Cultural Revolution, White Genocide

Two Not-So-New Novels Offer Imaginative Insights into Current Concerns

KEVIN BARRETT • JULY 13, 2020

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Is the “woke” United States, reeling from the officially-approved George Floyd riots and accompanying outbursts of iconoclasm, undergoing its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution? And will it lead to some form of genocide against people of European ancestry?

Normally I would be the last guy at Unz Review to be asking such questions. The white nationalist contingent here always whines about the alleged oppression of white people, and my habitual response is to roll my eyes. It seems obvious to me that white Americans do not rank highly among this planet’s long list of oppressed, subjugated, and dispossessed. Sure, a few white folks may get passed over for a black affirmative action hire here, or lose a coveted Ivy League post to a less-qualified Jewthere. But among the many terrible and unfair things that can happen to people because they are members of the wrong ethnic group, such injustices are fairly underwhelming.

But rarely, very rarely, something terrible does happen to someone merely because they are (perceived as) white. Just yesterday here in Wisconsin a police officer named Phillip Thiessen was apparently murdered by a crazed Hispanic for the crime of looking like a white guy on a Harley: “A Wisconson (sic) man who struck and killed a motorcyclist told investigators he intentionally crashed head-first into the victim because he believed all Harley riders are ‘white racists,’ local officials said.”

Was the suspect, Daniel Navarro, 27, a racist lunatic—or a plain old lunatic whose paranoid fantasies were inspired by the current anti-white zeitgeist? “Navorro told detectives he believed he had been intentionally poisoned by coworkers and by a neighbor; that people drive by his house and rev their engines and squeal their tires to try to upset him; and that people make racist comments towards him — all because he’s Hispanic,’ (Sheriff Ryan) Waldschmidt said. He added that, ‘Navarro said if President Donald Trump and white people are going to create the world we are living in, he has no choice and people are going to have to die.’”[1]

I have been told I shouldn’t talk about who really was behind 9/11 because some unstable individual might shoot Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz or Larry Silverstein and it would be my fault. I have been told I should be careful how I talk and write about Jews and Zionism because some nutjob might shoot up a synagogue and I would share responsibility. So does that mean those who criticize white people’s historical crimes (legitimate) and/or talk trash about white people in general (not so legitimate) are responsible for the murder of Phillip Thiessen?

It is becoming increasingly conceivable that the blind fervor of the woke generation could one day inspire serious and widespread oppression of white people—in the worst case scenario, a white genocide.[2] As aids to thinking about white genocide possibilities, two novels stand out: Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (the literary last word on the Chinese cultural revolution) and Doris Lessing’s Shikasta (the ultimate white genocide sci-fi masterpiece).

Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, is a Rabelaisian yarn-spinner with a gargantuan talent. He supposedly wrote all 540 pages of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in 42 days, which if true has got to be some kind of world record.

The novel recounts and satirizes both the Cultural Revolution and its semi-capitalist aftermath, summing up 50 years of Chinese history as seen through the eyes of two characters who suffer various kinds and degrees of persecution at the hands of the woke generation of Maoist maniacs, then fail to find paradise in the materially-successful post-Mao period. Ximen Nao, a kind, generous, moderately wealthy landlord in a rural village, and his stubbornly individualist farmhand Lan Lian, get to observe the entire half-century thanks to the literary conceit of reincarnation. Ximen Nao, lynched by Cultural Revolutionaries just before the novel begins, finds himself in hell, condemned to repeatedly reincarnate in his village as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey, and before finally earning the right to regain human form.

Though it may not be obvious to the inattentive reader, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is (like all great novels, according to René Girard) a meditation on scapegoating and human sacrifice. The novel, in essence, explores the aftermath of the Cultural Revolutionaries’ murder of Ximen Nao and the terrible injustice that act represents.

Mo Yan’s satirical depiction of the drunk-on-ideology insanity of the Cultural Revolutionaries is uncomfortably reminiscent of today’s equally drunk-on-ideology frenzy of wokeness, white-bashing, and statue-smashing. I say uncomfortably, because the Chinese version of wokeness ended in the mass murder of at least half a million people—possibly as many as 20 million. The scapegoating and human sacrifice of the “parasitical landlord” Ximen Nao is a synecdoche representing a vastly larger crime.

Could “oppressive, racist whites” become for American cultural revolutionaries what “parasitical landlords” were for Chinese ones? That notion would have seemed absurd just a few years ago. Today, the parallel is increasingly disconcerting.

But there is one major difference that would almost certainly prevent a direct replay of the Chinese scenario: “Oppressive landlords” were a tiny minority in China, whereas whites are still a bare majority in the USA. If the American Cultural Revolution ever started getting far enough out of hand, more whites would do what the white nationalists want them to do: rally behind their group interests. It seems very unlikely that even the most self-hating whites would volunteer to pay for their ancestors’ crimes with their heads: Kneeling before a black person is one thing, while kneeling for the executioner’s sword is quite another. So for demographic reasons alone, domestic white genocide in the USA and Europe is probably a non-starter.[3]

But there is one scenario, less improbable than it may seem, under which a “white genocide” could actually happen: a radical shift in the global balance of power coupled with ever-worsening economic and ecological crisis. Doris Lessing’s sci-fi masterpiece Shikasta envisions a future of looming white genocide that looks much more plausible today than it did when the book was first published in 1979.

