The Sickness Unto Death is the title of a book by the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).* He diagnosed the sickness as despair – the despair of individuals. An individual despairing of himself is sick with a psychological disease. “Psychological” is the author’s word for it. Kierkegaard was a Protestant Christian – but opposed to the established Lutheran church of Denmark – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.

In the twentieth century the French writer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) published a novel titled The Camp of the Saints. The story diagnoses guilt as the lethal sickness of the pan-European community called the West. Its guilt is a political disease, making it impotent and moribund. Raspail was a Catholic – but angry with the Catholic Church – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.

In May 2023, First Things published an article by Nathan Pinkoski on The Camp of the Saints. These are extracts from it:

The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the [20th] century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies.

Yet The Camp of the Saints is not a disaster novel. The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an “uncovering.” The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction. …

Raspail will not allow the migrants to be idealized. Throughout the novel, he emphasizes their vulgarity by providing lengthy descriptions of their crudeness, sexual promiscuity, and repellent hygiene. … [T]he migrants are materially and culturally destitute. That is why they find the West attractive. They do not have a mission to redeem sinful Europe; they are seeking deliverance from poverty and from the sometimes-brutal oppression and inequalities of non-Western cultures.

They will not obtain what they seek. In discussing what to do about the armada, the French authorities persuade themselves of their own ­illegitimacy. At the climax of the novel, the French president delivers an emergency speech meant to authorize the use of military force against the migrants and prevent them from landing. But he ­cannot bring himself to deliver the order. France will not defend itself. When the migrants alight from their boats and wade ashore, the West has already capitulated.

European governments fall as the migrants arrive, and European citizens withdraw from public life. Civil society collapses; as a result, the migrants enjoy no real improvement in their condition. They bring their bad rulers with them, replacing European regimes with the very regimes they have fled. ­Dictator-generals and Brahmins take up positions in French government, ruling as they did in their own lands. The migrants and their supporters do not “include” the Rest into the West. They expand the scope of the Third World, and wretchedness goes global. The purported blessing of the arrival of the wretched, so cherished by progressive voices in the novel, does not come about. What emerges is not a particularly harsh despotism—there is only the occasional boot stomping on the human face—but the pain of the survivors is great, because of their vivid memories of what they have lost. …

The left-wing intelligentsia herald the coming of the migrants as the dawn of a new age of multiculturalism, but they stoke a media frenzy and deploy the tools of cancel culture against those who demur, ostracizing or punishing them. …

Raspail is unsparing in his depiction of the betrayals urged by left-wing intellectuals, but he reserves his most scathing passages for the treason of the Catholic Church. In the novel, the previous pope has sold the treasures of the Vatican in a failed bid to win the approval of the Third World. The sitting pope, a Latin American, spends his time flying around on humanitarian missions and selling off whatever Vatican assets remain. He sees himself as a champion of the Third World. As the migrants arrive and the native French abandon their lands, priests go down to the beaches to cry, “Thank God!” They turn their backs on their countrymen, imagining they see Christ in the migrants.

In Raspail’s telling, Catholic Christianity has for some time been in thrall to humanitarian universalism. The novel satirizes a left-liberal Catholicism that disdains national and civilizational particularity and renders the faith indistinguishable from the moral universalism of non-believers. Under the banner of “charity, solidarity, and universal conscience”, progressive clerics abandon their neighbors for the sake of the stranger. They practice the religion of humanity, a Christian heresy …

The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to the future of humanity. The new civic liturgy of Western nations must express submission to the morally superior non-Western “other”. Those in the West need to be trained to take the knee …

Again and again in the novel, cowardice and self-hatred are masked and moderated by the conviction that mass immigration into Europe and the deconstruction of European identity will somehow take away the sins of the West. But Raspail knows the truth: Third World immigrants do not have the power to deliver Europeans from their sense of worthlessness. Once one embraces the logic of civilizational repudiation, the endpoint is nihilism and cultural death. …

The West is responsible for its own fate. Raspail is right. God will not deliver us from the consequences of our guilty self-­hatred. It is up to us to decide whether we will reject […] atonement through occupation and turn instead to the Lord.

Contrary to Pinkoski’s opinion, ours is that the really interesting thing about The Camp 0f the Saints is the accuracy of its prediction of what is happening in the 21st century: the non-violent invasion of the First World by a vast number of immigrants from the Third World; the failure of First World Governments to prevent it or turn it back; the sabotaging reaction to it of leftist intellectuals; clerics of the great churches – the Catholic priests following the lead of a Latin American pope –  passionately encouraging the shattering, the befouling, the abandonment of Western civilization.

