Anti-White History Month

3,094 words

Reduced, then, to teaching and preaching, the Negroes will have no outlet but to go down a blind alley, if the sort of education which they are now receiving is to enable them to find the way out of their present difficulties.
Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)

Hey white boy,
What you doin’ uptown?
Lou Reed, Waiting for the Man

October is here, heralding the start of Keats’ “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. The end of summer and the precursor to autumn (which Americans charmingly call “the fall”), October is harvest-time and a season of great beauty as the landscape changes from green to gold in what Henry David Thoreau called “the month for painted leaves”. The best days of England are the crisp, cold October days of bright sunshine in an azure sky, and its countryside is a display not to be missed. It is difficult to think of a more beautiful calendar month, or how it could be made any better. Oh, but it can, for in the UK (as well as the Netherlands and Ireland), October is also Black History Month (BHM).

BHM has gained traction over the post-Floyd years, and it’s gained something else as well. There is even more of a need for attention now among British blacks than the usual high dosage, because they no longer have a monopoly on so-called “British racism”. There’s a new kid in town, and his name, likely as not, is Mohammed. The British black caucus is involved in a kind of strange ratings war with Islam. During the height of the BLM rioting in 2020, Islam rather slipped into the shadows. The Muslim Council of Great Britain issued a vague message of support, but this was not an Islamic phenomenon, this was a black-power set of events. Now, things are changing fast. The crescent is in the ascendent, Muslims flood the streets in major cities, and blacks are losing viewing figures. Another reason to spice up BHM. And the way they’ve done that, as with so much else, is to use the white man.

I wrote last week about reactive political or ideological beliefs, the founding of your principles as the negation and rejection of what you oppose, whichever side of the political chasm you occupy. As a working model of this reactionary necessity, BHM is exemplary. There has been an interesting shift in focus over the last couple of years, as the celebration of blackness has dropped its masquerade mask and shown its true face, which is one snarling with anti-white animus. I suppose it was always there, but the cultural constellations have only now aligned, and are in just the right conjunction for it to emerge. There is something very tribal about all of this, something of the shaken spear, of face-paint in the firelight.

So, an entire month of myth and malevolence awaits us. Along with the usual narcissistic grandstanding, the absurd and almost wholly false historical revisionism, the supremacist strutting, and the private sector-funded orgy of self-indulgence, BHM is featuring a lot more “beat whitey” rhetoric, even if it is dolled up either to resemble genuine academic work or as some kind of performance art. Let’s go looking among our “black Britons” for somewhere to start our education. Why not start with a black success story? Why not admire a pillar of society, a member of the select few elected to govern? Step forward Dawn Butler, MP (Member of Parliament).

Butler is a black woman who has something of an antipathy to whites. To mark the beginning of BHM, she issued a video featuring herself reciting a poem whose subject matter appears to be exactly how and why black people are superior to white people. It’s a strange attempt at lyricism attempting to mask a genuine hatred of whites, and I know it’s a tough ask, but sit through it. It’s two minutes of your life that I can never give back to you, and I don’t feel good about that, but the poem casts its shadow over this entire piece. A sample lyric, if you really can’t face the visual prospect. The poetess is addressing white people, as she does throughout the work:

“You wanted to see me broken.
Head down and tears in my eyes.
More fool you, you didn’t realize
That my strength is powered by your lies.
You are the wrong one, the violent one, the weird one.”

Oh, and the video features a montage of black “civil rights” activists, including convicted murderers and rapists, one of whom is Eldridge Cleaver, who thought raping white women “an insurrectionary act.”

It’s a genuinely venomous ode, I’ll give her that. Snoop Doggy Doggerel. Byron couldn’t have put more sneering contempt into his poetic put-down of Bob Southey than Dawn has for whitey, who is weird and violent, just wrong. A two-for-one deal, too, as she gets to hate men in general, and I imagine there are a lot more women dabbling in poetry now this relatively new hatred has come back into style, like this season’s hemline in the 1950s.

The point here is not that some chippy black woman wants to celebrate her ethnic Guild Month with a mean-spirited, talentless attempt at poetry, but rather that this animus, this sheer intolerance of the manifest success of white history, is not confined to the playground that is black culture. It goes a lot deeper than that, and is far more ominous than an affirmative-action hire with a political megaphone (which will always mean a supermarket somewhere is missing its floor manager). In fact, this anti-white manifesto is now the tribal beat of the West, and it certainly sounds across the European Union. But before we visit Europe, we need to go to the movies.

We’ll go down-market, leave the world of poetry and the muses, and head to the cinema. I have vaguely followed the story of “go woke, go broke” cinema because it costs a lot of money to make a movie and I am interested as to why the big money-men would be putting their balls on the line in this way when focus groups and test audiences must have screamed, “No!” a thousand times at some of the woke bollocks coming out of Hollywood. Are the board-room meetings of the men who run the film industry really buzzing with excited chatter about gay Spidermen and transgender Lokis? I very much doubt it. My late father made documentary films for the British government, and often referred to those in charge of the film industry as “the Jewish Mafia”, and they know how to count. They also, however, know enough about the industry to be aware that all movie production is awash with loss-leaders, movies that bomb, the old “straight-to-video” genre. The success of the big movies funds a lot of flops.

