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IMO the main reason to adopt ¬HBD is straightforward: explicit rejection of HBD, or more properly, habits of thought developed over decades spent vigorously condemning anything that smacked of post-hoc justification for discrimination against black people. The hated outgroup believed proposition N, therefore we will believe ¬N, and any statement that can be interpreted as supporting position N (however innocuous) will be treated as giving succor to the enemy.
It also has the benefit of never having to tell someone to their face that they're part of a group that is intellectually inferior to one's own, which is fighting words even if true - an understated benefit for someone who's afraid of getting punched!
True, I suppose. But they could've chosen not to take that particular ideological stance. They could've kept the war at the simpler level of 'they attacked us and are doing us harm'. The average US soldier was not ideologically motivated, apart from their hatred of Japan they didn't really care so much about the European front. See page 21: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a301424.pdf
Mostly soldiers seemed to be motivated by other things than ideology: camaraderie with their fellow soldiers, a desire for adventure (especially flyers), a sense of duty and pride in their country, a desire to win the war and go home. The Germans hated the Russians and the Americans hated the Japs but the Americans and Germans didn't dislike eachother that much.
I don't deny that this is a factor but this strikes me as perhaps the ultimate cowardice. We apologize and abase ourselves, provide trillions in informal reparations based upon the premise of equality, vacate our own communities so they can turned to semi-wasteland (this is not a pleasant process for those who are unable to leave), integrate schools and sacrifice the prospects of our own children (or more often move to whiter locales), tolerate massive grooming rings lest we be thought racist, create political patronage jobs for DEI commissars to harass whites in the workplace and sabotage our own employment prospects. Or take the sabotage and suppression of former Rhodesia and South Africa. Since when has the Chinese government ever tried to bully their own coethnics in the Philippines or Malaysia and get them to be nicer to the locals? Since when have Arabs waged extremely bloody wars to get other Arabs to stop enslaving blacks? You don't see Turkey apologizing and providing compensation to Greece for invading and occupying their country for centuries, or for enslaving millions of Slavs, Poles and Ukrainians. You don't see Algeria apologizing for the Barbary Pirates raiding and enslaving Europeans across the Mediterranean.
This behavior is a massive historical anomaly.
I heard differently from my German-Canadian relatives who were a teenagers in WW2. But likely the Japanese kids got it worse.
But I was actually thinking after my reply about the persistence of certain liberal outgroup modes, notably the KKK and Nazis (who are kind of a super-KKK). Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that there's hardly any of either group left, those that managed to hang on being almost universally despised & marginalized, but you still hear about them all the time, and a certain kind of leftist always jumps at the chance to pattern match their foes with one or both of these two groups.
(Status: speculative, possibly uncharitible)
One possibility is: liberals just really hate racism, so the biggest baddest racists of the 20th century loom large in their imaginations. I'll grant this one to an extent, although not all instances of racism attract equal fervor. (especially when perpetrated by nonwhites).
I think the more interesting explanation is: at its roots, in its memetic DNA, modern liberalism is designed for fighting the outgroup that it was born to oppose. "This Machine Kills Nazis", everything else is incidental.They might hate racism, but not on first principles, not really; they hate racism because racism is what the KKK did, and they exist fight the KKK. The modern humans who make up the ideology don't have write access to it anymore, so in order to steer the Nazi-killing machine in the direction of the outgroup-du-jour they have to make it think they're Nazis.
In this context, ¬HBD being taken as gospel seems perfectly natural.
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Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa fell less due to sanctions and more because the white population fell too low, relatively, to maintain white dominance by force. Needless to say, the US is in no danger of becoming less than 15% white any time soon.
40% of whites in America are anti racists fighting to dismantle white supremacy so you don't need to get anywhere near as low as 15%.
Anyway the point wasn't whether sanctions were critical to destroying Rhodesia, it's about how bizarre it is that the western world sided with African communists against their own co-ethnics.
I wouldn't exactly call Afrikaners "coethnics" to America or Britain, although you have a point about Rhodesia.
Did the Netherlands condemn apartheid? They're definitely coethnics
The most hajnal place in the world condemning behavior by groups that code as its own backwards hicks, knowing it would make its military protectors happy, while not particularly grokking the consequences of the end of minority rule, doesn’t seem totally inexplicable.
It would be like New York City condemning Texas’s border policy. Oh, right.
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And to be fair, there’s lots of people who may not use the words HBD(or know what they mean) but who understand full well that blacks are relatively deficient in something important(although it’s often not phrased as intelligence) but who would never say it in front of black people. Both because it’s rude to remind people of this, but also because getting into a fight just doesn’t sound like a good idea.
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