What accounts for the capitulation of the rich and mighty law-governed civilized West to poor, weak, ignorant hordes from (in our case) the dark continent of Africa, corrupt republics of Latin America, cruel khanates of the Middle and Far East, hellholes of vicious Communist dictators?

Pinkoski declares, in apparent agreement with Raspail, that the big mistake which allows such a fatal tragedy to happen, is the embrace by Western political, intellectual, and religious leaders of  a “perverse logic” that “throws into sharp  relief the nihilism of guilt”.  The guilt is for Europe’s erstwhile imperialism, its colonizing and alleged oppressive exploitation of Third World countries. It arises, even in “Catholic Christianity”, out of an enchantment with  “humanitarian universalism”. That, Pinkoski tells us, is a “religion of humanity” and “a Christian heresy”.

The expression “humanitarian universalism” is no doubt intended to imply Marxism, but also more than that: global brotherhood, the family of man, humanism; an ideology of moral values, but essentially secular, and so “heretical” because it omits God. To the Christian mind, such an ideology is invalid because morals can only be decreed by God.

In reality, humanism, which purports to be concerned with individuals, is a very unlikely source of guilt and shame for a communal “sin”. The “sin” in this story is so bad that it calls for extreme punishment – nothing less than the destruction of our entire civilization, the peak achievement of humankind. The notion that humanism, or “humanitarianism”, is the source of such a shame could only arise in the religious mind – a mind furnished with inherited antiques: sin, guilt, atonement, penance, redemption through suffering, subordination of one’s own interests, apocalypse. And only one Western religion demands atonement by self-abasement, self-sacrifice, annihilation of achievement, willing submission to suffering.

Humanism began its resurrection with the anthropocentrism of  the Renaissance, and rose to its full height when Reason dethroned Faith at last in the Enlightenment. After a millennium of Christian oppression, Reason set Western man free to think, explore, experiment, discover, invent, hypothesize, be right and wrong; and be free to choose law instead of mystic revelation as a setter of ethical rules. (It is unfortunate – worse, it is disastrous – that most humanists have by now embraced the secular religion of socialism which again is inimical to freedom.)

The Enlightenment broke the power of the churches to terrify and oppress, but it did not change the essence of Christianity, which is masochistic. Doctrinally self-accusing. An ideology of  guilt, shame, abasement, and morbid reverence for martyrdom. For as long as its institutions were  powerful enough, it was an oppressive, torturing, property-confiscating, murdering tyranny; as totalitarian as it could be in the ages in which it ruled – no matter whether in the name of Catholicism or Protestantism. The secular heir to its tyranny is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Wokeism – no matter which of those labels it wears.

Christian faith, far from being the cure for the West’s sickness unto death, is its cause.

***

*Kierkegaard’s works are fascinating and often intentionally funny. He was witty and dryly humorous. His wit and humor are on fullest display in his book Either/Or.

Racial “color-blindness” was tried for decades in America between the end of the Jim Crow laws and the election of Barack Obama. He ended it. The idea of the ethnic “melting-pot” – persons of any national origin becoming American nationals so citizens of the United States would be bound together by law (ius) not territorial nativity (rus) – which did work quite well for about two hundred years, was repudiated along with “color-blindness”.

Bruce Thornton wrote in the Hoover Digest in 2012:

The melting pot metaphor arose in the eighteenth century …  and it described the fusion of various religious sects, nationalities, and ethnic groups into one distinct people: E pluribus unum. …

The image of the melting pot drew its strength from the idea of unity fostered by beliefs and ideals—not race, blood, or sect. …

This image, then, communicated the historically exceptional notion of American identity as one formed not by the accidents of blood, sect, or race, but by the unifying beliefs and political ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the notion of individual, inalienable human rights that transcend group identity. …

If some custom, value, or belief from the old country conflicted with those core American values, then the old way had to be modified or discarded if the immigrant wanted to participate fully in American social, economic, and political life. The immigrant had to adjust. No one expected the majority culture to modify its values to accommodate the immigrant …

Logically, the change has meant a person’s race matters; it is to be taken into account when his/her candidacy for everything from school to job to advancement is considered by authorities. Rus matters more than ius after all. And some races are more worthy than others.

So is separation of races and ethnicities the best way to prevent inter-race conflict? If so, are the races to be treated as “separate but equal”, or are some races and ethnicities really more worthy than others?

