “racism” from the discussion — in the 21st century should tell us that we are fundamentally misguided if we suppose that this profound tendency of human nature can be eradicated altogether. If you could somehow prevent people from discriminating on the basis of race or ethnicity, they would discriminate on some other basis that would be equally unfair and harmful. Such a policy would, in other words, merely redistribute the unfairness.

    It is ridiculous when, in the course of discussion among allegedly educated and intelligent people, liberals start jumping up and down to exclaim that RACISM IS BAD — as if anyone were arguing otherwise — in a sort of Denunciation Derby, where it becomes a contest to see who can offer the most eloquent condemnation of whatever incident (e.g., the death of Trayvon Martin) has inspired the discussion.

    You saw something quite similar in regard to the Steubenville rape case. Once the Denunciation Derby began, anyone who disputed the Left’s attempt to make this a symbolic indictment — of America’s “rape culture,” whatever the hell that means — was accused of being pro-rape. Whereas the Left has spent decades proclaiming their devotion to the Due Process rights of accused criminals, they completely reversed themselves in regard to the Steubenville case, so that anyone who refused to join their digital lynch-mob was subjected to outrageous harassment.

    Only if you take a step back from such controversies and attempt to appraise the situation objectively — “What’s really happening here?” — is it possible to understand how the Left is manipulating the narrative for political purposes.

    Mankind will never abolish racism, nor is it possible to abolish murder or rape. Yet the Left is forever trying to convince us that there is a utopia of sinless perfection to which they could lead us, if only we’d submit to their superior judgment.

  5. ConantheCimmerian
    May 21st, 2013 @ 10:30 am

    We just need to keep on importing immigrants to these majority white countries so as to eliminate the White Problem and the Problem Of Western Civilisation.

  6. M. Thompson
    May 21st, 2013 @ 11:15 am

    Yep. “Surrender!” is the battle cry of the modern pseudo intellectual.

  7. Quartermaster
    May 21st, 2013 @ 12:23 pm

    “Liberalism is a philsophy of comfort while the west commits suicide.” Jerry Pournelle, PhD (two of ’em no less, in Psychology amd Poli Sci).
    I’d go further. Liberalism is a philosophy of stupidity, with no ground in reality. they simply stroke themselves and tell them all is going to be well when they take over. They simply are too stupid to realize there will be nothing left, and they will be frog marched to the wall to pay the price for their idiocy, all the while screaming that it’s so unfair.

  8. Finrod Felagund
    May 21st, 2013 @ 1:10 pm

    I don’t remember who said this first, but the 21st Century definition of a racist is someone who’s won an argument with a liberal.

  9. Dai Alanye
    May 21st, 2013 @ 1:22 pm

    Ethnocentrism is natural and at least partially justifiable in the United States, since our guiding principle regarding immigration is that immigrants become Americans. To that extent, mild ethnocentrism is good policy.

    Our present difficulty is that in an attempt to be fair and inclusive, immigration standards were changed from what was considered to benefit America to what was considered to benefit immigrants. In other words, back around 1970 we decided to take Emma Lazarus at face value in her remarks about wretched refuse.

    Pressure to continue this philosophy comes from shallow sentimentalists, scheming Democrats, and self-interested employers. It strikes me as plain common sense, however, to acknowledge that the USA is getting crowded in some places, leading to excessive pressure on the economy, infrastructure, and natural resources, as well as to antagonism toward what has historically been our national outlook.

    Under the circumstances, and especially in light of unemployment rates, our policy for the time being should be NO immigration. And when conditions improve we ought to go back to the old standard of only encouraging those who are easily assimilated. We don’t need or want any more ghettos than we already have, nor should we risk Balkanizing the nation.

  10. Daily links | Evan McLaren
    May 21st, 2013 @ 1:22 pm

    […] Further along those lines, Fjordman and Robert Stacy McCain wonder about the fate of countries like Norway under the pressure of mass Muslim […]

  11. ConantheCimmerian
    May 21st, 2013 @ 1:27 pm

    But if you did that (no immigration), then there would be no solution to the White Problem.

  12. ThomasD
    May 21st, 2013 @ 2:11 pm

    “The problem is that racism does exist.”

    So fucking what.

    So does Marxism.

    Taken alone these facts tell us nothing of what we are – able and willing – to do about them.

    Propose a remedy or deal, those are your options.

  13. ThomasD
    May 21st, 2013 @ 2:13 pm

    Let me just add, the only people I find more offensive than racists are complete morons.

    Marxists aren’t so much offensive as they are dangerous.

  14. Bob Belvedere
    May 21st, 2013 @ 2:18 pm

    Damn well put, Stacy.

  15. Dai Alanye
    May 21st, 2013 @ 2:19 pm

    Skin color exists as a compromise between the need for vitamin d (created by ultraviolet irradiating the skin) and the need to avoid being burnt by those same rays.