It’s always been how studios work. They can take the occasional hit and go with a bi Hulk or whatever, because there will be another box-office beast along soon with a regular plot ordinary people like and which therefore makes money. But, anyway, to the movies, where Barbie: The Movie is showing.

As noted, I follow the world of cinema vaguely and so was aware that the girl’s doll Barbie had been made into a movie, although I wasn’t aware it had been so ideologically primed. Barbie lives in Barbieland but things don’t work out and she starts showing distinct signs of humanity, like a replicant but dressed all in pink. She gets told by a witch that she has to go to the real world, where humans live. This she does, presumably attended by much hilarity and heartache, things little girls seem to enjoy in equal measure. I haven’t seen the film, although the trailer rather oddly made me want to. The first shot is a woman’s feet, wearing supermodel high heels and with kitten bows. The feet stop and kick off the shoes. The feet step out, but still retain the arch of the shoe. Their owner remains on tip-toes. Barbie is a doll. Her heels never touch the ground. When they do, her Barbie friends shriek in horror. It honestly looks like it might be quite a weird watch, looked at from a certain angle.

Yes, that’s all very well, but what does it have to do with EU policy? We’ll turn to one of the many EU-funded think-tanks that grease the ideological cogs and gears of that ricketty and untrustworthy engine. The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) does what it says on the pack, it advises the EU on its relations with other countries which, in Europe, means countries that the EU doesn’t want to be countries anymore. That’s the point of the EU. If you want to be a superstate you can’t have people who eat different types of cheese, or have a different conception of what civil society ought to be, or possibly even different ideas about race or immigration. So you can’t have nations, you have to take the different cultures and set them all back at zero, like a stopwatch. It’s what all revolutions aim at. Year zero. I bet at least one of the unelected EU Commissioners secretly wants a new calendar.

The ECFR recently released a report whose subtitle, European Sentiment in the Year of Wars and Elections, indicates its concerns as likely to be mass-psychological and behavioral, worrying about what people are worrying about. And so they are, in the main. But it was the main title that made me reflexively think this must be satire. The report is titled Welcome to Barbieland. Here is the report’s explanation for the use of a film made for little girls and ironic, post-modern adults to illustrate the state of European social policy:

Today’s European Union resembles a Barbieland: a place prone to regard itself as more perfect than it really is – and harbouring some notable blind spots.

In Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film, the eponymous character leaves the fantastical Barbieland and finds her way to the real world. Much to her consternation, Barbie discovers not all girls are eternally grateful to her for empowering and emancipating them. Worse, many see her as a source of suffering and oppression.

In the past 12 months, many people who consider themselves “pro-European” might have experienced the equivalent to Barbie’s shock.

This is not the place for a review of a film I haven’t seen, just a note that the use of the film as a delivery system for an anti-white message is not quite as frivolous as it seems. If we’re white, we are all Barbie now. Barbie gets her come-uppance, by the sound of things, and is taught a new moral code from those to whom she must pass power. It sounds familiar, and that’s because the ECFR report and the film Barbie are two eggs from the same chicken.

There is a feedback loop between Barbie and the ECFR report that bears its name. They are both cultural productions of the same disruptive ideology, which explains the suitability of the film to symbolize the point of the research, which is to produce a culture in which Barbie: The Movie can exist. This kind of self-referentialism goes on all time in Critical Race Theory (CRT), for example. Texts will be laden with extensive footnotes which turn out to be references to other works of CRT. There are no genuine thinkers noted unless it is to denigrate a white male philosopher. It’s not critical thinking, it’s a hipster literary salon but without any good writers taking tea.

You can see this cultural and ideological feedback loop between film and report in the first two bullet-points of the report’s summary:

• In the movie Barbie, the titular character comes to realise that Barbieland is not the utopia she assumed it to be.
• Similarly, European political leaders have blind spots that illustrate the difference between the principle and the reality of the EU’s Enlightenment ideals. In time, these could come to undermine the health of democracy within the bloc.

I keep re-reading these two points. It’s not that it’s the Barbie movie they’ve chosen to illustrate the European condition rather than something by Herzog or Antonioni. I understand the limited intellectual abilities of the generation this paper is aimed at. It’s the wonderful similarity between the experience of a girl’s dolly come to life – like a dime-store Galatea, Pygmalion’s creation – and the “Enlightenment ideals” of the EU’s gauleiters. When woke is doing the creating, you can link anything to anything. Film and report go together for pedagogical purposes because as pure ideology, they are the same thing. Like triangles of different sizes but with the same internal angles, they may look different, but they are congruent.

