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Notes -
It would probably be prudent to offer the full context here:
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So, he's objecting to what he sees as specific Jewish privilege and is specifically answers the claim that this action would make him an anti-Semite. Seems like context that one would want to include and not just drop this one individual sentence here, whatever one things about Ignatiev's other statements.
Public writers who threaten critics with a libel suit (especially for an evaluative claim like “is an anti-Semite”) always rub me the wrong way. It just seems pathetic, like running to teacher because someone called you a doo-doo face. The cost of having a following for your thoughts is that someone’s going to misinterpret them. If you can’t take that heat, stay out of the kitchen.
I also feel like it’s a lack of humility — if you’re offering up a radical take on race, someone’s going to find serious issue with that. Maybe they’re misinterpreting you. But the cost of a radical reinterpretation is that the people who rely on the mainstream one will find it intensely offensive. Of course you’re going to get called nasty things! You can wear that as a badge of honor, or shriek about it. Only one of those makes you look like a person with the intellectual humility required to actively argue for a radical take.
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It’s a Jewish specific thing in this context because Jewish laws forbid that anything that touches something unclean must be destroyed. Christianity has no similar rules. If I hold a race in a church, it might be offensive, but it doesn’t render the building “unchristian” to the point that it must be destroyed. The closest I can think of is hala in Islam or no beef in Hinduism. Reserving the holy things of religion against things that break those rules isn’t special treatment is the condition doesn’t exist for other religions.
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Can you explain how the context contradicts my summary? He vocally supported ending the white race, while at the same time declaring anti-Semitism a Crime against Humanity. That was my statement, and your context does not refute that in any way. Sure, he made that affirmation in order to defend himself from the accusation of anti-Semitism for his position on Harvard food accommodations but that is no matter. What I have said is not changed whatsoever by the context you provided, he simultaneously held both positions exactly as I described.
If the context was unimportant, why not include it yourself? Even if we assume that you didn't mean to imply what people think that you were implying, at least you surely understand that your post could easily be read in such a way without that context?
The context is unimportant, and I excluded it because it is unimportant. You can't just say the word "context" you have to explain how "the context" changes what I said- and it does not in any way. So he was against Jews getting their own dining accommodations at Harvard? Can you explain to me how that's relevant at all to what I said? My point was to contrast his call to destroy the white race with his claim that anti-Semitism is a crime against humanity. That point is not whatsoever challenged by his position on Harvard dining.
(Since you tagged me) It literally serves as an example of him opposing Jewish particularism, which is ultimately what you accuse him of.
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You only mention him objecting to anti-Semitism, as usual implying that Jews only care about Jews and are enemies of everyone else. The context makes it clear you're being disingenuous:
As for "vocally support ending the white race," when academics and activists talk about "ending whiteness" they are not talking about literally genociding white people. Their argument is that "whiteness" is an arbitrary social construct. Of course most of us consider this a stupid argument, much like the claims that "male" and "female" are arbitrary social constructs. But just as people who want to "end masculinity" and "end the gender binary" are not talking about literally exterminating males, you know perfectly well what Ignatiev actually meant.
This argument would never hold against any other group; women, blacks, jews themselves. We can't accept and normalise this sort of rhetoric. Its indefensible.
It's amazing to me how often a conversation like this happens.
"Well, what he said was bad, but he wasn't actually calling for genocide." "So you think what he said wasn't bad. I guess you are pro-genocide."
I mean the objection is that no one could remain a public figure after suggesting I want to “end” any group other than whites. If he’d been talking about “ending Jewishness” or “ending blackness” or “ending femininity” he’d have been fired rather publicly. In fact, reading his statement he doesn’t say “I object to Jewishness, like other forms of bigotry.” He said “I object to antisemitism, like all forms of bigotry.”
If he’d worked with a group that suggested that treason to blackness is service to humanity, he would never be in a position to have anything else he said taken seriously. He’d probably be banned even on Twitter.
Okay, sure. This conversation is still very strange to me, it's like reddit-tier grasp of nuance. I am not defending the statements, just saying he said A, not B. "Oh, so you're saying A is fine!" No, that is not what I said.
This is fair, my comment was a bit of a snipe.
I just don't want to see this rhetoric on any side.
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It's not what he said. He said "that argument wouldn't hold against any other group".
We literally just came off a decade-long purge of "ironic" offensive humor precisely on the grounds that the irony may be used to cover up a true sentiment, so what's so outlandish about the claim that "end whiteness" actually means "end whiteness", and the general condemnation of "all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry" not carrying much weight when people notice they only seem to come out when it's the author's own ethnic group that's under attack, and also that he comes from a school of thought holding it's impossible to be racist against whites?
