WhINOs: White In Name Only

[Alex Linder]

[White-in-name-only (WhINOs) push kosher racialists to support the jews' war on Islam.]

Why the Racial Right is Wrong about Iraq

By Ian Jobling • 7/25/08

The racial right, or the group of writers who seek to advance the interests of American whites, has almost without exception been hostile, often rabidly so, to the Iraq War. Writers like Paul Craig Roberts, Kevin MacDonald, Steven Sailer, Sam Francis, and Pat Buchanan have promulgated the theory the war was the product of Jewish power in America. Jewish neoconservatives and their Israeli friends, otherwise known as the “Israel Lobby,” persuaded the Bush administration to start a war that advanced Israeli interests but was detrimental to America’s own. This interpretation of the causes of the war has led to a wholesale rejection of the pro-war conservative position.

The racial right’s position on the war is, in my view, a mistake, not merely because it rests on extravagant and poorly supported assumptions about the extent of Jewish power, but also because it causes the racial right to side with its enemies. Since the worldview of the anti-war left is rooted in leukophobia, or fear and loathing of the white race, the racial right ought to be able to appreciate the value of pro-war conservative commentary, which manfully opposes leftist leukophobia. Such an appreciation does not necessarily entail endorsing the war—the debate about the legitimacy of the war is a complex one, with much to be said for both sides. Rather, my thesis is that we should value the perspective of pro-war conservatives because the enemy of our enemy is, to a certain extent at least, our friend.

The term “racial right” requires some explanation. By it I mean the group of writers stretching from Pat Buchanan to David Duke who have views that can be plausibly interpreted as pro-white. While Buchanan has never declared himself pro-white, he does defend whites against abuse and has made the survival of the white race an issue in his work. The relatively sane and respectable elements of the racial right—with the operative word here being relatively—publish their work on VDARE, so the racial right might also be termed the VDARE writers.

As I explained in Anti-American or Anti-White?, the viewpoint of the anti-war left is rooted in the assumption that whites are the only racist race and that all other peoples are noble savages who are being cruelly exploited by us. Leukophobes view the Iraq War as the latest episode in the Howard Zinn version of American history, according to which all our country’s involvements in the non-white world are motivated by greed and racism, and, consequently, are overwhelmingly detrimental to native populations. Leukophobes focus on the negative aspects of the war, such the Abu Ghraib scandal, and downplay the positive aspects, such as the successful staging of elections. The media blackout on positive news about the Iraq War continues today: after the war started turning our way with the initiation of the Surge last year, news agencies began withdrawing reporters from Iraq. The leukophobic anti-war left also has a seemingly uncontrollable need to label mainstream Republicans, who are in fact liberal on racial issues, “fascists” and “Nazis.”

In case my previous article did not convince you that the anti-war movement is leukophobic, consider Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the most famous expression of anti-war sentiment. It is clear from his previous work that leukophobia is central to Moore’s worldview. Indeed, in 2001, he wrote a book called Stupid White Men blaming whites, especially wealthy, conservative white men, for the ills of the nation. For example, Moore states that the high incarceration rate of blacks and Hispanics is simply “ethnic cleansing” of non-whites by whites: “Our judges and lawyers are more like glorified garbage men, rounding up and disposing of society’s refuse—ethnic cleansing, American style.”1 Moore does not acknowledge the possibility that non-whites might be more likely to go to prison than whites because they commit a disproportionate share of crime.

The same attitude shapes Fahrenheit 9/11’s portrayal of the Iraq War, except this time Iraqis rather than blacks or Hispanics are the victims of the greed of rich white men. Moore promotes the theory that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were started to increase the profits of oil corporations. The greed of wealthy, stupid, white corporate men, symbolized by George W. Bush, causes America to commit wanton slaughter against a country that had done nothing to deserve it. In one scene of the movie, a happy scene of children playing in the streets and weddings in Baghdad is interrupted by bombs raining down from the sky.

The Bush administration also exploits America’s racism in order to drum up support for the war in the movie. The Iraq invasion is preceded by a number of bogus terror warnings whose sole purpose is to stir up irrational fear of Muslims. Moore captures white small-town Americans saying things like, “When I look at certain people, I wonder, ‘Oh my goodness! Do you think they could be a terrorist?’ ”

Moore cements his case that America is a racist state by portraying blacks as a disfranchised population cruelly exploited by the war machine. One scene shows military recruiters at a mall patronized heavily by blacks, implying the Army looks on blacks as cannon-fodder.

One reason why that some Americans defend the Iraq War so intensely is that pro-war conservatives molded a narrative of the war that challenged these invidious leukophobic slanders. For conservatives, the war was a continuation of the heroic American legacy of defending and enlarging the realm of freedom. In selling the Iraq War, Bush appealed just as much to this sense of heroic history as to the threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons. As he said in an address delivered shortly before the war:

Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before—in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home.

Pro-war conservative writers also tried to discredit the leukophobic interpretation of the war through an appeal to this heroic narrative. As commentator Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

For all the propaganda of al Jazeera, the wounded pride of the Arab street, or the vitriol of the Western Left, years from now the truth will remain that our soldiers did not come to plunder or colonize, but were willing to die for others’ freedom when few others would. Neither Michael Moore nor Noam Chomsky can change that, because it is not opinion, but truth.

