I don't think that the Western Establishment has any clarity about the interest of the nation. That is why it is so indifferent to the status of borders.
This is Nozik's "normative sociology" at work. In his Anarchy, State and Utopia he joked that it was "the study of what the causes of problems ought to have been". Practised by the Guardian, BBC etc real causes are rewritten or denied in favour of imaginary pasts, motives and causes that serves their agenda. For example, the role of white people in ending the slave trade is omitted entirely as is slavery as a universal of human history. Perhaps we should also talk of "normative history", the portrayal of history as the woke wish it to have been.
I fear Bridget Phillipson's 'review'of the education syllabus will be an exercise in normative sociology and history. It is led by an intersectional feminist who will no doubt be keen to pass judgement on the past by her own self-righteous standards.
At root is a misguided universalism in which the characteristics of peoples are denied in promotion of supposed equality of individuals but not quality before the law (the only meaningful equality) rather equality of rights as the only relevant way to see people. Renaud Camus (of the misunderstood Great Replacement) insisted peoples can have collective characteristic - their culture and history - and put it this way: If a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture can say to a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais […] “I am just as French as you are”, it follows that “being French is nothing”.
And so it is in our multicultural mass invasion from other cultures that being English is now nothing and, as noted in this substack, being white is less than nothing. Incidentlly, Camus was not being racist or ethno-nationalist. Individuals can assimilate. They just can't do it at scale as we can see in the parallel, and often antithetical, cultures now spreading across the UK.
Kenneth Clarke, in his series Civilisation all those decades ago, remakred that civilisations fall when they lose confidence. We must not let the Phillipsons and Critical Theorists demoralise us. We are a peoples, and a welcoming one at an individual level, and we must fight to defend ourselves intellectually and politically.
Why would we expect the Western Establishment to act in our interests? I have tried for years to wake up Tory MPs I know. They don’t get it! Immigration is the perceived cure for Whiteness’!
"Europe’s Original Sin: White Supremacy, Colonialism, and the Contemporary Racial Wealth Gap" is a great symbol of the modern Western mania of self-hatred (brought to you by America's Marx-rooted Left academia, whose mission seems to be destroying our entire cultural and civic patrimony for its crimes against their egalitarian/utopian fantasies) because it helps make clear a few aspects of our toxic top-down zeitgeist:
First, "Original Sin" comes right out and gives away the religious aspect here, that we in the post-Christian West still need to cling to this one remaining plank of Christianity that's floating in the water after the shipwreck: that we are stained at birth and must atone for our crimes and the crimes of our ancestors and that Western morality needs to be entirely rooted in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where we give all away to the suffering stranger aka "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" etc. This seems to be some combo of fundamentalist xenophilia combined with a masochistic fetish of performative self-abasement;
and then there's the obvious biased question-begging stupidity of the premise: of course in European countries Europeans would be the ones with the most power and assets. How much power and money do non-Chinese have in China? Or non-Arab in Saudi Arabia? Somehow the entire history and current existence of Europeans is a single giant hate crime that no one else would be accused of...but then I remember we're not in the realm of reason but in the realm of ideological fantasy...
I'm really starting to doubt that the West has any ability to fight off this autoimmune disease designed in the laboratories of American Humanities Depts—whether it's called Deconstruction, Decolonization, Crit Studies or Social Justice etc. The Left has found the Achilles' Heel of modern liberal democracy—its total commitment to universal egalitarianism even at the cost of social chaos and misery, founded on the absolute terror of being called a bigot and the deep guilt Westerners feel about their wealth and power.
Five hundred years ago Europeans conquered the globe and now their anxious, guilt-ridden and self-hating descendants want to give it all back and abolish their societies in a frenzy of atonement so we can return to the state of nature and the days of the Noble Savage, where we are all equal because we are all equally poor and miserable. It makes sense in a twisted way...
I don't think that the Western Establishment has any clarity about the interest of the nation. That is why it is so indifferent to the status of borders.
