The emergence of Senator Obama, as a serious contender for the Presidency of the United States, may well precipitate a demonstration of just how truly confused, concepts of race and racial preferences have become in contemporary America. The campaign also promises to stir cross-currents that seem certain to bring many of the chickens of Leftwing folly, home to roost.
While we could not support the Senator for ideological reasons, quite apart from any consideration of genes or genealogy, our primary focus will be not on specific issues, but on the perceptions and dynamics of race and racial preferences, in the social climate revealed by the Obama campaign, and its context among historic movements. In this, we must take a functional look at two generations of focused agitation.
What has induced us to again turn to the Obama phenomenon has not been anything the candidate has said, nor what his supporters have said; although some of their comments are relevant--at least in the sense of being revealing. Rather, we have been prodded by the idiotic remarks of some of Obama's "modern" Republican foes, who felt compelled to assure the world that while there might still be "ignorant," "hate" driven Whites who would vote against Obama because of his race; America--as a whole--has outgrown such bias. One such talk show host, in particular, illustrated this not so clever analysis, almost as an apology for the obvious emergence of a racial factor in the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary. The Republican, in question, felt a need to distance himself from any such racial preference, while still enthusiastically supporting Senator McCain! Comments such as his, and the repeated images of huge crowds, of diverse types, chanting in a unison reminiscent of Nazi rallies from the 1930s, dictated our choice.
There is a familiar, almost pathological, need among pro-Administration Republicans, both Neocons and survivors of the Rockefeller faction from the Goldwater era, not to discuss the Democratic dilemma over Obama and race; certainly not with words that might suggest that any reasonable voter might choose to consider a candidate's lineage. At least, this is clearly a taboo, if the hypothetical voter happens to be a rooted White Caucasian, who might take pride in a settler heritage. In this, of course, the Republican Left "apes" the long-standing attitude of the American Left, generally--those, who have not only advocated coercive legislation, both proper and judicial, in the name of "Civil Rights," but an increasingly vicious stigmatization of White Americans who still demonstrate pride in being part of that settler heritage. Thus, such Republicans, as the confused White Democrats--currently in a quandary over Obama's past ties to a racially motivated and belligerent Rev. Wright, and the potential for a major White backlash destroying their prospects for November--are unable to rationally address the coming election (and the potential fall out therefrom) in an historic or ethnic perspective.
Meanwhile, those who seek to exploit minorities--the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons, etc.--those, who feed off the intellectual confusion of the American mainstream on anything having to do with race or ethnic awareness, are being handed the opportunity of their lives to undermine what remains of social peace and tranquility in America. When Obama--having drawn those huge crowds across the Continent--was confronted with the publication of some of Reverend Wright's anti-White pronouncements, he sought to distance himself, not by repudiating the attacks on traditional American culture--or on a political system, he seeks to lead--but by reference to their "divisiveness." And he stated, in effect, that Wright was in error for advocating "self-help" without realizing that (according to Obama) self-help would not be effective unless America could be changed!
Obama is not more conservative than Reverend Wright. To the contrary, he is to his Left. Obama is no friendlier to traditional American concepts, he simply denies hating White people. But this does not mean he does not hate. To Obama, it appears that the "more perfect Union," to which he has repeatedly adverted, is one where only a single American identity, in a new egalitarian society, will be acceptable. Obama's "more perfect Union," is not one where individual States may dissent from a common unity of purpose, nor one where traditional communities may maintain separate identities; rather a monolithic coming together, in the name of "change," as defined by Obama.
The Obama phenomenon is the culmination of an over two generation attack on the Union of the Fathers, an increasingly frenetic attack on the ethnic identity of Americans of White settler stock, as a unique people; and, while it may appeal to the doctrinaire Leftist, it is hardly what even the modern "Liberal" actually sought--or 'signed onto'--at the start of the process. No one, actually elected to Office in the "New Deal," would have joined the contemporary assault on the mere display of the Confederate Battle Flag; on the traditional pride of the American Southerner in his settler and Confederate heritage; on anyone's taking pride in his own race or lineage, and wanting to preserve same. Nor were such assaults yet common in mainstream "Liberal" circles, in the days of Kennedy & Johnson.
There were certainly active efforts to attack practices deemed unfriendly to minorities. But few mainstream Americans, indeed, equated simple pride in an Anglo-Saxon or Celtic heritage with bigotry; few, indeed, thought it unacceptable that a small town, with strong Christian roots, would display the Ten Commandments, or hold a community wide religious observance. Only a small fringe attacked such things. Yet the quality of our politics, on average, has been declining since the 19th Century. While few attacked heritage overtly, few showed a proclivity to defend it against persistent attacks by that small fringe. By the latter days of the Clinton Administration, a profound shift had taken place in public perceptions--and, as in the era of the Nazi accession in Germany, many things that would once have seemed unthinkable, became part of an accepted reality. Intimidated, those who knew better remained silent. What is ironic, in the present Obama phenomenon, is that the Clintons, who epitomized the promotion and acceptance of the new dispensation, would be among its early victims. In the depths of Hell, "Citizen" Robespierre may be smiling.
