By Ian Jobling • 1/29/08
In the past week, I have posted two stories about the creeping restrictions on freedom of speech that have been imposed on Westerners because of our fear of offending non-whites. Yesterday, I discussed the case of Frances Semler, who was forced out of her job because she was a Minuteman member and a critic of illegal immigration. Last week, I described the threat of punishment hanging over Canadian critics of Islam. We can all think of a hundred examples of whites who have been punished for their opinions about race, from Brigitte Bardot to Rush Limbaugh. These cases are illustrations of a key principle: integrating non-whites into white societies changes our culture and makes the maintenance of our traditions and our way of life impossible. One of the distinctive traits of white societies is our capacity for self-criticism. No dogma, religious or otherwise, has been immune from the critical insight of our people. It is for this reason that white societies have been so capable of innovation. Traditional ways went out the window as they were found wanting and replaced with novel ideas and practices.
The West’s self-critical nature is the reason why it invented science. The key idea behind the scientific revolution is that a theory of how the world worked was not justified by its conformity to the teachings of the Bible and other traditional texts, but only by its success in explaining empirical phenomena. Science was only possible because we could admit that if the facts and tradition conflicted, tradition must be wrong. For all other cultures in the world, tradition won out over the facts.
The scientific revolution was one of the major sources of our political revolutions. The scientific spirit debunked the divine right of kings and led to representative government. Self-criticism also corroded our ethnocentrism. While all other races made rigid distinctions between their own ethnic group, who were truly human, and other ethnic groups, who were something else, Westerners were the first to ask themselves whether the difference was so great as all that. Our recognition that all races of man are equally human and that none is a favorite of God undermined traditional justifications of slavery and racial discrimination and led to the end of those practices.
The non-whites whom we have imported into our countries, however, show no such taste for self-criticism, and they react with blind fury whenever one of their core beliefs is challenged. How could anyone possibly believe that 40 million Mexicans aren’t a blessing to America, think Mexicans? Fire the Minuteman! How could anyone be so wicked as to mock the true prophet, Muslims cry? Fine the magazine! Behead the infidel publisher!
And thus, in order to accommodate Hispanics and Muslims, we have had to change the basic nature of our societies and place some ideas outside the reach of criticism. The core values of our society—that the races are equal and that diversity is a strength—can no longer be challenged without the risk of serious consequences to the critic. Importing dogmatic races into our societies has in turn led whites to become dogmatic. The integration of non-whites into our societies has denatured the West.
Race realists think of the loss of the West as a portending disaster, but, in a sense, the West has already been lost because the free-spirited and fearless discussion of our core values is no longer permitted. Today the true spirit of the West survives only in small, isolated, and vulnerable outposts like White America.