This is Nozik's "normative sociology" at work. In his Anarchy, State and Utopia he joked that it was "the study of what the causes of problems ought to have been". Practised by the Guardian, BBC etc real causes are rewritten or denied in favour of imaginary pasts, motives and causes that serves their agenda. For example, the role of white people in ending the slave trade is omitted entirely as is slavery as a universal of human history. Perhaps we should also talk of "normative history", the portrayal of history as the woke wish it to have been.
I fear Bridget Phillipson's 'review'of the education syllabus will be an exercise in normative sociology and history. It is led by an intersectional feminist who will no doubt be keen to pass judgement on the past by her own self-righteous standards.
At root is a misguided universalism in which the characteristics of peoples are denied in promotion of supposed equality of individuals but not quality before the law (the only meaningful equality) rather equality of rights as the only relevant way to see people. Renaud Camus (of the misunderstood Great Replacement) insisted peoples can have collective characteristic - their culture and history - and put it this way: If a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture can say to a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais […] “I am just as French as you are”, it follows that “being French is nothing”.
And so it is in our multicultural mass invasion from other cultures that being English is now nothing and, as noted in this substack, being white is less than nothing. Incidentlly, Camus was not being racist or ethno-nationalist. Individuals can assimilate. They just can't do it at scale as we can see in the parallel, and often antithetical, cultures now spreading across the UK.
Kenneth Clarke, in his series Civilisation all those decades ago, remakred that civilisations fall when they lose confidence. We must not let the Phillipsons and Critical Theorists demoralise us. We are a peoples, and a welcoming one at an individual level, and we must fight to defend ourselves intellectually and politically.
Why would we expect the Western Establishment to act in our interests? I have tried for years to wake up Tory MPs I know. They don’t get it! Immigration is the perceived cure for Whiteness’!
Thank goodness Frank is here chronicling this.
Totally agree with your sentoments
I can live with yout phrase..
"Europe’s Original Sin: White Supremacy, Colonialism, and the Contemporary Racial Wealth Gap" is a great symbol of the modern Western mania of self-hatred (brought to you by America's Marx-rooted Left academia, whose mission seems to be destroying our entire cultural and civic patrimony for its crimes against their egalitarian/utopian fantasies) because it helps make clear a few aspects of our toxic top-down zeitgeist:
First, "Original Sin" comes right out and gives away the religious aspect here, that we in the post-Christian West still need to cling to this one remaining plank of Christianity that's floating in the water after the shipwreck: that we are stained at birth and must atone for our crimes and the crimes of our ancestors and that Western morality needs to be entirely rooted in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where we give all away to the suffering stranger aka "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" etc. This seems to be some combo of fundamentalist xenophilia combined with a masochistic fetish of performative self-abasement;
and then there's the obvious biased question-begging stupidity of the premise: of course in European countries Europeans would be the ones with the most power and assets. How much power and money do non-Chinese have in China? Or non-Arab in Saudi Arabia? Somehow the entire history and current existence of Europeans is a single giant hate crime that no one else would be accused of...but then I remember we're not in the realm of reason but in the realm of ideological fantasy...
I'm really starting to doubt that the West has any ability to fight off this autoimmune disease designed in the laboratories of American Humanities Depts—whether it's called Deconstruction, Decolonization, Crit Studies or Social Justice etc. The Left has found the Achilles' Heel of modern liberal democracy—its total commitment to universal egalitarianism even at the cost of social chaos and misery, founded on the absolute terror of being called a bigot and the deep guilt Westerners feel about their wealth and power.
Five hundred years ago Europeans conquered the globe and now their anxious, guilt-ridden and self-hating descendants want to give it all back and abolish their societies in a frenzy of atonement so we can return to the state of nature and the days of the Noble Savage, where we are all equal because we are all equally poor and miserable. It makes sense in a twisted way...
The term “race entrepreneurs” is too tame. “Race hustlers” seems more like it.
How do they justify not getting rid of all that pale. male and stale technology?