Yes, goes the argument, some races and ethnicities need to be recompensed for past injury inflicted by other races and ethnicities, so those who have been oppressed must be favored over those who oppressed them. That is “social justice”.

Some argue that racism is natural. Races, nations, tribes, as such, are antipathetic to each other and presumably always will be.

A counter-argument to that is: so is nakedness natural. People will always be born naked, but that’s no reason not to cover ourselves. The nakedness cannot be changed, it can only be remedied. And is, easily enough.

Ah, but racism is much more difficult, in fact impossible, to remedy.

This question arises: Is it possible that even if racism is natural and common in individuals, it is not standard? As a sense of humor is natural and common, but not standard like a heart and a head. It is not essential to life.

Even if it is not standard, comes the reply, it is far more common than a sense of humor. Too common to be eliminated.

And regrettably that may be true.

If racial/national/tribal antipathy cannot be eliminated among the citizens of the United States, it cannot be eliminated anywhere.

It clearly cannot be eliminated in the United States.

It clearly cannot be eliminated.

If there is no racial-national-tribal discrimination against individuals by law, then everything that can and must be done about it has been done. In America it has been done. And yet racism is still with us.

Scolding people about being racist will make no difference. Privileging a minority with “affirmative action” or grants of unearned money will make no difference.

Racism cannot be compensated or educated out of existence. It cannot be reasoned away. It cannot be legislated, compelled, punished, “brain-washed” or habituated out of existence.

If it is natural, the best that can reasonably be hoped for is that most of us will make it ineffective with our own behavior.

Archimedes – nom de plume  of a member of our forum – wrote an essay against affirmative action in 1977 when it was a topic of intense debate in America. The reason for the interest in the subject then was an appeal by a white man, Allan P. Bakke, to the Supreme Court against the rejection by many universities, partly on grounds of his race, of his application to their medical schools.

In 1978 the Supreme Court issued its verdict in the Bakke case. It found for Bakke, but also allowed affirmative action in favor of black applicants. The universities launched it as a policy which persisted – against majority opinion – until this year, 2023. Now the Supreme Court has declared affirmative action to be illegal.

We have reviewed the essay by Archimedes and we agree with the him that his argument is still valid. We think he makes it excellently well.    

Here is the essay:

To reward or punish a person on the basis of his race is morally wrong; no good can come of it. And what the opponents of Bakke are proposing is not an end to this pernicious practice, but merely a change in victims and beneficiaries. The results, however, will be the same: resentment, envy, bitterness, social divisiveness, stereotyping, and a general corrosion of the spirit.

The American judicial system is based on precedent. Should the Supreme Court rule against Bakke, the equal protection amendment, which has been the bulwark of the civil rights movement, could be severely weakened, in which case there would be little left in the law to prevent a new Supreme Court or a vengeful majority from legally institutionalizing an inferior status for blacks.

Preferential treatment is condescending and patronizing and both stimulates and nourishes the very attitudes we are supposedly attempting to eradicate. One does not patronize a person one regards as an equal; neither does one regard as an equal a person one patronizes. Similarly, one does not accept preferential treatment without a loss of self-respect and integrity. I suspect that behind all the fine talk by white liberals is a posture of noblesse oblige and superiority, and behind all the strident demands by certain black groups and leaders is a gnawing sense of inadequacy.

Preferential treatment taints all black achievement, makes it suspect, gives it the appearance of a benefit conferred rather than something earned. Let this policy continue for another twenty or thirty years and not a single black doctor, lawyer, civil servant, teacher, engineer, scientist, business manager, or politica appointee will know for sure whether his success is the result of his own talent and efforts or is at least in part the result of some gracious indulgence on the part of Whitey. I cannot conceive of a policy more degrading and damaging to the black person of real merit. By the same token, I cannot conceive of a policy more likely to arouse the skepticism, resentment, and disdain of whites, however well-intentioned and kindly disposed toward blacks they may be initially. And the longer this policy is pursued, the more likely it is that all black achievement (except achievement in sports and entertainment, where excellence is immediately obvious) will come to be regarded by most whites and probably many blacks as not genuine.