    The ideal answer would be to mutate the human gene plasm to create vitamin D in some other fashion, allowing skin color to be a cosmetic choice.

    Alternatively we could segregate people geographically by degree of pigmentation. Thus, high pigmentation in high-sun climates, light in foggy climates, medium in moderate sunny areas.Southern California could go meso-American under this scheme, while the British Isles and similar locations (Iceland, Falklands) would go Nordic. I see no difficulty with this–do you?

  16. Jaynie59
    May 21st, 2013 @ 2:19 pm

    I believe Fjordman is why Charles Johnson went over the bend. CJ was obsessed with Fjordman and spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to argue with him. I used to read LGF and I commented there once in awhile. I also hung out in The Lounge in the middle of the night. I was going through menopause at the time and would wake up at 2 or 3 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep so I’d watch Red Eye or go The Lounge.

    CJ would link to a Fjordman essay, which were always long and detailed, and Charles would try to take it apart paragraph by paragraph. I would click on the link and read the essay and then go back to LGF to read CJ’s criticism. Man, oh, man was it a tedious read. I always finished Fjordman’s articles but never managed to get through CJ’s response. It’s like he took every word personally.
    Charles went nuts not too long after that. Between Pamela Gellar and Fjordman I think he burst a blood vessel or something.

  17. ConantheCimmerian
    May 21st, 2013 @ 2:39 pm

    Or we could just breed whitey out?
    Kill whitey?

  18. Bob Belvedere
    May 21st, 2013 @ 2:41 pm

    To paraphrase that now-overused cliche: life is what it is.

    Human Beings will always remain as they are. The only thing we can hope to improve is their behavior.

    But this cannot be done via force; it must arise out of an individual’s exercising of his Free Will, without any physical or mental reservation.

    To be a Leftist is to reject Reality, which means they all reject Life and Free Will.

    As Gerhart Niemeyer wrote:

    …Whoever entertains a view of history that destroys the present and past and locates all values exclusively in some human future, is…barred from common sense. Whoever acts under the illusion that man can create a new man, a new world, or a new society lives in a dream-world and is barred from common sense. …Common sense is political sobriety that is fully aware of human limits inherent in the human condition.

    In their efforts to drug man into a ‘right way of thinking’, a ‘true consciousness’, the Left seeks to turn all men into gods, which they believe will bring about Heaven On Earth, Immanentize The Eschaton.

    In other words, they seek to do what cannot be done, what is not possible. Therefore, all of their efforts will fail.

    The trouble is, all of their efforts involve the participation of their fellow Human Beings, whether voluntary or compelled, and said efforts inevitably lead to the gas oven or the guillotine when things go badly [as they always do].

  19. BobBelvedere
    May 21st, 2013 @ 5:37 pm

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM Cultural Survival Instinct http://t.co/tYrUYlwZf7 #TCOT

  20. K-Bob
    May 21st, 2013 @ 6:26 pm

    Yep, you’re absolutely right. I was there, watching the same thing. Johnson is a perfect example of a guy who has taken an idea *into* himself, so that any attempt to argue the merits or problems with said idea is interpreted as a personal criticism of the man’s existence. (Which, ironically, is a feature that makes such people become fairly worthless individuals, if they cannot control their urge to pontificate and judge others.)

    He simply cannot argue an idea dispassionately, or removed from his “feelings.” This is a form of dishonesty that makes it impossible to argue with such a person.

    (It’s exactly the same problem one has in trying to discuss an addict’s addiction.)

  21. K-Bob
    May 21st, 2013 @ 6:28 pm

    Yes, Chris Matthews is a White Problem.

    Best to just ignore him.

  22. K-Bob
    May 21st, 2013 @ 6:40 pm

    Skin color doesn’t rape, loot, or kill. Ideology does.

    Ironic that in hiding the skin color in these reports, which always, *always*, refer to the perpetrators as “youths,” the news media also hides the ideology. I’ll bet if the majority of Muslims were white, they would have ZERO trouble identifying the ideology in the news.

    So their own racism is what prevents any focus on the problem.

    When I see thugs gathering at a corner I was considering walking past, I don’t notice what color of skin inhabits the tattoos, piercings, angry gestures, pointing and laughter, and gang signs. I just see the stuff that warns me to go another way. Same with walking past a group of people coming out of an AME church. I feel very comfortable around them, and it has nothing to do with skin color.

    Only Democrats Care About Skin Color

  23. K-Bob
    May 21st, 2013 @ 6:45 pm

    Genuine morons are usually gentle, happy people. See for example the comment section at Ace.mu.nu

    It’s the “social morons” that are offensive.

    (“Retarded” is a Politically Correct term for “moron,” “idiot,” and “cretin.” At least, that’s why the term was created; so as not to offend the morons, idiots, and cretins.)

  24. K-Bob
    May 21st, 2013 @ 7:06 pm

    A minor quibble: A)genetics has thoroughly debunked all claims related to skin color, and B) the skin color groups continue to intermix. So the future holds far less success in store for people who care about skin color than those of us who don’t.

