Our Israeli correspondent MC contrasts “moderate” multiculturalism, the kind he experiences in Sderot, with the “extreme” version, which forces white Westerners to hold their own culture in contempt.
Cultural Contempt: All Things in Moderation
by MC
I quite like the odd tipple, but I am well aware that the current alcohol predilection of the nation is not healthy. I am also a religious fanatic, but my religion is verbal, not physical. Whilst I might regale you with words, I am not going to behead you if you refuse to listen.
I respect moderation, and I respect self-control.
In fact, my culture is built around moderation and self-control. I was taught at school and at home that these were desirable values, and that in all things I should do as I would be done by.
As I got older, I found that my values and culture of moderation was under attack.
Last week my wife and I had a visit from three German ladies who are currently visiting Sderot, we were able to converse in a wonderful mixture of schoolboy German, schoolgirl English and basic Hebrew, not one of us shared a fluency in any language other than our mother tongues, but we shared a common set of values. Judeo-Christian values of common decency.
We dined together on the simple foods that we could afford, we drank bottled water (the tap water is fluoridated) and we conversed. We discussed Torah, and we discussed Yehushua Ha’Meshiac.
Seventy years ago this dinner party would not have been possible. The cultural differences would have made for extreme problems. The German ladies, for the previous ten years, would have been forced to conform to a world view of Übermenschen and Untermenschen. They would have fallen into the former culture and my wife and I into the latter class. And my wife and I would have been in a state of fear.
Cultural contempt makes social barriers so high that normal interaction is impossible. For example: a cultural and educational tour company advertises China as a destination in both The Guardian (left) and The Telegraph (centre-right). The tours are the same but the dates are different, because the disparate groups of people are not compatible. One holds the culture of the other in absolute contempt.
I am a racist in that I like my own culture, and I am much more relaxed in a social situation with people of my own culture. This is racism in moderation, and gives offense to nobody who is not looking to be offended.
There is an Arab lady who collects food from our charity here in Sderot. She is certainly the wrong side of fifty. She greets the volunteers in Hebrew and smiles, positively beams friendliness to us all. She is a pleasure to serve, hijab and all. Most of our problems are Russian, those who bring their communist atheist upbringing through the door with them. They find it very difficult to understand the concept of a charity, and that our staff is of unpaid volunteers, many of whom are poorer than the clients they serve. One gentleman client even demanded that we employ a Russian speaker.
Zhoya, a volunteer from Kazakhstan, speaks Russian and is a great help when she is there, but our two Russian volunteers are now elderly and infirm and we very rarely see them. Zhoya is no spring chicken, but she is lovely to work with, and is absolutely reliable. David (from WV) speaks some Russian, as well as Hebrew, English, Dutch and French, and the Moroccan and Tunisian Israelis also speak French. The charity is American, and lunchtime is a cross section of U.S. society: West Virginia, Texas, two from California, Oregon, North Carolina and Kansas, plus my wife and I from (Old) Hampshire. Culturally we are all compatible even if we do have the odd problem with corned beef, bums and fags. But one also hears Russian, French and Hebrew at lunchtime, and it is not the language or the skin colour that is problematic.
The recent spate of black-on-white violence (and the endemic black-on-black violence) is probably the saddest reflection on US society today, and the mirror is positioned at the top pinnacle of political society where there is a ‘White African’ President who is causing cultural mayhem. Obama holds white middle-class culture (from which he himself descends) in contempt, and that contempt trickles down into the whole ‘Democrat’ culture.
So it is open season on white America, on white Sweden, on white France.
It is this cultural contempt that enables genocides and Holocausts, a cultural contempt which is the common factor in National Socialism, Communism and Islam. It is Cultural Contempt that is destroying the West, the cultural contempt of ‘socialists’ for ‘conservatives’, the cultural contempt of Muslims for any non-Muslim, the cultural contempt of ‘Black’ America for ‘White’ America.
We in the West failed to recognise the spores of the cultural contempt fungus that settled in our universities and became embedded in our ‘caring, sharing’ societies. We did not perceive the cultural contempt that crept into our living space, courtesy of mainstream media moguls. And because we did not perceive, we could not defend until we too were infected. Now we are in collusion; now we too have contempt for our culture. We have been taught to see ourselves as oppressors and to punish ourselves, we have been taught that we are ‘racist’ and that ‘racism’ is something very, very bad.
Racism in moderation is very good for us. “Hey Morrie, heard you had a fire at the warehouse.” “Shhhhh; that’s next week!” (you have my permission to laugh ).
Moderate ‘racism’ allows me to relax with my own kind, it allows me to socialise within my own culture and not to have to worry about political correctness. It allows me to be me so I don’t have to guess who’s coming to dinner. Cultural contempt corrodes my identity and my culture, it sets off in me an inferiority complex that makes ‘dinner’ a traumatic occasion and I begin to hate that experience and all that it entails.