We are told that quotas and affirmative action are necessary if we are to put an end to the underrepresentation of certain groups in various aspects of American life. But what does the word “underrepresentation” mean? When is a group properly represented? The quota people have the answer to that one. They tell us that if a group constitutes X per cent of the population as a whole, then that group should constitute roughly X per cent of every profession and trade. The premise here is that attitudes, aptitudes, tastes, and desires are, or at any rate ought to be, uniformly distributed among all racial and ethnic groups, and if in fact they are not, we must simply go ahead and pretend that they are and force people into their predetermined slots. This is egalitarianism at its worst. It is totally at variance with traditional American notions of individual merit and personal freedom. There is absolutely no health in it.

The argument that blacks as a group require quotas and special treatment as compensation for deprived and disadvantaged backgrounds lumps all blacks in one category and all whites in another category. Blacks are by definition “disadvantaged”; whites are by definition “privileged”. Yet we know that tens of thousands of black children are growing up in comfortable, middle-class homes and can by no rational standard be termed “underprivileged” or “disadvantaged” and that an even larger number of black children attend integrated schools and receive the same instruction and enjoy the same opportunities for learning as their white classmates. If the opponents of Bakke were truly sincere about taking into account and compensating for deprivation, they would exempt the above children from special consideration. But they do not. Deprivation is determined by race and race alone. What this says is that a black child who attends school in the wealthy, innovative, richly endowed Berkeley system is disadvantaged, while a white child who attends an impoverished, woefully understaffed school in Appalachia or the rural South is a member of a privileged group – the white race – and hence can learn to live with a few minor handicaps, such as exclusion from college or graduate school.

The whole argument about inferior schooling and disadvantaged backgrounds is shot through with cant and self-deception. It is true that blacks going to “bad” ghetto schools learn very little. However, it is also true and the NAACP knows this that – blacks enrolled in “good” desegregated schools do just as poorly. (This unwelcome fact has emerged from virtually every one of the numerous studies of the effects of school desegregation on academic achievement.) Thus, as things stand right now, even if the entire country were desegregated and every school had a statistically “correct” racial balance, the educational gap between blacks and whites would remain unaltered (as it has after nine years of integration in the much vaunted Berkeley school system) and there would still be a demand for quotas and preferential treatment.

What is required is not quotas but a fundamental change in the attitude of blacks toward academic achievement and a determination on their part to perform as well in the classroom as they do on the basketball court. But the policy of quotas and special placement seems to be precisely the kind of policy that will discourage such a shift in attitude and emphasis. It implicitly assumes that blacks cannot or will not do well enough to be admitted to colleges and graduate schools on their own merits; it awards blacks easy and unearned victories at the expense of a generation of whites that played no role in the previous subjugation of the black man; it discourages rather that stimulates a desire to excel on the part of blacks. And because it treats the symptoms instead of the causes of the problem, it cannot bring about fundamental change. To succeed in its goals, it can never be relaxed; it must be maintained forever. Is this what we really want?

Fortunately it can no longer be openly maintained.

That excellent conservative writer, Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, asks questions that we too want to know the answers to, in an article* at Canada Free Press:

How did globalism metastasize all over the world so quickly, like a virulent cancer? How was this evil exported around the world in such a short time?

How did the ideology of self-loathing become so pathological, the ideology of putting citizens of another nation ahead of a country’s own interests?

Why are so many governments destroying their own countries on purpose, in unison, to satisfy the directives of the United Nations, a corrupt organization run by representatives of small countries that could not survive without financial help from the west? Their wealth-redistributive climate change industry and the “world without borders” concept have been exported around the world like a blitzkrieg.

Who is responsible for breeding this evil idea of self-loathing and destruction of nations into every corner of the globe? Nobody seems able to resist, they are mesmerized into submission.

And how did the virus of woke-ism spread around the globe so fast, except perhaps in China?

Why would a Yale University Economics professor [Yusuke Narita] suggest that elderly Japanese should commit “mass suicide by disembowelment to help the country deal with its rapidly aging population?”** Where did this insanity originate?

The leftist religion of climate change and planetary apocalypse has also taken over the globe, playing in the hands of elitist billionaires who want nothing but total control of our lives and all businesses, under the guise of protecting the globe from our alleged irreversible damage to the environment.

How did the disgusting critical race theory, in your face anti-white racism, spread so quickly around the United States, the most tolerant nation on the planet?

The author genuinely wants to know the answers, as do we. She does not try to provide them herself.

We are opening a comments page in the hope that if readers have plausible answers, they will tell us.***

Footnotes

* The article discusses other topics, and expresses some opinions that we do not agree with.