In constructing this narrative of America as liberator, conservatives appealed to whites’ instinctive loyalty to Western values, such as individualism, pluralism, and the rule of law. That the war had a special appeal for whites is demonstrated by polls, which have found whites were far more likely to favor the war than non-whites were.

The conservative narrative of the war has a lot to recommend it. Iraq under Saddam was indeed a brutal, kleptocratic, and unfree dictatorship. America did not act like a domineering imperial power when it got into Iraq, instead spending blood and treasure to establish a democratic government and to build necessary infrastructure for the new state. Far from being the brutal, callous invader of leftist folklore, the US military was, generally speaking, respectful and humane to a fault, even putting US troops’ lives in danger to assure the minimum of civilian casualties.

Of course, the pro-war conservatives never made their appeal to and defense of white racial identity explicit. Indeed, these conservatives view racial liberalism, with its suicidal excesses of tolerance, as one reason to take pride in America. However, the racial right could have come in to fix the message of mainstream conservatives and brought the confused and cryptic racial pride of war supporters into the clear light of day. Pro-white intellectuals could have explained that whites’ love for Western values is probably rooted in their distinctive biology and that the values of non-whites are very different. If it had done so, the racial right would have strengthened its message by grafting it onto the powerful pride in America drummed up by mainstream conservatives.

However, instead of linking national with racial pride, racial right writers had nothing but scorn and ridicule for pro-war conservative commentators, all of whom were supposed to be either masterminds of Jewish treason or their fellow-travelers. Pat Buchanan denounced Jewish neoconservatives for having started the war because they were more concerned with Israel’s interests than America’s:

We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords… We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.

This view of the cause of the war is a matter of orthodoxy among the racial right. Steven Sailer, Sam Francis, Kevin MacDonald and many others promulgated the “Israel Lobby” theory of the war’s origins at VDARE and in other forums. Jared Taylor even blamed the war in Afghanistan, a straightforward war of retaliation, on Israel, and in March 2003 he was fervently hoping that Saddam Hussein would defeat American troops.

Perhaps the most obnoxious products of the anti-war right are the wild-eyed diatribes of Paul Craig Roberts, who seems to be trying to do his best to outdo Michael Moore in anti-war hysteria. In a column published last year, Roberts, using unsourced and exaggerated statistics about the number of war casualties, accused America of waging “genocide” against Iraqis and, along with Israel, of committing acts of “terrorism” in the Middle East. Such ranting is standard fare for Roberts, who began a column published earlier this year as follows:

It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel.

It’s a disgrace that VDARE goes on publishing this psychotic.

In criticizing the racial right, I do not mean to imply that all this group’s ideas about the war were harmful or useless. The racial right made many valid criticisms of the conduct of the war and the policies behind it. For example, Steven Sailer made the crucial point that it was wrong for the Bush administration to dismiss skepticism about Iraqis’ capacity for democracy as the product of irrational racism. Sailer was right to insist on the possibility that Arabs are innately unsuited to democracy and to chide the Bush administration for ignoring it.

I don’t know exactly how to explain the racial right’s demonization of pro-war conservatism. Simple anti-Semitism, epitomized by David Duke, is no doubt part of the explanation. However, there are much saner heads among racial right writers, so other motives must be sought. One motive was rage against Pres. Bush’s racial liberalism, which created a powerful prejudice among the racial right against everything his administration did. However, I think the deeper problem is that the racial right is out of touch with the values of the constituency that it wants to represent. The racial right is so reflexively hostile to liberalism that any enthusiasm about advancing democracy, freedom, and human rights incurs their wrath. This antipathy is probably disastrous for the racial right as liberalism is rooted in the Western values that are the essence of white racial identity.

http://www.originaldissent.com/forum...ead.php?t=7124

[John in Woodbridge]

Now we are hearing all this pap about how the surge is working. The insurgents just could be laying low for while. They know we aren't going to be able to stay there forever.

Did you hear about the US embassy being built there? Nicknamed the George Bush Palace, it is 3 times the sized of a traditional embassy and is like the Taj Mahal. That will probably be the first thing that goes up in flames once we leave Iraq.

[Alex Linder]

What joker Jobling writes - you could take his name off and substitute Krauthammer and get the same arguments.

[John in Woodbridge]

I don't know of any "real" conservatives that support the Iraq War. I think some of that mentality is the belief that "God" is behind the United States, and might makes right.

[Mike Parker]

Wow, that one is too neoconnish even for our own edenlink:

Mr. Jobling,

did you also support the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia? After all, according to Western propaganda, this campaign was conducted to instill “democracy” and “human rights” in the Serbs’ collective psyche. No matter that thousands of innocent Europeans died in the process…

By Constantin von Hoffmeister on 7/27/08 at 1:44 am

I guess it's like pregnancy: it's hard to be a little philo-Semitic.

[Wolfgang Noosetight]

Rim-Jobling is fooling no one. Fighting and dying and spending trillions of dollars on Jew wars for Jew interests is not in our interest.

[Mike Jahn]

Originally Posted by Jim Crowe

I don't know of any "real" conservatives that support the Iraq War. I think some of that mentality is the belief that "God" is behind the United States, and might makes right.

Define "real" Conservative...

[John in Woodbridge]

Originally Posted by Mike Jahn

Define "real" Conservative...

Paleoconservatives.