The Third Rail

Author: Deena Stryker

Column: Society

Region: USA in the World

It has become commonplace to refer to the two great threats facing humanity, climate change and nuclear war. While these deserve special attention due to their relationship with complex scientific technologies and natural phenomena, a third threat, for which humans are entirely responsible, deserves to be right up there, given that its representatives can manipulate the other two.

That threat is racism. The white race, which has dominated the world for the last five hundred years thanks to its superior technologies, cannot accept the fact that, these technologies having become ubiquitous, what counts is the fact that it constitutes only 16% of the total world population.

Crimes have long been committed in the name of race — and not only by white people. However the increasing press of non-white southern peoples upon hitherto almost exclusively white northern preserves, in the name of equity, has been met by the brutal far-right political philosophy: fascism. There is some evidence that humans could eventually tame climate change with technology, and international treaties continue to hold the nuclear threat at bay. However, when it comes to race, humans are vulnerable to their most primitive instinct: the rejection of Otherness.

As I signaled in my book A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness, in evolutionary terms, the development of the brain led to abstract thinking, creativity and language, enabling us to put other humans in a different category from ourselves, something other ‘animals’ do not do. The ethicist Peter Singer notes that massacres, and even genocide, appear to have always been part of human behavior. And in the twenty-first century, advances in technology have greatly exacerbated the effects of wars perpetrated by the minority white race upon what I have referred to as the majority honey-colored world.

While immigration from the southern hemisphere into the United States can be laid at the doorstep of not so benign neglect on the part of Washington, which maintains the populations of its ‘back yard’ just enough to serve its commercial needs, the recent drastic acceleration of immigration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe is the direct result of wars and the rapine of these regions wealth, in which Europeans have participated. And yet, they fail to make the connection. In the name of their Christian heritage, they have thrown up far-right parties whose members protest the construction of mosques, notwithstanding the Enlightenment tradition enshrined in their national constitutions.

While President Donald Trump insists on building a wall along the US southern border, Hungary erects barbed wire fences to keep refugees out, while the European Union tries to make dodgy deals with its Turkish neighbor to send them back where they came from. In the few short years since the coup that ousted the pro-Russian president of Ukraine with on-the-ground help from descendants of Nazi collaborators, the Alt-right has become a major political force across Europe as well as in the United States, where it pledges allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan, which many had thought was a relic of the past. Torchlight parades went directly from Europe to the US south, where one person was killed last year, and the president walks a slippery path between anti-fascist groups and his gun-toting followers whom they also oppose.

Recent academic studies have emphasized the role played by masculinity in the rise of the extreme right: ‘The Others’ have taken your job or your girl, but you can regain your own masculinity, and thus your girl and job, by fighting them.

The trauma of the Vietnam War has also played a role, America’s defeat led to a push among veterans for ‘remasculinization’, has led to the current paramilitary subculture. So-called ‘weekend warriors’ join militias to regain their manhood by preparing to protect their women and children from perceived threats from non-whites and the country from conspiracies to take it over.

A typical schizophrenic element is that while attacking ‘emasculating feminists’ in words, ‘weekend warriors’ join militias to regain their manhood by preparing to protect their women and children from perceived threats from Other men (blacks, immigrants Muslims). They believe that by doing so, they are restoring the ‘natural’ gender roles that decades of ‘cultural Marxism’ have destroyed.

In Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orban leads a similar campaign by trying to shut down gender studies departments, while France’s Marine Le Pen leads protests against same-sex couples adopting children. Meanwhile, as the instigator of the multi-colored organization known as BRICS that unites it with China, India, Brazil and South Africa, Russia demonstrates the only viable future for whiteness: cooperation across the board with the other races.

Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.

https://journal-neo.org/2018/08/19/the-third-rail-2/