Doris Lessing’s Shikasta

In the near-future world of Shikasta, the global economy has collapsed due to environmental degradation, and the decadent West, recently demoted from its global leadership position, has gotten the worst of it. China, the new global hegemon, leads a non-Western bloc that blames whites for all the ills of the world, uses UN troops as a fig leaf to occupy white lands, and extracts reparations in the form of terms-of-trade arrangements leaving white nations on the verge of starvation. The more radical members of that bloc advocate “finishing the job” by outright exterminating the whites.

Shikasta’s hero, George Sherban,[4] is a man with a mission: stop the looming white genocide. Unfortunately, he can’t stop the larger catastrophe, nuclear apocalypse.[5] But apparently white people’s genetic makeup includes something rare and valuable that needs to be preserved for the post-apocalypse rebuilding. (Not that nonwhite peoples’ don’t, of course…Doris Lessing may have grown up in white Rhodesia, but she wasn’t a racist!)

The novel’s climax is a powerful set piece, a “Mock Trial of the White Races” prosecuted by the dark-skinned races, with George Sherban as the white folks’ defense attorney. (Sounds like the sort of thing that might have happened in CHAZ!) The prosecution begins: “I open this Trial with an indictment. That it is the white races of this world that have destroyed it, corrupted it, made possible the wars that have ruined it, have laid the basis for the war that we all fear, have poisoned the seas, and the waters, and the air, have stolen everything for themselves, have laid waste the goodness of the earth from the North to the South, and from East to West, have behaved always with arrogance, and contempt, and barbarity towards others, and have been above all guilty of the supreme crime of stupidity—and must now accept the burden of culpability, as murderers, thieves, and destroyers, for the dreadful situation we now all find ourselves in.” (p.315)

George Sherban’s tepid defense of the white races is not the sort of thing that Occidental Observer would likely publish. Sherban in essence admits that the charges are largely true, but let-he-who-is-without-sin-cast-the-first-stone: “Do you want me to remind you of the many instances in history when black, and brown, and light-brown, and gold-coloured and cream-coloured nations treated themselves, or other nations badly?…For instance, it is not news to any of us that the slave trade in Africa was conducted largely by Arabs and was made possible by the willing co-operation of black people.”

The scene rapidly degenerates: “…Then a girl stood up and shouted, ‘I’ve had enough of man’s inhumanity to man. What is the point of all this anyway?” She was German. A Polish girl stood up from the opposite side of the amphitheater and shouted across, ‘I’m not surprised you have had enough. You can leave if first you stand up like others have done and do some self-criticism. I want you to tell us of the crimes committed by Germans in the Second World War.’ ‘Oh no!’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake! ‘Let’s get out of here,’ was now heard from everywhere.” (p.338)

The Trial of the White Races more or less ends with a hung jury. Its significance, as it turns out, is not the verdict, but the cathartic effect of airing all this stuff out. Somehow the way the event is reported around the world, as a symbolic lynching that didn’t quite come off, has enough impact to stop the real impending lynching, the impending planetary-scale white genocide. Lessing’s hero George Sherban has saved the white races from total annihilation. 99% of earth’s grossly excessive population will soon be wiped out in the inevitable nuclear apocalypse. But among the surviving 1%, there will at least be a few whites with their precious genetic and spiritual baggage.

Today, if anyone wrote a science fiction novel about a hero’s struggle to save the white race from genocide, the book would probably be banned on Amazon. Facebook would refuse to run ads, the publisher’s YouTube channel would be taken down, and the author would be abused, ostracized, and canceled.

Doris Lessing was lucky she was writing in the atmosphere of intellectual freedom that pertained in 1979.

Notes

[1] If I were a paranoid conspiracy theorist I would say Navarro sure sounds like he’s been MK-ULTRAed. But since this is not one of my conspiracy essays, I’ll consign that observation to a footnote.

[2] For example, if the woke left had a charismatic authoritarian leader, he/she/it (or whatever the preferred pronoun) might pose a vastly greater threat to the Constitutional Republic than Donald Trump does.

[3] Yes, I know that white identity advocates have argued that changing demographics in white-majority countries, beginning with the US and Europe, represent “white genocide.” This is obviously false, for two reasons. First, far from dying out like the Herero or the Yahi or the indigenous peoples of Tasmania, people of European ancestry today still make up a greater share of Earth’s population than they did just a few centuries ago, and are in no danger of anything remotely approaching extinction…at least no more than anyone else. Second, and more importantly, the demographic changes in question are entirely self-inflicted by the white people themselves, who have chosen to have fewer children than replacement level, while voting in or tolerating governments that pursue lax immigration policies. A “genocide” cannot be self-perpetrated. The white identity advocates’ argument that Jews are responsible for the immigration laws, if true, does not change this, because the Jews in question are just as white as any other people of European ancestry (and do not seem to be demographically prospering vis-à-vis other whites in any case). At the end of the day, both the 99% of Euro/American whites who are goys, and the 1% who are Jews, are choosing small families and lax immigration laws. Whatever that is, it sure ain’t genocide.

[4] Actually, George Sherban is the reincarnation of—or directed by the walk-in spirit of—an extraterrestrial good guy named Johor, who is working with the benevolent Canopus federation to make the best of the terrible situation on Shikasta, “the wounded planet,” i.e. Earth. In Lessing’s somewhat Manichean imagination, Canopus and to a lesser extent its ally Sirius always work for peace, love, and harmony, while the villainous planet Shammat, capital of Puttiora, exploits, destabilizes, and corrupts in service to pure evil—rather like the real-life Anglo-Zionist empire, only more so.

[5] By this late date (in the novel) nuclear apocalypse is essentially inevitable, due to the power Shammat of Puttiora has achieved on Earth.

https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/cultural-revolution-white-genocide/