    However, your larger point is really that discrimination will never go away. For those who study the working of the mind, discrimination is an important survival trait, even in cases where it’s based on bogus data.

    Early hominids had no clue why certain plants would kill you, but they learned to avoid ones that had certain common appearances (including several benign and even beneficial ones). It helped them survive, even if it meant they ended up with vitamin deficiency or some other problem.

  25. K-Bob
    May 21st, 2013 @ 7:09 pm

    At least the French had the good sense to make the Guillotine a spectator sport. Hiding the decline (or the gas chamber) is what leftists prefer to do. It makes it harder to believe in accounts of atrocity.

  26. Bob Belvedere
    May 21st, 2013 @ 7:18 pm

    Ah, but the French Revolutionaries were Leftists.

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  29. robertstacymccain
    May 21st, 2013 @ 10:39 pm

    Unfortunately, K-Bob, you will find that intermixture does not eliminate the problem. In Latin America, for example, mixed ancestry is quite common, but race-based discrimination is actually quite strong, with lighter-skinned (more European) peoples generally holding higher socio-economic status. And generally, Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. — most of them meztizo — are not less prejudiced against American blacks than are white Americans.

    The enlightened cosmopolitan color-blind ideal is unlikely ever to prevail, simply because most people are not enlightened cosmopolitans.

  30. robertstacymccain
    May 21st, 2013 @ 10:51 pm

    Emma Lazarus was a poet, not a political philosopher, and the elevation of her poem to the status of a sort of Open Borders Amendment to the Constitution is — like the dubious claim that the Gettysburg Address was tantamount to a second Founding — a source of infinite confusion.

    Hell’s bells, the Statue of Liberty itself was never intended to be a statement about immigration. It was a gesture of French friendship toward the United States, made at a time when the French had rather recently had their asses kicked by the Prussians and were for obvious reasons eager to have the U.S. as an ally. The Statue became an immigration symbol principally for the wave of immigrants (what we might call the “Ellis Island” surge) of 1900-1925 and their ancestors. But I’ve never understood how the fact that your penniless Grandpa Guido came from Salerno in Nineteen-Ought-Whatever could be translated into a “principle” that says we can’t stop Jose from sneaking over the Rio Grande.

    The firm principles of the Constitution have been obscured by the accretion of a lot of sentimental gush. Much of this is well-intended, but flag-waving Fourth of July-speechifying nonsense is a poor substitute for ordered liberty.

  31. Dai Alanye
    May 21st, 2013 @ 11:04 pm

    There is sentiment and there is practicality. Better to base speeches on sentiment and legislation on practicality.

  32. K-Bob
    May 22nd, 2013 @ 3:04 am

    Mmmm yeeeahhh, But they’re still pretty old-school on race there, ya know.

    I know we’ll have to drag a lot of people up from the depths of Ante-Bellum, Democrat thinking, but I know we can get there eventually.

  33. K-Bob
    May 22nd, 2013 @ 3:15 am

    Pretty much, yeah. As John Adams warned, a unicameral congress destroyed their new republic in the cradle.

    But you have to give the French their due when it comes to aesthetics. Cackling, toothless women on the front rows, prancing dwarves and apple throwers in the rear, all around a stage with the most famous prop in history. Or so the romantics wrote.

    My guess is that it was too short a spectacle for most “serious” fans.

  34. Wednesday news and opinions | Walla Walla TEA Party Patriots
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  35. Mike Rogers
    May 22nd, 2013 @ 8:30 am

    News stories referred to youths and immigrants, not to Muslim misogynists and criminals. Deport them to their hellhole of origin.
    Read the story of Spain’s expulsion of the Muslims in the 15thand16th centuries. It took 100 years to drive them out: they lied, they dispersed, they outbred the Spanish, but they NEVER assimilated, because cultural victory was their goal.
    We have been warned.

  36. Bob Belvedere
    May 22nd, 2013 @ 8:36 am

    The French were damn good at the theatrics back then. To keep things going, they always had several dozen victims on the show card. If they ran low, it was pretty easy to declare someone an ‘enemy of the state’ and proceed with the festivities.

  37. K-Bob
    May 22nd, 2013 @ 8:46 am

    Ahh, that Robespierre: MC, and eventually, Main Attraction.

  38. Jaynie59
    May 22nd, 2013 @ 9:10 am

    It didn’t help that Charles was treated like a God at LGF. One night at The Lounge, it was about 4:30AM Massachusetts time, some kid started chatting about Islam and how CJ was all wrong about it (he was anti-Islam back then). The kid was jumped on immediately. I sat there and watched as they all attacked him. After about 10 minutes Charles showed up. Wow. It was like the King stepped into the room. The butt kissing was a sight to see. The kid got banned.

  39. Bob Belvedere
    May 22nd, 2013 @ 9:11 am

    The Brothah was down wit it.

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