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It seems to me they are clear advocating for eliminating what many people would think of when they think of males. While they may be allowing for XY individuals to still 'exist' in some sense, it's likely it would be in the sense that a woman can have a cock, balls and beard. Those aren't women, and their new men, won't be men.
They are talking about eliminating males in a real sense. We do them and ourselves a disservice by not believing they are sincere in their advocacy especially when they show us time and again who they genuinely are and what they believe.
Yes, but what they are talking about is folly, and impossible. They think they can literally transform males into something else. But they aren't talking about killing people. As with "whiteness," I don't have to agree with their construction to point out that they are not literally talking about eliminating people.
They're not talking about killing current males, mostly.
They are absolutely talking and working towards their goals of eliminating what many people would think of as males from existence. You say this is folly and impossible yet they seem intent on putting forward the effort. I think it's worthwhile opposing this effort with the full force and breadth of capability.
Cool. I wasn't supporting their efforts.
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There is no implication of that at all. My implication is exactly what I said: he is vehemently anti-white and he strongly objects to anti-semitism. Absolutely nothing about the context challenges that fact, there is no implication that he "only cares about Jews." He's a commie, I'm sure he cares about a bunch of stuff! But he's vehemently anti-white while strongly objecting to anti-Semitism (very very many such cases).
That was my point, it is 100% true, it is not changed at all by the context, and it's not challenged by anything you wrote here.
@Amadan, would you agree that he's vehemently anti-white and he simultaneously strongly objects to anti-Semitism, regarding it as a Crime Against Humanity? If not, why not?
I don't think "anti whiteness" is the same as "anti white," at least not the way you mean it.
I also don't believe you were not implying he only cares about Jews when you intentionally isolated his statement about anti-Semitism from his opposition to bigotry in general.
That context is significant, and you know you were trying to frame his words to mean somethingother than his intent.
Your claim is that I was saying "Ignatiev only cares about Jews" when I said no such thing and would have no reason to believe this. I said he is anti-white and he strongly opposes anti-semitism, which is a claim that is not refuted by anything you or anyone else has wrote in response.
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You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
Obviously I understand Ignatiev's beliefs, better than you apparently. No, I don't think Ignatiev is calling for a literal murder of all white people. Instead he is using his own non-negligible cultural influence to deconstruct and pathologize White Identity, in an effort to undermine it. I understand that perfectly well, I more than most here understand that you don't undermine a race by just committing murder, you do it at a symbolic and ultimately cultural level. It remains an expression of a strong ethnic hostility even if it's not actually advocating for physical violence.
Citation strongly needed! He regards the Black Race as a social construct also, but one that is sympathetic and he does not call to Abolish Blackness. If you're going to provide a claim for that, please provide evidence. While you're at it- provide evidence that he called to Abolish Jewry. Of course he did neither such thing, it is Whites who who receive the enmity of his ideological worldview and no other racial group.
Calling for the Abolition of Whiteness while simultaneously declaring anti-semitism as "Crime against Humanity" is a far more important demand for Jewish privilege than the question over whether Jews at Harvard should be given dedicated kitchens. He is demanding Jewish privilege by socially deconstructing White identity while declaring in-kind criticism of Jewish identity to be a Crime against Humanity. His position on dining at Harvard notwithstanding, which is entirely irrelevant to the question at hand.
Please provide evidence Ignatiev called for the Abolition of Blackness or Jewry. He did not. He called for the Abolition of Whiteness, and he declared anti-semitism to be a crime against humanity. Which is exactly what I said in my original post.
I challenged your absurdly naive notion that combining all the races of the world would magically combine all the relative strengths of each group into one superior specimen:
That was the juvenile claim you made which I challenged.
I don’t believe that this is what he meant by “anti-Semitism”! I believe he meant a far more quotidian antipathy towards individual Jewish people as a result of their religion or ancestry. I believe that his frequently-expressed opposition to Israel is part of his larger opposition to the reification of unchosen identity groups. If “Jewry”, as you’re using it, means “Jews cooperating and seeing each other’s fates as inherently tied together, in both past and present, on account of their shared inherited identity,” then yes, I think he pretty clearly wants that to stop.
