Previous posts in this series: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fascism, Good Country Volk, Infiltration, Children of the Sun
Caution: racist rhetoric.
Fourteen Words
Fascism is rooted in ultranationalism, but there’s more to it than that. Contemporary fascism (at least in Europe and North America) also relies on a conspiracy theory. Fascists used to call this “white genocide,” until that became too recognizably racist to win people over; the current favorite euphemism is “ethnic replacement.”
The idea is: white people are dying out, due to open immigration policies supported by liberals/”globalists”/Marxists/Jews. (Which scapegoat gets the blame depends partly on how deep into the ideology the speaker is, and partly on how deep in they believe their audience is.) The “ethnic replacement” bit, from right-wing French author Renaud Camus, states that you go from having one people to having a different people, within the space of a single generation. Therefore, in order to save the white race, it is necessary to establish a homeland where only whites are permitted. In the US, fascists uphold America as the place to turn into their white ethnostate.
If you’ve heard the expression “fourteen words,” that’s what this is in reference to. An author named David Lane summed up the fascist goal in two fourteen-word statements: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” and the (less common) alternative, “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.”
Here’s why all that is stupid.
What Do a “Genocide”?
To begin with, white people aren’t dying out. There are 250 million white folks just in the US, let alone the rest of North America or for that matter the rest of the earth. It would take more than forty anti-white Hitlers to exterminate that many people.
Second, let’s define that word “genocide.” The United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948 defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. This includes actions like sterilization and mass murder, and also transferring children by force from one group to another in order to cut them off from their culture. So, e.g., shutting people in ghettoes or camps, sterilizing them, and taking their children away to be raised by another cultural group, would qualify as genocidal behavior. Moving into their neighborhood and having parties on holidays they don’t happen to celebrate would not qualify. Sending an army into another group’s territory to conquer them and forcibly convert them to another religion is a form of genocide; freely intermarrying with them is not.
Neither Black people, nor Jews, nor Mexicans, nor any other group, are committing genocide against white people. They’re just not. This behavior may still sound familiar to my white readers, but probably not as something done to white people.
The lie that white people are being “replaced” is actually an artifact of something else: how we measure whiteness.
What Makes the White Man White
Take Barack Obama, the first Black man to become President. His mother was white. Why can’t he claim to be a white man? Because of his skin tone? Well, that makes some sense; regardless, he could certainly call himself biracial. But then how come he can also just call himself Black, without further qualification? And how come a relatively light-skinned Black person who could “pass” for white, like Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles (who has both Black and Irish ancestry), is also still considered Black or biracial, but never just white?
It actually has nothing to do with skin tone, and less than you’d think to do with ancestry. Jews and sufficiently pale Latinos get kind of a soft yes on the “Are they white?” question, for example, but that’s pretty new. A few generations ago, Italians and the Irish (yes, the Irish, the people with the fairest skin this side of milk) were the ones who were, at highest, questionably white.
The current classification of race comes from a social and, in some places, legal principle called the one drop rule. This classifies people as Black if they have “even a drop” of Black blood, i.e. any verifiably African ancestry. Whiteness is recessive—it has to be “purebred,” or it doesn’t count. For all the fascist chest-beating about the strength of the Aryan race, whiteness is apparently one of the most fragile things in the world.
This way of calculating race makes it easy to “prove” that the proportion of white people is plummeting. But in fact, what’s happening is that people are having kids without bothering to make sure there’s no trace of non-white blood in the mix. That isn’t “genocide.” It isn’t “ethnic replacement.” It’s family.
Ameriklan History
What’s extra ridiculous about this is, it’s not even how race was determined while slavery was legal. The rule was instituted mostly in the twentieth century. Anti-miscegenation laws, prohibiting the intermarriage of Blacks and whites, are as old as the 1690s. But who counted as Black varied a great deal; people who were only an eighth Black were typically eligible for inclusion in white society.1 As late as 1895, South Carolina Democrat and Confederate veteran George Tillman said to the state legislature, “There is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. … It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation … to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood.” Not until 1910 did the first US state2 institute the one drop rule.
And then there’s the other extra ridiculous thing about this whole project—the idea that the US, of all places, is the place to plant a white ethnostate. Setting aside for a moment the ridiculous racial calculus, we are so emphatically neither indigenous to nor the sole inhabitants of North America, the very idea that we have a claim to this land as our “homeland” is beyond parody.
I’m not saying that we personally bear the guilt of our ancestors who colonized this land, and who very much did commit genocide against the peoples they found here. I’m not saying that we need to feel personally guilty because we probably have some family ties to slavers.3 But I am saying that no one should make himself both a laughingstock and a monster by blaming and oppressing the descendants of the very peoples our ancestors victimized—and then, on top of that, thinking and acting as though we are the victims.
Footnotes
1One-eighth was a common rule; one-quarter prevailed in some places. There were also places that had a threefold “caste” system, with whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom, while “colored” people were in the middle.
2It actually wasn’t South Carolina but Tennessee. Go figure.
3I probably could, if I applied the same interpretive framework to the Old Testament that a lot of Christian anti-Semites do. But they’re wrong, and I don’t propose to apply that framework at all.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In