Taki's Mag

I have a simple argument against white racism—not mine, actually, but H.L. Mencken’s. Suppose the Anglo-Americans really were wiped off their ice field. Well, then, nothing would actually be lost that is worth preserving in the first place. Mencken gives the reasons in his book Prejudices, which I excerpt here and adulterate with my own commentary.

Mencken wrote this before the Anglo-Americans started taking credit for having liberated the whole world from tyranny once (from fascism), twice (from communism), a hundred times over. Who but an Anglo-American could have written, say, George Bush’s Second Inaugural Address? The Anglo-American’s vainglory leads even today to the most absurd and appalling follies. So upsetting does he find the idea that his is not obviously the best way of life that he has embraced a foreign policy literally devoted to making other ways impossible. It is absolutely no surprise that the party of the Anglo-Americans—the GOP—is also the party that most ardently supports a foreign policy in all dimensions daft.

Today, of course, the exotic exception is the eminent scientist, artist or scholar—not to mention merely the eminent lawyer or businessman—who actually is an Anglo.  Anglo-Americans still might be a bare plurality in Congress, but even that, as Mencken wrote, is illusory. They contribute almost nothing today to this nation’s accomplishments.

Here Mencken at first seems less clairvoyant. We no longer have Prohibition or a KKK (except as a joke), and, for the most part, the Anglo-American parts of the country do seem like the more civilized places to live. Or do they? Take a look at the civilization that the Anglo-Americans have actually built and ask yourself honestly if it even deserves that lofty title. The Anglo-Americans have made perhaps the single ugliest “civilization” in human history. This is nation of connector roads, theme restaurants, strip malls, and houses built on top of and sometimes in back of three-car garages. Merely to look at an Anglo-American, with his obesity and utter lack of sartorial propriety, is enough to turn one into misanthrope. All this before we even get to the Anglo-American’s music and the arts…  I’ve heard that the white racist movement is dominated by frat boys with a fondness for 1980s heavy metal. And these are the people that we want to preserve!?!
As for Fundamentalism of the Scofield bible variety, I dispute that it even exists any more, even among Anglo-Americans.  On the contrary, what the Anglo-Americans have now is far worse. Fundamentalism at least implies some kind of deep immersion in scripture—in the King James translation no less. Today, Anglo-American religion is dominated by light-and-magic mega-churches preaching a vacuous gospel of self-help.  The mainline protestant alternatives offer nothing but the most smug self-congratulation and wretched sentimentality.  In either case, Anglo-American ignorance in religious matters has become almost total.

Mencken goes on to adduce the evidence:  The American empire was “built up primarily by swindling and butchering unarmed savages, and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations.”  In the revolutionary war of 1812, “the Americans had enormous and obvious advantages, in terrain, in allies and in men; nevertheless, they fought, in the main, very badly, and from the first shot to the last a majority of them stood in favor of making peace on almost any terms.” The Mexican and Spanish wars are “too obscenely ungallant to be discussed at all.” As for the Great War, “the entire country went wild with fear of any enemy who, without the aid of divine intervention obviously could not strike it a blow at all.”

The Anglo-Saxon is no less astoundingly susceptible today to fears and alarms than Mencken observed in the 1920s. Anglo-Americans found nothing more entertaining during the Cold War than an irrational fear of Communism. When that ended, it took them no time at all to replace it with the “war on terror.”  Why, after 9/11, the Anglo-Saxon’s congenital paranoia inspired him to invade a country that had not even attacked his.  One starts to wonder whether the world might just be better off without Albion.

Mencken, a Nietzschean, might have added that every ethno-nationalism is born of ressentiment. It takes a grievance to make a people. Now that America has become a multicultural society, white racists have discovered their inner victim. But in truth the most pitiful thing in the world is an aggrieved Anglo-American.  By all means—let’s do close the borders. We certainly don’t want to give the Anglo-Americans any more reason to complain.