What I think you’re either ignoring or failing to recognize, though, is that as a leftist he believes it’s important to prioritize. Leftists believe in tackling the very big problem (the centuries-long privileging of fair-skinned people over dark-skinned people, which is still ongoing and still profoundly negatively impacts the latter’s lives) right now, and then later on down the line, once that’s been done, future progressives can start working on dissolving the other, less currently-powerful unchosen identity groups.
Again, why would Ignatiev waste his time writing books and giving speeches about “abolishing blackness” when he knows full well that this would simply introduce massive friction and mutual recriminations within his political coalition? Just to prove to you that he’s not a hypocrite? It’s not like you’d hate him or oppose him any less if he did so. So why should he care about appeasing your sensitivities?
One possible answer is that it makes white people feel bad and defensive when he fails to do so, and that this is bad — either because it is a priori bad to make people feel bad about their race, or because it’s politically counterproductive and unnecessarily makes enemies of a numerous and powerful group. And certainly the latter, at least, is a good reason to not to what Ignatiev is doing, even if one shares his philosophical priors. I was precisely one of those white progressives who got scared off by the explicit anti-white antipathy expressed by guys like Ignatiev, and who discovered a positive white identity as a result. (I’ve since lost some of the enthusiasm I had about that identity at the time, but it was sufficient to ensure I could never again be a leftist.)
Still, there are, demonstrably, plenty of white people who are comfortable with the proposition that whiteness could be fully deconstructed, without that having any serious negative impact on the material reality of their lives. That the hegemonic culture centering whiteness could be dismantled, and that instead of another group taking up the whip hand and using it to take their own turn as the hegemonic oppressor, everyone could just all agree to be deracinated self-inventing individuals. You and I both agree that they’re wrong about this — that there will always be a hegemonic culture in any given polity, and that such a culture will likely always have something to do with unchosen/inherited identity groups. But that’s a testable claim, and committed leftists really do believe that, in the fullness of time, they can stop that pattern from recurring. And given that belief, I think it’s fair to say that they are anti-Whiteness™️ without being anti-White People.
Their main problem is that they are, unwittingly or otherwise, politically allied to vindictive non-whites who are very consciously committed to simply changing which group(s) will be the next up to hold the whip. I see Ignatiev as more of the naïve idealist who really believes this time will be different and we can finally defeat racial identitarianism for real. You appear to see him more as the consciously-vindictive aggrieved minority who wants to be the next one to hold the whip hand. Is this an accurate characterization?
Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.
If I said: "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the Jewish race" do you think Ignatiev would regard that as anti-semitism? Obviously he would. So you just switch "White" from "Jew" in his own rhetoric and it goes from "moral good" to "crime against humanity."
This is funny Hoffmeister. Firstly, I never accused Ignatiev of hypocrisy, he's a Jew who is hostile to White Identity. That's not hypocritical. Ben Shapiro is not hypocritical for strongly opposing White Identitarianism while strongly supporting Jewish identitarianism. He's not being a hypocrite, he's being a Jew who is strongly motivated by his religion and ethnic identity.
But secondly, you were the one who said "In that sense, it is also true that he wants to 'abolish the black race'" without providing a shred of evidence.
In fact, the situation is worse. You, Hoffmeister, accuse me of being an equal-offender racist- racist against everyone, while I accuse you of being even worse- only racist against blacks. It's telling then that you are defensive of Ignatiev who defends Black Identity on the basis that it musters resistance to White Identity. So his real position is the precise opposite of what you imagine. He supports using Black Identity as a tool to undermine White Identity, which is why his ideas found such prominent reception during the BLM Great Awakening. In this way, his position is basically equivalent to the anti-semitic conception of the conniving Jew who wants to manipulate Blacks to get back at whitey. This is literally Ignatiev, but you remain totally blind to this pattern of behavior and the writ-large alliance between Jewish intellectuals, Blacks, and the Civil Rights movement.
He hates White Identity, he wants to destroy it- and there's no evidence for hatred of Black or Jewish identity, in fact precisely the opposite. That is my characterization of his beliefs.
Indeed. Suppose Ignatiev were to reply to your comment (and general worldview) with:
Would you accept his offer?
Because that is the difference between Ignatiev’s position and those of the dissident rightists who borrow his words in this case. He (like all communists) allowed for conversion; even the last emperor of china was converted, after all. You do not.
I'm not sure even sure if that's miles away from Ignatiev's actual position, if you strip away Protestant Christianity or going to Israel and th elike. I was prompted by this whole discussion to go search for his actual comments on the issue and found easily a series of blog texts called "Memoir of an ex-Jew", where he suggests that one of the big problems with Zionism is precisely that it prevented Jewish assimilation:
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The entire series is likewise an extended attack on Jewish identitarianism in multiple forms.
