War and Rumors of War 2
Eugene Robinson comments on Alabama (it would be Alabama, woudn’t it) Congressman Mo Brooks farcical claim that President Obama and the Democrats are waging a “war on whites.”
But maybe not. Maybe Brooks has fully bought into the paranoid myth of white victimhood that gives the opposition to Obama and his policies such an edge of nastiness and desperation.
I do not believe it can be a coincidence that this notion of whites somehow being under attack is finding new expression — not just in Brooks’ explicit words but in the euphemistic language of many others as well — at a time when the first black president lives in the White House.
The myth of victimhood is not new. Long after it was understood that slavery was morally wrong, Southern whites justified its perpetuation by citing the fear that blacks, once liberated, would surely take bloody revenge against those who had held them in bondage. Jim Crow laws and lynchings had a similar purpose. In the minds of his assassins, 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and killed to protect the flower of Southern womanhood.
The myth surfaces whenever Obama comments on race.
Feeding that sense of victimhood has been one of the prime tactics of white supremacists, both thet blatant ones and the subtle ones, over the centuries. So long as they can maintain an “us and them” mentality, they can keep themselves in power. As Lyndon Johnson said
Read the rest.
August 10, 2014 at 2:47 pm
Ah, the really poor man’s Ted Nugent. Same features, the paranoid style, the belief that a variety of parties, all on the left, are in a conspiracy not only to destroy the country but to bring down the good white tribe. It’s Saul Alinsky, it’s two other old people, the enemy within, anyone who protests or disagrees. Barack Obama hates white people, every night, from the stage. With this guy, it’s when something recording his words gets stuck in his face or he’s on tv. The new American bigot protests when called a bigot by others who notice using the argument that it is not he or she who is the racist, but the person seeing it and saying something.
August 10, 2014 at 10:19 pm
Bigots and haters never admit that they are bigots and haters. They must invent elaborate rationales to deny their bigotry and hatred, not only to others, but also to themselves.