It is a question of time--not quite analogous to that of the precedence of the chicken or egg--as to whether the notion of a Central Government, or a macro political collective's, having a functional power to demonize cultural preferences and patterns of personal association, primarily reflects a Communist or Nazi philosophy. Certainly the avowed egalitarian form, which the demonization of class or racial preferences has taken among affluent Americans, is more in the older Communist--the purer egalitarian--mold. The Nazis, while calling for a "classless, casteless" Germany, embraced a nationalistic form of egalitarianism. While their systematic demonization and exclusion of German Jews--as the later methodical slaughter of peoples in the conquered territories--were anything but egalitarian, they demonstrated a capacity for pure hate, fully comparable to that displayed in the Communist extermination of land owners (even would be landowners) in the pursuit of equality in the Soviet monolith.
Yet, considering the whole picture, it strikes us that while the notion of a Government reengineering social attitudes to egalitarian purpose, is clearly an application of communist thinking, the actual form of what has happened in the United States, since the 1930s, reflects at least an equal, if not greater, Nazi influence--although perhaps an indirect one. Bear with us, while we make some essential distinctions:
Although Stalin ruthlessly suppressed ethnic minorities that resisted the Bolshevik monolith, he gave at least lip service to a respect for the diversity of the varied peoples of Russia and the other Soviet Republics. Hitler, on the other hand, borrowed the original Marxist tactic of demonizing German Jews; yet the Nazis, generally, adopted a policy of actual denial with respect to race and ethnology among the broader German population, downplaying significant ethnic differences between other subsets of the German population. The favored "race" was not an actual biological race, determined by a common heredity, but a term applied to adherents to National Socialism among Germanic peoples. (See Chapter 7 of the Conservative Debate Handbook, and the comments by Col. Gayre.)
Being in the center, cross-roads, of Europe, it was not surprising that physical anthropology had shown the German population to be less homogeneous than that of most of Germany's neighbors. But the German form of Socialism appeared to require a pretense of oneness, very similar to that reflected in the type of American, today, who becomes hysterical at the mere suggestion that differences between racial and ethnic (including regional) subsets of the American population must be respected. It was in the fanatical pursuit of oneness--one people, one leader, one will--that Hitler turned an originally well educated population into so many chanting automatons, and destroyed all local autonomy, as all dissent in Germany. The mantra more closely resembles that being embraced by the crowds around Obama, chanting "Yes we can," or whatever, than any politician inside the "Beltway" would be willing to admit.
Those with access to extensive film repositories, might compare pictures of the adoring young women at an Obama rally, with the young German women leaning out of windows to greet Hitler in Nuremberg in 1934's "Triumph Of The Will." We realize that adoration for a charismatic speaker is no reason for rejection. The Obama supporter would doubtless argue that Obama is the opposite of Hitler, labeled a "racist" for over 70 years; that Obama is the candidate of "inclusion." Yet look more closely: It is only because of the American Left's inordinate influence in American education, that so few have observed and commented on the fact that the most widely proclaimed difference between modern American "Liberalism" and German National Socialism, the former's claimed tolerance and the latter's attributed intolerance towards minorities, is almost wholly illusory.
While subsidiary targets have been different, the foundational question--the functional concept--the popular acceptance of a Government able to expropriate the most basic individual liberties--including rights over the uses and disposition of one's property, the education of one's children and the patterns of one's personal associations and identifications--has been remarkably parallel. Is the issue over whether to allow Government virtually total power over the mind and property of the individual, merely a question of whether one agrees with the application of that power at a given moment in time? We think not! And what of the politics of "inclusion," when forced on those who came here believing they would have their own distinct communities?
Booker T. Washington's famous metaphor, stating the essence of mutual toleration in a multi-racial, multi-cultural, political society ("In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress") reflected not only his vision of a more prosperous, more tranquil America. It captured the very essence of why early White America worked! Virginia and Massachusetts could join a common Union, because it did not seek to remake either society in the image of the other; nor in that of any other State or community. It is not surprising that Hitler's first major act, after arrogating unlimited power in a contrived crisis, was to destroy States' Rights and local autonomy throughout Germany. The Founding Fathers understood Liberty. Hitler understood power.
