The Original White Supremacists: The current misuse of the term “white supremacy” is highly dangerous politically. By singling out this particular form of racism and misapplying it to famous figures from the past, as well as to people living in the present, the users of the term risk not only its rapid devaluation, but also the angry retaliation of those who feel both themselves and their beliefs to have been wrongly and unfairly condemned.
THE TERM “WHITE SUPREMACIST” is rapidly replacing the more
straightforward “racist” in mainstream journalism. The term is also being used
to describe the belief system of Philip Arps, the self-confessed Nazi who was
sentenced earlier this week to 21 months imprisonment. On social media,
especially Twitter, the term is being used, anachronistically, to characterise
the ideas of explorers and colonialists living in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. While it is not unusual to encounter such terminological misuse in
the writings of radical post-modernists, it is worrying to see the mainstream
media subsume so many different historical and ideological phenomena into this
single, catch-all, expression.
The current misuse of the term “white supremacy” is also
highly dangerous politically. By singling out this particular form of racism
and misapplying it to famous figures from the past, as well as to people living
in the present, the users of the term risk not only its rapid devaluation, but
also the angry retaliation of those who feel both themselves and their beliefs
to have been wrongly and unfairly condemned.
Because the number of New Zealanders subscribing to the
beliefs journalists now describe as “white supremacist” is by no means a small
one. Indeed, it is likely that a majority of older Pakeha New Zealanders still
adhere, either wholly or in part, to the notion that the achievements of
western civilisation – of white people – far outstrip those of any other. They
may be careful about who they share these ideas with, but they hold them
nonetheless.
It is certainly the case that this assumption of western
superiority informed the response of practically all the western nations to the
terrorist attacks of 9/11. When President George W. Bush explained the
terrorists’ murderous attacks by saying: “they hate our freedoms, they hate our
way of life”; very few white Americans, or whites living in any other western
nation, failed to grasp his racially-charged sub-text: they are less than us.
The mainstream media, itself, is equally guilty of assigning
considerably greater value to the lives of westerners than to human-beings
living in other parts of the world. A cruise liner carrying wealthy Europeans
runs into a Venice wharf, injuring half-a-dozen, and it’s headline news around
the planet. An overcrowded ferry-boat collides with another vessel and sinks,
drowning 200 Indians, and all it rates is a one-line mention three-quarters of
the way down the news bulletin. What other message can we draw from that, other
than – whites are more important?
So, racism is a hard habit for westerners to break. The use
of the term “white supremacy”, however, should properly be restricted to the
specific political actors and the particular historical context from which it
emerged. It refers, primarily, to the political regimes which arose in the
southern states of the USA in the years following the American Civil War – most
particularly in the decades immediately following the withdrawal of federal
troops from the states of the defeated Confederacy in 1877.
These regimes were built on the bedrock requirement that
whites must in all conceivable circumstances: economic, social, cultural, legal
and political; be placed ahead of and above blacks. The poorest and most
ill-educated white farmer had to be able to count himself better off, both
subjectively and objectively, than his black neighbours. White supremacy wasn’t
just a matter of personal racial animus, it described a comprehensive and internally
coherent system of race-based rule. A “white supremacist”, accordingly, is a
person who not only subscribes to the principles underpinning the infamous “Jim
Crow” system, but also – like the contemporary Ku Klux Klan – strives for its
return. Obviously, the term may also be legitimately applied to the very
similar systems of race-based rule erected in South Africa and Rhodesia between
1948 and 1992.
It is important to acknowledge that a political entity
driven by the principles of genuine white supremacy will be very different from
one in which the official goal is racial assimilation, as was formerly the case
in New Zealand. It will also be quite distinct from a regime, such as Nazi
Germany’s, whose official goal was the physical elimination of all races deemed
to be a threat to the herrenvolk – the master race. This is because, in
both the American South, and in Southern Africa, blacks were absolutely
essential to the successful operation of the white-controlled economy. Without
plentiful and criminally cheap black labour, the white supremacist regimes on
both continents would not have been economically viable.
This is why it is so dangerous to conflate all economic,
social and political systems in which racial prejudice and inequality thrive as
“white supremacist” regimes. Simple racial chauvinism is very different from
the conscious creation of a race-based economic and political system. If,
however, the media persists in lumping together every Pakeha who takes pride in
the achievements of western civilisation with avowed Nazis, like Philip Arps,
or genocidal eco-fascists, like the Christchurch shooter, then not only will
the charge lose all its definitional and moral force, but, sooner or later,
those so lumped will come to the conclusion that they might as well be hung for
sheep as lambs.
Those on the Left who are promoting the use of this term,
presumably as a way of shaming Pakeha New Zealanders into acknowledging and
renouncing their “white privilege”, may soon come to regret driving their boots
so forcefully into such a large pack of sleeping dogs. Giving these mutts the
bad name of “white supremacists” will in no way blunt, or shorten, their
political teeth.
What happened at Orewa in January 2004, can happen again.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 20 June 2019.
