The cultural Right was in a furor recently — whether sincere or feigned — first over Drexel University Professor George Ciccariello-Maher’s Christmas Eve tweet that “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide,” and then over Drexel’s Dec. 29 decision not to fire him.
The real outrage, though, is that Drexel wasted both Cicciarello-Maher’s time and that of its overpaid administrators in calling him on the carpet about this manufactured controversy at all.
And when I say “manufactured,” I mean exactly that. Aside from a few gullible mainstream conservatives and liberals on the margin who weren’t in on the joke, the whole thing was every bit as contrived as the GamerGate “controversy” over “ethics in gaming journalism” (which was actually a harassment campaign cynically organized and coordinated by juvenile gamers on 8Chan as a way to score one against the hated “Social Justice Warriors”).
In this case White GenocideGate was a fake outrage campaign organized by members of the so-called “alt right” online community centered on Breitbart.com. Although they call themselves the “alt right,” they’re actually an assortment of neo-reactionaries, “race realists,” “men’s rights activists,” outright white supremacists and neo-nazis who like to engage in organized channer-style harassment campaigns against the cultural Left.
Their outrage was entirely cynical because the term “white genocide” is something made up by people like them to describe something that doesn’t even exist. “White genocide,” in racist parlance, refers to the alleged danger that the white race will gradually disappear as the result of peaceful immigration by non-white people and voluntary intermarriage between people of different races.
Cicciarello-Maher’s tweet was simply a mockery of that phony concept: Peaceful immigration and voluntary intermarriage are good things, regardless of what the Breitbart neo-nazis think. Further, his comment resonates with the widespread desire of many on the Left to abolish the “white race” in a different sense — not by killing white people, but by deconstructing “whiteness” (the idea that all people of European descent belong to a single “white race”) as a recent ideological concept that’s used to legitimize colonialism and imperialism and render the producing classes easier to divide and control.
Cicciarello-Maher followed up with another tweet: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
And indeed it was. The Haitian Revolution was a slave uprising against a tiny minority of white owners. It shouldn’t be controversial to cheer on slaves killing their masters. When slaves are able to overthrow and kill their masters, it’s cause for celebration.
None of these considerations stopped Drexel University’s administrators from publicly clutching their pearls, of course. In their public response, issued before their planned meeting with Cicciarello-Maher to discuss the issue, they denounced his comments as “utterly reprehensible.”
What’s really reprehensible is the way these silly fools were taken in by a neo-nazi trickery campaign. In the perception of the “alt right,” the most insulting term in their vocabulary is “cuck,” and being “cucked” — that is, being fooled or taken advantage of by someone smarter — is the worst thing conceivable in their morally impoverished, empathy-free, dog-eat-dog view of the world. And Drexel adminstrators were completely and thoroughly cucked, exactly as intended.
And even worse is the fact that a major part of the American right-libertarian movement — the so-called “paleos” at LewRockwell.com and Mises.org — is so close to the alt right’s ideology as to make the two inseparable. Their squealing about “open borders,” and the dangers of white culture being submerged by an influx of “inferior” nationalities, is virtually indistinguishable from white supremacist fears of “white genocide.”
The irony is that America is a “white man’s country” in the first place only because of real, actual genocide — no scare quotes. The majority of the Native population was exterminated, their land stolen by white settlers, and the survivors relocated to a tiny percentage of the country’s land mass. And their ownership of that remaining portion is entirely negotiable if it turns out to have valuable resources on it, of course. Let’s not forget, either, how much of this country was built on the backs of slave labor — slave labor by those whose descendants the racists now want to “send back to Africa.”
Further, there’s no way to prevent what the “alt right” calls “white genocide” without resorting to totalitarian forms of social control. Not only border walls and immigration police acting entirely outside normal constraints of due process, but controls on marriage and other forms of free association across color lines. Even the so-called “paleos,” who dare to claim the label “libertarian,” envision an entire country in which every single square foot of space is privately appropriated, and no commons or public rights of way remain anywhere for anyone to stand on without permission from the white, socially conservative Christian property owners the country belongs to.
So if you’re upset about “white genocide,” you hate freedom, and you love the totalitarian state. Don’t pretend otherwise.
