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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I've noticed the alt-right (specifically the Richard Spencer wing) is blaming Christianity for cucking Whites and making them accept non-whites in their country. To me this isn't even close to being true and can be dismissed outright as nonsense.

We know from genetics that modern Europeans separated from sub saharan African 30 to 40 thousand years ago. We also know that Western Europeans didn't have any meaningful contact with Blacks until the 15th century when Portugal "discovered" West Africa during the Age of Exploration. By accepting this, we can see that Western Europe has had over 500 years of contact with Blacks.

I've specifically been looking into England, but the same is true for other nations. The highest count of non-whites I can find on Google Scholar recently is 2.6% in 1951. Interestingly, 2.2% of those 2.6% were first generation immigrants. This is by far the highest I've seen with other estimates putting it close to 99%.

So at this point, we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe. We also know places like France put in racist laws like Code Noir that explicitly put Whites at the top of the social hierarchy.

When we look at when this changed, it was really the 1960's. But at this point, Christianity was starting to decline due to science and especially Darwin (and in my opinion became obviously not true). The increased immigration and anti-racist views correlates with Christianity's decline, so the idea that Christianity having everyone's soul being equal can be equally dismissed. In fact, I would argue the pro non-white immigration came from the secular left or if you want to argue it's the right neoliberalism. I see zero evidence of this that Richard Spencer and his allies argue to be true. In fact, the evidence shows the complete opposite.

The culture that these people all seem to want to “R E T V R N” to is pretty explicitly not just Christian, but Catholic, isn’t it?

The idea they are supposedly criticizing, that human beings have dignity, is not a “slave mentality”, it is the foundational idea behind ending the standard where the vast majority of humans were subjects of their King. Christianity is a liberating ideology at its very core.

Of all the dumb, grifting things that people like Richard Spencer have said, this is perhaps one of the dumbest. This puts him into the same category as people like Andrew Tate; just absolute luke warm IQ people who would be working some low intelligence job if it were not for social media.

I think they want to return to pre Christian Germanic paganism, aka a remnant of the time of living in mud huts like the Africans they love to hate.

Like it or not, Europe broke out of those conditions from 1,000 years of Catholic theocracy. Asia modernized by copying them. This is a well-known, historically supported story that’s perfectly compatible with reactionary ideas about things like the place of women.

I think some of these DR types are too racist for actual Christian reactionaries in real life, or find that their autistic NEET edge lord behavior is otherwise unwelcome in IRL Christian reactionary communities so try to go further back. Twitter edgelordism is escapism whether it’s on the left or the right.

I think everyone wants to go back to some idealized Rome. Our art features it's stand ins, half of Europe speaks a hand me down version of Latin, Americans use the mile Latin for thousand paces even though most people have no idea what it measures lb is the abbreviation for Libra and makes negative sense for pound, out calendar has 4 months that count months in Latin, and we still celebrate people forgetting when Rome moved their New Year, and our planets bear their gods' names. Not even the originators of those deities, the Greeks names for them.

I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.