The US culture is probably the greatest and the most free culture that has ever existed on the planet. I would be proud to be American. Many Americans died so that I could be free from the insidious cultural contempt that invading Nazis would have doled out to my parents if they (the Nazis) had come across the Channel, which would have been the inevitable result had the USA remained neutral.
That said, I watch with horror as cultural contempt chalks up hate-filled victory after hate-filled victory. Please, America: don’t succumb. The world still needs your cultural leadership.
The B had me look at the image he found for this excellent post. He finds old pics that are often long since redded-out and makes them new again. It’s not what he used to do with images – i.e, paint them – but it’s still compelling to me.
When I wrote MC to let him know the essay he sent was now resident on GoV, I said:
“Your post be up …
Oh those long-gone days when there was hope, and it was either Emily Dickinson’s ‘the thing with feathers’ or it was still one of the theological virtues. That was before Obama took it over and made a Communist myth out of it. Complete with unicorns.
Oh well, enough of weeping…
————-
This is such a good post. We are lucky to have you in the team.
BTW, notice the contempt in Sidney Poitier’s face. I think that was his normal face. What a burden. The white man has his [own] burdens, but the black man, he picks up one he doesn’t need and dons it as his spiritual heritage.
Give me Booker T any day.”
“Obama holds white middle-class culture (from which he himself descends) in contempt, and that contempt trickles down into the whole ‘Democrat’ culture.”
There is truth in the above. And yet Obama keeps repeating, over and over again, that he is helping the “middle class.” I suppose he needs to do this to keep the white liberals on board, most of whom are middle class. Empty rhetoric of course but then he addresses all problems and issues with rhetoric–rhetoric which bears very little relationship to what his administration actually does.
But this empty rhetoric appears to be enough for the majority of the people in the United States.
Of course I’m NOT comparing Obama to Hitler. But I’m no longer astonished–or so censorious–about Hitler’s being elected.
As Khrishnamurti so succinctly observed, “the word is not the thing.” But for the majority of Americans, at the current time, it appears to be the thing.
I watch and am amazed by the phenomenon.
The word appears to be the thing: A friend of mine was out walking shortly before the 2008 election when he passed one of those nose-in-the-air Obama posters with the word “HOPE” on it. Another man stopped to gaze upon the image and then said to his young child, “Won’t it be great to have a president who actually believes in hope!”
The man was obviously certain that the soon-to-be-previous president did not “believe in hope,” and equally certain that merely putting the word on a political poster demonstrated something solid about the person depicted on it. This, by the way, was in an area where people think they’re all super-sophisticated brainiacs.
Isn’t it astonishing that people don’t understand this?
P.S. I am relying on polls showing that Obama has the general approval of the population.
Even with Rasmussen’s poll of “likely voters,” Obama has the approval of about 47 to 52% depending upon the day.
Good post, although I disagree with the conclusion that it is “racist” to prefer one’s own culture. Race and culture are two entirely different concepts, and the conflation of the two is what enables the Left to demonize ideas. Japan, Korea and Taiwan have proven that capitalism has no race, just as Russia and China have proven that Marxism has no race. Civilized societies should shield humans from the harsh working of Darwinism, while exposing ideologies to the harshest possible Darwinism. There is nothing racist about preferring ideas that work!
Racism is a straw man that has taken on a life of its own, and in a way it has become internalized within us through constant propaganda over the past sixty years of the television era.
We therefore have a horror of the accusation of racism that the cultural Marxists can trot out every time the want to stop a conservative dead in his tracks. ‘Racism’ thus becomes the worm in our “crimson bed” eating away at our cultural integrity until there is nothing left that cannot be controlled from outside.
By understanding the synthetic nature of ‘racism’ we can rise above its use against us. There is nothing wrong with racism in the context of moderation and self-control.
The terrible crime is the left’s use of these racial slurrs to express their comtempt for our culture and values. Is an African American called a racist because he keeps to his own culture? I think not. Only a W.A.S.P. can be racist after all
OOPs, that lets me out.
You can like your own culture and not be racist. Just measure yourself on how you react to different people. Do you dislike people that are different. What quality do you dislike? If you talked to the person would you still dislike them? Being open to every persons character is a way to be a solid person and have your own values rule. You can defend your judgements and discriminations in a valid way.
I judge obama to be a folly based on this BSM post. Not for the faint of heart.
http://www.theblogmocracy.com/2013/08/30/a-presidency-of-squandered-opportunities/#comment-1252335
In some circles one is a racist if one moves out of a neighborhood where daily shootings occur.
I think that it is a very good thing that Israel is a Jewish nation run by Jews for the benefit of Jews. I only wish I could say the same, mutatis mutandis, of my own nation, the United Kingdom. Perhaps MC could advise on how Israel manages to act in its own interests in a way impossible to the UK, US, France, Sweden et al.