** “Narita also has mentioned the possibility of making euthanasia mandatory in Japan.” (From the same linked source.)

*** If again we are deluged with nonsensical comment from bots, we will have to close the page.

If every member of the House and Senate, and the president of the US and every member of his/her cabinet, and all nine justice in the Supreme Court were black, that fact would be of no importance whatsoever if each had qualified for his/her position by fair competitive achievement and was competently performing his/her official responsibilities. But if their only “qualification” is their blackness, it is cause for alarm.

A revolution is in progress in America, an uprising against the country’s established form of republican government, with the aim of destroying it as a nation state and turning it into a black-ruled territory in which whites are subjugated to blacks. In the new dispensation, all whites are to be punished with humiliation and impoverishment because the ancestors of some of them enslaved blacks.

The revolutionaries – with whites their most visible prominent leaders – are succeeding, even though they are encountering some set-backs: a temporarily Republican-majority House of Representatives, certain states effectively frustrating their ploys. White Joe  Biden, a crooked and senile fool, has been maneuvered into the presidency and does what he’s told. Black clothed and masked Antifa thugs riot when ordered to, and beat, burn, shoot, bomb, kill. Schools teach children to be ashamed of themselves as oppressors if they are white and sorry for themselves as victims if they are black. Prosecutors get law-abiding but critical citizens jailed and career criminals released. The mass media toe the line.

The aim is black supremacy.

Who lays down the line? Is there a living mastermind? A chief plotter? An oracle, a guru, a lord of the danse macabre?

Who tells the “president” what to do? He says “they” do, that he will be in trouble of he disobeys – but who are “they”? Or “he” or “she”?

Is it white George Soros? He’s the chief financier of the revolution, but is he the conductor?

Is it black Barack Obama, who promised to “fundamentally transform” America?

Is it vindictive, cruel, white Nancy Pelosi whom uncountable numbers of police officers and tens of thousands of soldiers obeyed until she stopped being Speaker of the House just recently?

Is it not a single person but a cabal that plots the way, makes the decisions, issues the orders? If so, how did its members get into it, and how do they keep themselves secret?

Why do the whites join in the caper? In the hope of saving themselves?

Tides of Africans and Asians are sweeping into Europe, tides of Latin Americans into the United States.

The white race is dwindling. Our civilization is in its twilight.

Jillian Becker    December 12, 2022

Can you trust your doctor to be qualified in Medical Science? Or was he awarded his degree because he scored a pass in Diversity Studies?

Beware! The latter is more likely now to be the case.

“Medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit …,”  Heather Mac Donald writes in an authoritative and important article at City Journal which we quote in part.

Why are they doing that?

“… in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.”

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. … Physicians must “confront inequities and dismantle white supremacy, racism, and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression, as well as embed racial justice and advance equity within and across all aspects of health systems”. The country needs to pivot “from euphemisms to explicit conversations about power, racism, gender and class oppression, forms of discrimination and exclusion”.  (The reader may puzzle over how much more “explicit” current “conversations” about racism can be.)

In other words, the policy-makers of the profession, being convinced that Blacks are innately less  intelligent than Whites and Asians, are lowering standards and introducing new criteria of evaluation by requiring skills in hitherto unrelated subjects (such as “communication and interpersonal skills”), in order to have more black doctors. Their motive is impeccably virtuous. Blacks must be saved from feeling inferior.

(It doesn’t apparently strike them that by lowering standards to achieve this aim they are declaring their firm belief that Blacks are inferior.)

Of course they never say they think Blacks are less brainy than Whites and Asians. They claim that the reason Blacks generally score lower in exams is because they are subjected to race prejudice and discrimination.* They are therefore less healthy, and therefore less able to study.

In accordance with the idea that racism causes racial health disparities, they are changing the direction of medical research, the composition of medical faculty, the curriculum of medical schools, the criteria for hiring researchers and for publishing research, and the standards for assessing professional excellence. They are substituting training in political advocacy for training in basic science. They are taking doctors out of the classroom, clinic, and lab and parking them in front of antiracism lecturers.

If this is not done, the medical school’s existence may be terminated:

Faculty are responsible for teaching how to engage with “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” in order to “disrupt oppressive practices”. Failure to comply with these requirements could put a medical school’s accreditation status at risk and lead to a school’s closure.

These exotic ideological obligations cannot be shrugged off by the trained doctor once he has his degree and starts practicing his profession:

According to the AAMC, newly minted doctors must display “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice”.

Research will be well funded – provided it is spent  on advancing the ideological doctrine:

They have shifted billions of dollars from the investigation of pathophysiology to the production of tracts on microaggressions.