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He would simply point out that there is no example in history, with the exception of the few brief periods in which Israel has existed as an insular sovereign political entity, in which Jewish people have had the power to openly privilege themselves as a dominant racial group at the expense of other groups. Whereas there was a period of several centuries wherein white people — conscious of their whiteness and the way it made them different/better than other people — had both the means and the willpower to travel around the world establishing states in which they were made the supreme/privileged race and others were treated as less-than as a result. And, Ignatiev would argue, this power differential favoring white people has continued to the present day. He would argue that Jewish people simply lack the concentrated power and the racial solidarity to place themselves in a position of supremacy over white people even if they wanted to.
Therefore, there is a context around the claim that “Jewishness must be abolished” — namely, that such a project has been actively attempted multiple times within fairly recent history and had demonstrably catastrophic results for Jewish individuals — that simply doesn’t exist (at this time) around the superficially-similar claim that “whiteness must be abolished.” Even if there were some not-insignificant number of powerful people working together to abolish whiteness, the methods they would realistically have at their disposal would not look anything like large-scale pogroms or the Holocaust or whatnot. White people do in fact still have the lion’s share of the money, the power, the resources, the access to nice things and prestigious employment, etc. Their enemies are forced to resort to more long-term abstract tactics such as tipping demographics through facilitation of mass immigration — something which affects countries on a long time scale, but doesn’t actually produce significantly negative impacts on the quality-of-life of individual white people in the present.
Now, of course, this is where you and I both disagree strongly with Ignatiev, given that we recognize that some ethnic groups actually are quite bad on average and have the ability to introduce a lot of pretty substantial negative externalities in a pretty short period of time when given any power/leeway. That being said, I would hope you can acknowledge that none of those externalities, as of yet, have risen to anywhere near a level of badness comparable to racial chattel slavery, industrial-scale pogroms, apartheid, etc. (You may believe that things could get that bad for a significant number of white people within our lifetimes. I think the probability of this is low but that it’s worth taking at least some basic measures to guard against. Ignatiev believes such an outcome is totally implausible, and that none of his political allies would ever dream of doing something like this even if they could.)
And again, as far as I call tell Ignatiev does believe that he personally benefits from a system of white supremacy. Unlike you, he doesn’t appear to just see himself as “white-passing, but exempt from all the really bad criticisms of white people because he’s Jewish.” He, like most people who are honest about it, recognizes that he’s white in every way that counts, and that this has benefited him tangibly. (Police officers are less likely to apply a heightened scrutiny to him upon clocking him visually. Service staff are more likely to treat him deferentially rather than warily. And so on and so forth.)
Most people, whose “Jewdars” are quite weak, would probably have no idea Ignatiev is Jewish unless they asked him, or unless they happened to have a reason to look up his early life on Wikipedia. Therefore, if Ignatiev does genuinely believe that a visibly white/European phenotype confers material advantages in this country, then he is advocating stripping himself of those advantages. I don’t think he sees “abolishing whiteness” as being in his cynical self-interest, in the way that Ben Shapiro sees pro-Jewishness as in his self-interest. Again, Ignatiev does not seem to have any affinity with the Jewish community, does not seem to wish to avail himself of protection within it while whiteness is being abolished, and opposes the continued existence of an Israeli state where Jews could escape to if they fall afoul of “anti-white” activity.
I have never called you a “racist”, and I don’t ever unironically use that word. What I do believe is that your identity commitments are too parochial. That you’re thinking too small by focusing on the centrality and purity of European-derived people only. That you’re unnecessarily excluding millions, potentially billions, of valuable contributors to the human race, because you’re too micro-focused on reifying whiteness.
Does he? Genuinely, are there specific passages of his writing in which he does so? I’m not aware of any, although I’m far from a connoisseur of his work. If you have evidence of this it would likely change my assessment of him considerably.
And even people who weren't white nationalists could look at that and say "motte and bailey".
He can claim that abolishing whiteness is a technical term that doesn't imply any racial hostility. But saying "I don't really mean X" when there are plenty of people in your coalition who do mean X is indistinguishable from giving them cover and encouraging them even if you pinky swear that that isn't really what you mean.
Right, so, I acknowledge that this is by far the largest problem with Ignatiev’s beliefs. Again, I don’t think people should agree with him, I comprehensively reject his political project, and I want him to fail miserably and to die knowing that his entire life’s work was a pointless, cancerous failure.
