Archive for the ‘Reinventing Apartheid From The Left’ Category
The Real Wicked Determinists
Thanks to the Nazi belief in blood and destiny, there is a widespread assumption that evolutionary psychology, which is once again building our self-understanding on the biological sciences, must necessarily be racist. In fact, the discipline has virtually nothing to say about human “races”. The genetic differences between population groups are rather small and behaviourally […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
A Solution To The Dilemma
In Alexander Kielland’s 1883 novel, Poison, a husband and wife fight over whether their son should be confirmed or not. The worldly husband is thinking of the son’s prospects in society, the idealistic freethinker wife does not want the boy to be a hypocrite; it is about expediency versus truth. Our own age has found […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
Back To “Blood And Soil”?
Nazi racial theory was the fruit of a shotgun marriage between physical anthropology and linguistics. Although not for lack of trying, the former science was unable to produce any convincing classification of human “races”. So a fatal error was committed, and “race” was defined by language instead. Since there appeared to have been an Indo-European […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
The Invention Of Ancient Peoples
If I had been alive in 1861 to hear Massimo d’Azeglio say, “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians”, I would have asked him, “If there are no Italians, why should you wish to make an Italy?” For the paradox of 19th-century nationalism in general is that “the People” were created by the […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
Ethnokitsch And The Roman Legions
One example of the perfect circularity of ethnokitsch is Romanian forenames. Visitors find that most of the people they meet are named after Roman emperors and poets, for example Tiberiu and Ovidiu, and draw the conclusion that the Romanians are direct descendants of the Romans. The locals will not hasten to contradict them. In reality, […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
Dead Languages Our Heritage
In my lifetime, many languages have been brought back from the dead. The streets of Toulouse are named in both French and Occitan, and in the pubs of Caernarfon you may find teenagers flirting in a language until recently confined to their chapel-going great-grandmothers. Now, linguistic variety and richness is a very good thing in […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
Doing Our Cultural Thing
Whereas the word “culture” once generally meant the high arts, this elitist sense is now almost obsolete; the anthropological usage has so triumphed that “culture” now means “the stuff people do”, down to hot dogs and mud-wrestling. If “culture” is everything I do, therefore, and my “culture” must be protected, venerated and practised, then it […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
Brown Crackers
Many Europeans are currently exercised about unappealing behaviour in their immigrant communities: female genital mutilation, honour killings and suchlike. Most of the debate revolves around ethnicity and religion, equating Islam with all sorts of bad things. The offensive behaviour is not, however, a consequence of the mere fact that the immigrants are Muslim, but to […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
Open The Skull And Take It Out!
Somebody called John Allen Muhammad has identified a need to train a “new generation of black minds”. I am all for more training of black people to use their minds better, as I am all for more training of white, red, yellow and polka-dotted people to use their minds better. But I wonder whether we […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left
The Unique Love Of Family
Ask any ethnicity what their national culture is all about, and they will all answer with some variant of “love of family”. Or else it revolves around eating a lot, or asking the man in the sky for stuff. So everyone’s national culture, which they take such pains to differentiate from all other cultures, is […]
In: ON PC; OR "WHAT WOULD MS. GRUNDY SAY?", Reinventing Apartheid From The Left