[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
Nowadays, when White Liberal guilt has gone from being an annoying nervous tic to being a full-blown mass psychosis, you don’t get to celebrate, e.g., Independence Day without legions of prune-faced schoolmarms stepping up to tell us our country is rooted in oppression and cruelty, White Supremacy and slavery, duh duh duh duh duh …
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company was out there ahead of the pack. On their website—their actual corporate website benjerry.com—they posted a notice saying, quote:
The US Was Founded on Stolen Indigenous Land—This July 4, Let’s Commit to Returning It
Ah, the Fourth of July. Who doesn’t love a good parade, some tasty barbecue, and a stirring fireworks display? The only problem with all that, though, is that it can distract from an essential truth about this nation’s birth: The US was founded on stolen Indigenous land.
This year, let’s commit to returning it.
Here’s why we need to start with Mount Rushmore.
(In today’s commercial environment of ”Go Woke, Go Broke,” a surprising number of corporate statements of that kind disappear from the company’s website after a few days. We savvy web warriors know that, so we copy a private image of the company’s page—see above—for safekeeping).
But this story was all over the Main Stream Media. Piers Morgan, for example, got a whole page out of it in the July 6th print edition of the New York Post: Ben & Jerry’s should stick to whipping up ice cream—not division.
.@piersmorgan: Ben & Jerry’s should stick to whipping up ice cream – not division https://t.co/HkhovPzkHu pic.twitter.com/p47NbF6poK
— New York Post (@nypost) July 5, 2023
What do I think about all this guilt-mongering? I’ve already made my definitive pronouncement, but the issue doesn’t seem to be going away, so I will Pronounce again.
Every nation has historical skeletons in its closet. The only question: How should a healthy nationalism deal with the airing of these past misdeeds?
If the nation is under totalitarian control, there is no problem at all. The regime just prohibits any public mention of the misdeeds, any reference to them in educational or historical materials. Within a single generation, all knowledge of the misdeeds has disappeared down the memory hole.
In Communist China today there is no public recollection of the Land Reform massacres or the Mao Famine. Nobody under thirty knows anything about the Reform Movement of 1989 that ended with tanks rolling in to Tiananmen Square.
If a foreigner raises such issues, the front men for totalitarianism just lie; or else they counter with something the foreigner’s nation did, supposedly of equal moral turpitude. Loyal Chinese citizens are expected not to make a fuss about the Cultural Revolution of fifty years ago, but to be seething with indignation at the burning of the Summer Palace a hundred years previously.
(Of course, you can see the same pattern developing among U.S. liberals: Election Interference! MRC Poll Finds Most CNN & MSNBC Viewers Don’t Know About Biden Scandals and Bad News, NewsBusters, June 29, 2023.)
But even absent totalitarian control, East Asians seem not to bother much with collective guilt. I know plenty of overseas Chinese who are perfectly aware of the horrors of communism; but I have never heard any of them express remorse over, for example, the Dzungar genocide, twenty years before our own Declaration of Independence. The Dzungar genocide has a Wikipedia page, you can look it up.
Likewise with the Japanese. Their nation perpetrated some gross atrocities within living memory, but Japanese people seem not to suffer anguished guilt about it. Their government has issued formal apologies when there has been some diplomatic or commercial advantage to be gained by doing so, but you have to wonder if there was any sincerity behind the words.
(If there was, wouldn’t the apologist, in the proper Japanese tradition, have closed the proceedings by committing public seppuku?)
And then, the Mongolians. Today’s Mongolia is not at all totalitarian. On the scoring system used by Freedom House, Mongolia, with a score of 84, is in fact freer than the USA with 83.
You can make a case that, with due allowance for available population numbers and low levels of killing technology, the worst mass murderer of all time was 13th-century Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan.
How do the free Mongolians of today feel about him?
They LOVE him! Mongolia’s main international airport is named after him; so is the country’s premier university; so is the capital city’s main tourist hotel.
A must-see sight if you visit Mongolia is the colossal equestrian statue of the conqueror:
In 2008, a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan riding on horseback was erected on the bank of the Tuul River at Tsonjin Boldog, 54 km east of the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, where according to legend, he found a golden whip. The statue is 40 meters [130 ft] tall and wrapped in 250 tons of gleaming stainless steel. It stands on top of the Genghis Khan Statue Complex, a visitor center that itself is 10 meters tall, with 36 columns representing the 36 khans from Genghis to Ligdan Khan. The statue is symbolically pointed east towards his birthplace.
[Enormous Statue of Genghis Khan in Mongolia, by Kaushik Patowary, Amusing Planet, September 10, 2013]
Just the standard 40 metre high, stainless steel equestrian statue of Genghis Khan located in Tsonjin Boldog, Mongolia.
— PPS Ltd (@PPSLtd) February 15, 2018
Look how little the people are!!! pic.twitter.com/80B5oSE0u0
I must say, totalitarianism aside, that when watching a sniveling worm like Antony Blinken writhe and rend his garments over America’s faults and misdeeds, I find myself preferring the more robust East Asian attitude:
Yeah, we did that. They would probably have done it to us if they could, though. In any case, we’re not doing it any more, so what’s the point of banging on about it?
Back in the day, when some schoolyard nuisance accused yourself or your family members of some fault or defect and you couldn’t be bothered with a detailed rebuttal, you could shut down the topic by saying: ”So’s your old man.”
Behind the smooth diplomacies of those Japanese apologies, or the shrugs of Chinese friends when I mention the wanton killing of missionary wives and children in the Boxer Rebellion, I’m pretty sure I hear some echo of that schoolyard rebuttal: ”So’s your old man.”
I’m not a totalitarian and I don’t want anything memory-holed.
I would, though, stand up and cheer if, the next time one of those United Nations pests, ChiCom flunkies, race grifters, or corporate virtue signalers accused the USA of historical misdeeds, some appropriate official representative of this republic would respond publicly and loud with:
”So’s your old man.”
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.