There is a way for naïve white progressives — even ones who are as clearly maladjusted and full of spite as Noel Ignatiev — to be reintegrated back into a politically healthy discussion, but only once they have persuasively demonstrated that they understand the extent to which they’ve directly empowered the most worthless, destructive, spiteful, irredeemable elements of our society. Since that’s not happening any time soon, we can keep trying to crush the Ignatievs of the world. I just think we can do so without calling them liars and hypocrites.
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Well, besides right now, anyway. And some would argue a few other times within living memory. Right now, after all, Jews wield a disproportionate amount of influence at the expense of western white (and the various non-whites stuck here with us) civilization. Almost all the metrics people use to point out white institutional dominance point an even longer finger at the Jews.
This privilege manifests in many forms, one of which is you can say "abolish the white race by any means necessary" and have an entire elite institution launder this attitude into mainstream acceptability, whereas if you want to say the same about Jews you have to rant on niche internet forums.
Jews do not have anywhere near the level of explicit racial solidarity that whites had in, say, apartheid South Africa, or the Antebellum American South. Whatever covert influence some powerful Jews have to influence things in their favor at the expense of others, surely you can acknowledge that their actions (outside of, arguably, Israel) are of a qualitatively different form than, say, passing laws explicitly forbidding non-Jews from owning property, voting, patronizing the same businesses as Jews, etc. The worst thing a powerful Jew can do to white people in 21st-century America is write a mean book about us, produce a TV series where we’re the bad guys, and attempt (with intermittent success) to legislatively block border enforcement. Contrast that with the worst era of White Supremacy, in which a white person could own a black person as property. The two situations are not comparable.
This doesn’t mean I don’t think discriminating against white people is bad! It shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t be tolerated, and it certainly shouldn’t be celebrated on grounds of retributive justice, balancing the cosmic scales, etc. I’m white, I’m planning to continue to be white, and I will do what I can to resist efforts to dispossess me or to dissolve cultural norms which are good for me and mine. But I don’t believe that Noel Ignatiev has the power to make me a second-class citizen, or that there’s any realistic American future in which white people are explicitly and systemically oppressed based on group identity. Whereas there are plenty of countries where it’s at least realistic to believe that Jews could suffer that fate again, as they have in the past. (This doesn’t give anyone, Jew or gentile, a blank check to tear my culture to shreds in order to obviate the hypothetical possibility of future pogroms, to the extent that any of them are doing so.)
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SS says a lot of pretty nakedly racist things, but man, a screed defending a literal call to abolish the White race that ends in claiming the desire to protect one's culture and homeland from foreign replacement is some vile thing -- as if literally every people don't want to do that, as if it wouldn't be considered mad, bigoted offense to promote this same replacement for minority groups -- is quite possibly the only situation where Secure sounds more sympathetic than the person he's arguing with.
Again, I’m not saying that Ignatiev’s beliefs are good — I oppose pretty much every aspect of his worldview — but simply that they are sincere and internally consistent. They’re not hypocritical. He doesn’t appear to want any special carve-out for Jewish people, nor does he seem to have any special affinity for Jewishness on account of his own personal ancestral background.
Like, yes, many Jews, Ignatiev himself, are hardcore believers in deracinated progressive abolishment of blood ties. So are many non-Jews! If you want to oppose their beliefs — and I do! — it is a useless distraction to try and smoke them out as secret Zionist special-pleading hypocrites. We can just oppose their actual stated beliefs, which are bad enough, instead of grasping at straws to call them liars.
Oh, yes, assuredly. Ignatiev's creed is abominable, but so long as he also supports the dissolution of Israel and Black identity or whatever, he's evil for non-hypocrisy reasons. That's a thing SS is good at: finding a lot of evil Jews. The problem is they're mostly evil Jews, whereas he thinks they're evil Jews.
It's rough! Ignatiev's beliefs are awful. But not Jewishly awful. Still, SS is more sympathetic than Ignatiev.
Do you think Ignatiev is motivated by his Jewish identity to any significant extent, or that his cultural output is influenced by his cultural and genetic heritage? If so, then it's not just- he's evil and he happens to be a Jew. My position is that he's neither good nor evil- he's a Jew.
I think everyone is motivated to some extent by their identity and environment, but I don't think Ignatiev's evil is motivated by his Jewish identity. He's embraced globohomo, not Jewish Supremacy, far as I can tell -- but I don't know the man outside of this quote everyone's been debating, so if you have something else condemning him, by all means share. It wouldn't be hard to persuade me against him, I think he's obviously a piece of shit.