It may be argued that the American Left, however its functional view of a Central Government may parallel the Nazi, has never sent people to Death Camps; that its ultimate methodology in the application of an asserted power to change society, and make all conform to new norms, is "kinder and gentler." But the Nazi death camps were phenomena of the last 40 months of the War. They were not active during the first nine years of a species of power over the German people, that the American Left can only envy. Yet the hateful rhetoric, which eventually led to human slaughter, was scarcely more vicious than that being spewed in America today, against those who dare not to want to be part of a new Monolithic egalitarian society, that Obama and others would construct for us. Do not Obama and his supporting cadres blame Conservative White Americans for the woes of American minorities, in much the same vein as Hitler and Goebbels blamed the German Jews for German problems? Just whose attitudes does he demand to change?
It is revealing that the focused attack on private preferences and patterns of association, in America, got underway in the same era in which the Nazis were strutting their ideological wares in Germany. It was not that the advocates of a new Monolithic America ever copied the Nazi targets or immediate objectives. That hardly refutes the Nazi influence. The almost fanatically egalitarian Reconstruction Congress, in setting up the public schools in the District of Columbia, still recognized that all were not truly one, in providing separate schools for the White and Black children. These were continued, with little dissent, until 1954.
It was only after sustained agitation and litigation in the 1930s & 1940s, that the advocates of "oneness" later obtained Court decrees that invalidated restrictive covenants in real estate; that in the 1950s, led to decisions that invalidated bequests that provided scholarships, limited to children of a testator's own ethnic choosing & religion, in Pennsylvania; to be followed by the "Civil Rights" laws and mentality, we see today, which severely restrict one's rights in one's own property.
That the mythical "level playing" field was never the objective--neither here nor in Germany--is evidenced by how quickly laws outlawing "discrimination" were ignored when the push came for "Affirmative Action." Nor was there great difference in the behavior of the respective movement's partisans in dealing with inspired street violence. Or just what is the philosophic difference between rioters destroying White and Oriental businesses in Los Angeles, or other American cities--with little or no consequences to the rioters--and Crystal Night in Germany?
Combatants in the ideological battle for America over more than half a century, we are well aware that many of the more extreme Leftists of the mid 20th Century, were convinced that in attacking White ethnic identity, they were actually fighting Nazi influences. In their zeal to oppose what they considered Nazi thinking, they focused only on Nazi policy, rather than political philosophy--on the particular applications of arrogated power, rather than the nature and proper function of Government. Driven by hatred of the existing order--as were so many of their Nazi counterparts--they eagerly embraced policies that were vicious and ultimately as self-destructive, as were those which Hitler brought to Germany. While these "anti-Nazis" were often dedicated Marxists--many outright supporters of Bolshevik Communism;--in their frenzy to "answer" the Nazis, the Nazi model may have come to permeate their thinking far more than many realized--more even than that of the yet more despicable Lenin in Russia.
America's roots more clearly reflect German than Slavic origins and influences. It would be only fair to assume that the German Socialist model received more popular attention than the Soviet, during that contemporaneous era. Moreover, the Soviet model was based more on equality through common ownership of property; the German, as that of the American "New Deal," more on a continuation of the appearance of private ownership; yet an ownership, more and more answerable to a collective power, as evidenced by an ever further reaching aggrandizement of Government. And, again, the German Socialist placed an ever greater emphasis on the "oneness" of the people. The Hitlerian mantra, "One nation--One Leader-- One Will," is more in concert with the repeated Obaman emphasis on seeking a "more perfect union," as opposed to the Libertarian vision--the limited Federal role provided in the actual Union, the Founding Fathers won for us.
Yet whether what is happening in America is more in the Communist or Nazi mold; it is very clearthat a huge percentage of the population have utterly embraced a movement that, in its fervor, combined with its denial of the essential nature of our institutions (all premised upon individual responsibility, and the rights of individuals in their own lives), is rushing us towards a social crisis of unprecedented magnitude. Increasingly, not only Conservatives; not only the Clinton Left; not only older line American "Liberals," but powerful influences, not ordinarily perceived as ideological, are becoming alarmed. It is not just possible, it is now probable that Obama's rush to power will be stopped, this side of an electoral victory. But what will follow?
For the Conservative, this may actually be opportunity--although in the near term, potentially very ugly. For the Clintons and those other American "Liberals" who, in pandering to earlier forms of the movement, have done much to create a philosophic monster, it is indeed a case of "chickens coming home to roost." And their dilemma is very real. Stand up too forcefully, and they risk a decisive split in their forces, that could last a generation. Fail to stand, and they risk being swept aside as inconsequential, as the Mensheviks were replaced by the Bolsheviks in Russia.
Our point is not to predict the immediate future, but to offer a generally unperceived context to an onrushing dynamic. We dealt, briefly, with an Obama type phenomenon in our Novel, Return Of The Gods. While the character, there, does not prevail; the rise precedes apocalyptic developments. We profoundly hope that we were not prophetic. In some situations, it is better to be wrong than sorry.