March 05, 2003

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A Reader Checks Phil Donahue On Hispanics

From Resisting Defamation's Stanley Womack: ResistDef@aol.com

Without any intent to quarrel or to attack you, I do want to discuss your following comment with you (from your note about the FrontPage.com symposium on White Nationalism):

I've always resisted the argument...that American whites should accept that they are just another interest group and organize explicitly. I think they're Americans, dammit. Nations are ethno-cultural entities; neither exclusively ethnic nor exclusively cultural.

In many ways, it doesn't matter what we adults think, it is the children who suffer intensely in schools, on playgrounds, aboard school buses, and on the sidewalk when they are challenged about their race & cultures.

In the olden days, 50 years ago, we were taught we were all Americans. Now we are taught we are members of races (multi-racialism), members of cultures (multiculturalism), and members of ethnic groups (multi-ethnicism).

When little European-American children go to school or to play, they are taught the most horrendous things about their parents, ancestors, histories, cultures, homelands, and diversities. It is the children - including college students - who have no "ideological" basis for self-defense.

By keeping to the "we're just Americans" position, you are not providing literature, ideas, and firm-footedness to our offspring in their daily wars - and they are embroiled in daily wars. Your position renders them without weapons. Thus, their fallback position: they're "really" Indians, Latinos, wiggers, or whatever.

If you examine our syllabus, you will note that underlying it is a collection of ideas that we loosely call the European American Movement. It isn't based on multi-racialism or multi-ethnicism, it is based squarely on multiculturalism. And until we can get to that "ism," we're not going to get much of any place.

Very clever people have unrolled new dogmas from the old Bolsheviki bag of tricks (literally), and have developed contagious arguments that square with the spirit of the times, so much so that we need to put those same dogmas to work for our young people.

In fact, the syllabus on our website is totally devoted to providing a network of ideas (an "ideology" if you like) that will help our young people understand who they are. They badly need concepts to defend themselves in our contemporary society, and the old one of "we're just Americans" doesn't do it anymore. We do NOT live in a unitary country in which the culture is more or less coterminous with the nation any longer. Those of us who write and think have to develop ideas that can shore up the shifting sands under our children's feet. It's about intellectual and verbal weapons.

You don't have to subscribe to the most colorful visions of white nationalists — there is a huge range of positions that can be taken between "we're just Americans" and the most extreme whiteness positions. There is a range of ideas, techniques, and views that will give our young people something to cling to.

In addition, it isn't an all or nothing proposition. We view cultural identities as cascading qualities. That is, we argue for levels of identities: first American, second multicultural (European American), and third ethnic, national origin, or other labels. (Our new favorite for "other labels" is Atlantic Islander-American. That one sends people into a frenzy.)

You have many more than two choices, and you have no obligation to abandon them all for a single one...good old situational ethics comes to our assistance here by dictating that our claimed identity can easily depend on the context...it certainly works for others.

You don't really have to choose, you can have a lot of identities and work them when needed. But (risking comparison with Hillary) we must put the school and college kids first.

Peter Brimelow writes: One of the few rational justifications for writing books is that you get to quote yourself. In Alien Nation, I concluded:

"Deep into the twenty-first century, throughout the lifetime of my little son [the notoriously blue-eyed Alexander], American patriots will be fighting to salvage as much as possible from the shipwreck of their great republic. But the struggle must be contrasted sadly with the task of completing the "Great Society" upon which Americans were encouraged to think they were embarking in 1965 [when the Immigration Act opened the floodgates]."

Stanley Womack is one of those American patriots. I do worry, though, that in retreating into an ethnic interest group, the Americans who created the republic are conceding the ideal – that Americans should be made in their image, morally and culturally if not genetically.