And unlike you, I would call him evil.
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Well, the problem is for SS, all Jews (modulo some tiny fringe who agree with him that yes indeed, we Jews are awful!) are evil.
Eh. They both basically want to eliminate their outgroup. I suspect Ignatiev's agenda is probably not literally exterminationist, so fwiw I find him more sympathetic, but that's like choosing which woman on The View is more intelligent.
Do you think Ignatiev's ideology is that "all white people are awful?" I don't think that's his ideology. I think he's hostile to White Identity.
It's so telling that you are so charitable to Ignatiev when I have never spoken rhetoric nearly as inflammatory as Ignatiev in his statements on the White race. But you still interpret his philosophy openly calling for the end of the white race with so much more charity than my cultural criticism of Jewish behavior in American society.
When it comes to Jews, it's not possible to simply oppose them politically and culturally. You have to be an exterminationist if you oppose Jews politically. You can't just oppose their influence in culture and academia and foreign policy, if you criticize them it means you want them all killed. Only for Jews though. This is the hysterical bullshit standard you enforce in every single reply to me Amadan, but don't at all apply to a Jew who openly calls for ending the white race by any means necessary.
Yes, that is exactly what I said.
I think Ignatiev distinguishes between white identity and the white race. Whether you or I find that distinction meaningful is irrelevant to understanding what his meaning is. Lots of non-Jewish white people in the woke movement say exactly the same thing. I have, in fact, heard some white people unironically say the white race should be allowed to go extinct (and a few loons even suggesting more direct and immediate measures), but they are pretty far out on the fringes and not what most of these people mean.
I'm "charitable" in the sense we are supposed to be charitable to views we disagree with here on the Motte, which means not straw manning, eliding context, or characterizing someone as saying something they didn't say. I don't think Ignatiev is calling for the end of the white race, in the sense that white people will no longer exist. And I think you know this and you are being dishonest in claiming you believe that's what he's saying.
If all you said was "Jews have disproportionate power in politics," I wouldn't disagree with you factually, though I'd still want to know what specific remedies you advocate and why you think it is specifically a problem. But come now, SS, you tactically hide your power level but your agenda is not merely JAQing about why so many Jews.
If you are constantly talking about how one particular ethnic group is a threat, how their values are hostile to ours, and how almost every member of that group is driven to behave in a certain fashion, yes, it leads me to strongly suspect that your actual agenda is exterminationist, because if you really believe all the things you say about Jews, it would be irrational not to be.
If you want us to believe that Jews are parasites undermining our civilization and we cannot peacefully coexist with them, but you don't want them dead, you just want to... you know, raise awareness, well, you're either treating your audience like chumps or you're unwilling to follow your own logic to its logical conclusion, and I don't believe for a second it's the latter.
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This is one way to look at it. You could also ask if maybe the double standard is what's causing the hostility in the first place.
If you immigrate to China, say "abolish the Han nation" and when called out on it say "I just mean the Han should stop persecuting the Uyghurs, why I am always being scapegoated and blamed for everything," that might not be the best idea.
There are plenty, including within China, who want to see “the Han nation” — as in, a national self-understanding in which Han people are believed to be the central example of what a Chinese person is, in which their language and their customs are given pride of place, and in which they are “supreme” over other ethnic groups within the borders of the country” — abolished as such. This can be true even while also believing that every individual Han-descended person should live a happy, thriving life as a deracinated invidual.
I agree that this would be a foolish thing for me to advocate were I to move to China. It would also be laughable because I have no power whatsoever to effect such an outcome in China. Ignatiev does believe, with some justification, that he can do his part to move the needle closer to that outcome in America. He has been extremely open about that, and has also been equally extremely open about not wanting to replace the cold American white-centric paradigm with a new Jewish-centric one. He is, so far as I can tell, a sincere believer that the entire concept of a hegemonic “national ethnicity” should be abolished everywhere. This inherently means taking power away from hegemonic groups; there’s no time-sensitive reason, and therefore no reason to expend any political/intellectual capital, in also trying to abolish the folkways of minorities whose ethnic preferences are already not given pride of place within America.
Ignatiev does not expect to live to see the day when any non-white ethnic group(s) have achieved hegemonic dominance over America (and I assume he believes that such an outcome is both implausible and undesirable) so why would he waste his time distracting from the far more urgent need to discomfit and dispossess (culturally and otherwise) the dominant group? Thus, again, the “double standard” makes perfect sense and is entirely intellectually justifiable, given Ignatiev’s priors.
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