Israel confirms plan to deport African migrants to Uganda
Interior minister says Israel will set a deadline by which ‘infiltrators’ will have to leave ‘of their own free will’
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/30/israel-plan-deport-african-migrants-uganda
Bravo! But if the UK tried that, not only would there be insurrection among certain of our own “citizens”, there would be v. strong international pressure for the UK to stop being sane and start being insane again. I’m pretty sure that isn’t going to happen to Israel.
Racism is a distilation of anti-Semitism, and whilst anti-Semitism has had some very real horror stories, the liquor of racism is but a contrived political hate fest feeding upon the very real truth of the Holocaust. Indeed, the irony is that racism is the brainchild of the very same socialist forces that brought us the Holocaust.
It is inside this artificial shell that Israel exists, the existential nature of anti-Semitism makes criticism of Jews and the Jewish State difficult, one has to use the proxy of ‘anti-Zionism’ in order to get anywhere near to achieving this. But the phemomena of anti-Zionism is, however growing in acceptability and Israel’s protected place in the world line up will not last much longer.
Israel has also kept very strictly to a Torah based society, the Sabbath is still uncompromised and YHWH is still held in respect and is still part of the everyday life of many Jews. We are thus not corroded as much by moral relativity as much of the West is. Most of the people we work with are believers in the Jewish sense of the word, and have a ‘trust and reliance’ in YHWH to keep them safe. YHWH has made promises to His people, and so far, he has kept to them.
Our national rudder is still intact, even if the steersman is sandwiched between a malevolent POTUS and a rigorous religious political conservatism.
Yes, the Western Left has turned on Israel and is now delegitimizing it in the same manner that it does European Christian nation states. It is correctly identified as Anti-Semitism. And likewise Anti-European Christianism.
Haters (and self haters.)
It is inside this artificial shell that Israel exists, the existential nature of anti-Semitism makes criticism of Jews and the Jewish State difficult, one has to use the proxy of ‘anti-Zionism’ in order to get anywhere near to achieving this.
Yes, that’s what George Galloway and his crew use. But given that the left control the media, why do they need to use a proxy? And concentration camps were invented in the Boer war. What happened to the Boers did not prevent South Africa being demonized, isolated and turned over to the folk who are presently destroying it. There is another factor at work: it’s white Christians who are the target of the hate first and foremost, not white Jews. That is puzzling, because the former group is much larger than the latter, so the latter should be much easier to target first for destruction.
The Jews and Israel are too small in number and size to be relevant, but Christianity is hugely significant.
Whilst it is very ‘trendy’ to blame all ills on Israel and the Jews, that is just a huge red herring. It is Christianity that is hanging on to the first and second amendments (and the 4th), and this action is all that is between the NWO and its goals, Israel is already a prepared sacrifice to the NWO ready to be cast into the fire when the time is right (so they think).
Because many Christians think they are going to be ‘raptured’ before any of this happens, there is a complacency
So the NWO is trying to make Christianity so ‘sissy’ as to be ineffective.
Dare say that generally the shared cultural and hospitality etiquette seventy years ago would have had those German ladies park their ideological baggage on the hosts doormat, todays alien dinner party guests would more than likely steal the family silver, decapitate the host and his family then occupy the family home.
In actuallity, the three ladies would have been as much in danger from the regime of seventy years ago as My wife and I would have been, as ‘Hebrew Roots’ type Christians they would have been a threat, and would have been dealt with as such.
In fact, they are likely to be regarded as a fundamentalist threat in the USA today which is a very sobering thought.
On my four or five visits to Israel, all between 1967 and 1984, I observed quite a bit of soft intra-racism and soft intra-multiculturalism among Jewish Israelis themselves. The “white” Ashkenazim and “black” Mizrachim lived separate lives, with marked differences in intelligence, education, achievement, criminality etc. There was soft contempt from the former toward the later, and hard resentment from the latter toward the former [the Sfardim are another story, too complex to get into here]. Just as I do in the black-white divide in America, I felt an immediate understanding and sympathy for the Ashkenazi side. I believe that since then Israel too has experienced much PC and Affrmative Action for the Mizrachim, probably with the same deleterious result as to the overall level of culture and excellence.
This has not changed very much, there is still a tiered strata, Ashkenazi>Iraqi>Mizrahim but as you note it is somewhat softer than the EU and US models, there is little ‘affirmative action’ but there is a huge income gap. On the whole we do not meet rich Askenazim in Sderot, so everyone here is in the same boat, small town Israel has a character of its own.
Todah Rabbah, MC.
But, I am ready to despair for my own country. I thought that when the O was elected the first time, we’d be well rid of him after one term, and was proven wrong by events. The USA is very firmly a left-left nation now (not center-left), where a Christian photographer has been ordered by a court to work for a homosexual wedding. We have a mainstream media that is always willing to cover the misdeeds of the O’s maladministration.
Freedom of Association ended for White Europeans/Christians/Males in the US in the latter half of the 20th Century.
Well, I head a Eurasian family. Our friends and people whom we like include a number of “colors”.