The report’s summary has three more bullet-pointed paragraphs in which it isolates the three blocs which are a cause for concern: Non-whites and Muslims; Eastern Europeans; Young Europeans. The refrain of Gaza is introduced, and will reprise throughout the paper. These three blocs face “one joint challenge – which is about the bloc’s dangerous xenophobic drift”. In a mission statement which underpins the report, the following injunction is passed: “Pro-Europeans… should reverse the drift towards an ‘ethnic’ conception of Europeanness by reconstructing a ‘civic’ offer that upholds the foundational values of the EU.”

We all know what that means, that “‘ethnic’ conception of Europeanness”. It means being white, being a white man, to be more specific. White women are on the receiving end of this cultural putsch too, but their problems will be a knock-on effect from the persecution of white men.

There is a separate section in the report called Beyond Whiteness, which is treasure trove if you are looking for the evidence of the European Great Replacement, and still shows the tendency to use comparative culture with items drawn from the lighter, frothy end of the cultural spectrum. The political landscape after recent local elections across Europe is lamentable, the report says, because it fails to replicate the Benetton-poster ethnic makeup of competitors in events such as the European Football Championships, the Olympics, and the Eurovision Song Contest. Again, like Barbie, this is sheer feedback loop. Those cultural showpieces are all products of the same anti-white cultural machine, set to churn out as much blancophobic grist as it can.

Welcome to Barbieland is a well-written paper, by the standards of these things. There is only one byline, that of Pawel Zerka, a Senior Policy Fellow at the ECFR, and he is a clear writer who goes light on the technocratic jargon. There is some meaning here, both obvious and not so clear. Note, for example, the curious use of the word “offer” in the summary’s final suggestion that the move away from an ethnic meaning to the European experience be replaced with “a ‘civic’ offer that upholds the foundational values of the EU”. What does that mean, “a ‘civic’ offer”? Does it mean an offering? Is that what the white man is, a sacrificial beast ready for the purificatory slaughter? I wouldn’t put anything past the EU. Welcome to Klaus Barbieland.

And so, like one of Europe’s great chefs gradually reducing a sauce au fond, getting down to the essence of the ingredients, we find that what the paper is concerned with is erasing whiteness, slowly at first, and then with increasing acceleration.

This report has what used to be called sub-text, a narrative beneath the supposed narrative, layered over like a palimpsest, but reappearing like a pentimento in a Rembrandt painting, a ghostly reappearance of an original version showing through the finished article. I know it’s fashionable to bash post-structuralism, but I will always defend early (and more philosophical) Jacques Derrida, and not least for the insight that the supposedly obscured, secondary text, is often in fact the main text itself. It just needs teasing out.

If you want a document that captures anti-white sentiment at the level of international policy, or even simply for ethno-masochistic reasons, Welcome to Barbieland is for you. It reeks of anti-whiteness, the same poison seeping through Dawn Butler’s poem and BHM in general. There are many quotable quotes, and the whole thing requires a long separate essay, but I’ll quote this paragraph for a good, representative flavor of the whole:

The ‘voicelessness’ of non-white and Muslim inhabitants in today’s EU means these groups’ perspectives may never be heard – allowing xenophobia to flourish in the language, policy, and outlook of EU politics. The unchallenged ethnocentrism of central and eastern European governments and politicians risks further normalizing such attitudes in that region and in the rest of the EU. And young Europeans growing up in that environment could adopt a xenophobic outlook while others reject an EU they see as standing for values they do not share.

Welcome to the machine. The report often uses the term “voiceless” to describe their favored ethnic and religious, non-white blocs. Well, that depends on what you count as meaningful language. What is meaningful language? EU techno-speak, or the language of the flames, the churches being burnt down across France each week? Because whoever is doing that has a voice, and I doubt it’s the Dominicans.

So, BHM has moved on. It’s now Anti-White History in perpetuity, year-round and available at all cultural outlets from TV to billboard, movies to football, pop music to the fine arts, political doggerel to EU policy advice. No more Mr. White Guy. And that’s where the theorizing stops and a more pragmatic, perhaps more genuinely American approach would help Europe’s men formulate a question that has no Parisian trickery about it: Are we going to let them push us around like that?

Google is a prosthetic memory unless you really don’t know an answer or quote, and I don’t use it unless absolutely necessary. It’s like eye-glasses weakening your eyes. So I often wait around for some phrase to echo from the memory, something connected to whatever it is I happen to be writing about, but nothing particularly enlightening was coming from the old philosophical muses with which to end. But one odd phrase did sound, from a pop/rock song. It is spoken by Patti Smith at the end of a chaotic live version of The Who’s My Generation. Smith, of course, was a sort of spiritual punk and very much a creature of the Bohemian far left but, out of context, her sneer to the audience may instruct European whites, and remind them of their own history.

“We created it. Let’s take it over”.