Funding that once went to scientific research is now being redirected to diversity cultivation. The NIH and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma to fighting white privilege and cisheteronormativity.

Which means that “white privilege” and “cisheteronormativity” (translation: being of European extraction and sexually normal) are worse afflictions than Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma.

Private research support is following the same trajectory. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute [HHMI] is one of the world’s largest philanthropic funders of basic science and arguably the most prestigious. Airline entrepreneur Howard Hughes created the institute in 1953 to probe into the “genesis of life itself”. Now diversity in medical research is at the top of HHMI’s concerns. In May 2022, it announced a $1.5 billion effort to cultivate scientists committed to running a “happy and diverse lab where minoritized scientists will thrive and persist” in the words of the institute’s vice president. “Experts” in diversity and inclusion will assess early-career academic scientists based on their plans for running “happy and diverse” labs. Those applicants with the most persuasive “happy lab” plans could receive one of the new Freeman Hrabowski scholarships. The scholarships would cover the recipient’s university salary for ten years and would bring the equivalent of two or three NIH grants a year into his academic department. If an applicant’s “happy lab” plan fails to ignite enthusiasm in the diversity reviewers, however, his application will be shelved, no matter how promising his actual scientific research.

The HHMI program and others like it amplify the message that doing basic science, if you are white or Asian, is not particularly valued by the STEM establishment. How many scientific breakthroughs will be forgone by such signals is incalculable.

It is a sad and dangerous policy for all of us frail mortals. A “doctor” well trained in the recognition of unconscious racism but not necessarily in biochemistry and pathology cannot be relied on to make an accurate diagnosis. As the author says, “The proponents of the systemic racism hypotheses are making a large bet with potentially lethal consequences.”

[The doctrine] that health disparities are necessarily the product of systemic racism has devalued basic science and encumbered medical research with red tape. The fight against cancer has been particularly affected. White and Asian oncologists are assumed to be part of the problem of black cancer mortality, not its solution, absent corrective measures. According to the NIH, leadership of cancer labs should match national or local demographics, whichever has a higher percentage of minorities.

As in all ideologies, logic is dispensed with, and the dogma does not stand up to critical scrutiny:

The AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity sneers at “discredited and racist ideas about biological differences between racial groups”. If race does not exist, as received wisdom now has it, then the racial makeup of clinical trials should not matter.

But it matters more than anything else to the Embedders of Racial Justice and the Advancers of Health Equity.

In May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial population did not contain enough blacks. The drug under review was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get. There were almost no black patients with that disease to enroll in the trial, therefore. Better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial without black participants.

In another case, in which applicants competed for a grant –

… the runner-up possessed a research and leadership record that far surpassed that of the winning candidate. But he lacked the favored demographic characteristics.

Much talent is being lost to medical science because of “anti-racist” bigotry.

[T]he diversity push is discouraging some scientists from competing at all. When the chairmanship of UCLA’s Department of Medicine opened up, some qualified faculty members did not even put their names forward because they did not think that they would be considered …

The HHMI program and others like it amplify the message that doing basic science, if you are white or Asian, is not particularly valued by the STEM establishment. How many scientific breakthroughs will be forgone by such signals is incalculable.

***

Footnote:

*Heather Mac Donald provides these figures and facts about medical school admissions:

In 2021, the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test [MCAT] was in the 71st percentile, meaning that it was equal to or better than 71 percent of all average scores. The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile—a full standard deviation below the average white score. The MCATs have already been redesigned to try to reduce this gap; a quarter of the questions now focus on social issues and psychology.

Yet the gap persists. So medical schools use wildly different standards for admitting black and white applicants. From 2013 to 2016, only 8 percent of white college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs [grade point averages] and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6 percent of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat … Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying—except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56 percent of black college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCATs and 31 percent of Hispanic students with those scores were admitted, making a black student in that range more than seven times as likely as a similarly situated white college senior to be admitted to medical school and more than nine times as likely to be admitted as a similarly situated Asian senior.

Such disparate rates of admission hold in every combination and range of GPA and MCAT scores. Contrary to the AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity, blacks are not being “excluded” from medical training; they are being catapulted ahead of their less valued white and Asian peers.

… and curse them, whether they’re alive or dead, in obscene terms.

That is their just deserts.

(Warning: This post contains sarcasm.)

White people have done nothing good for the human race. They have invented nothing, created nothing, built nothing, discovered nothing, achieved nothing, done nothing that has been of any benefit to humankind.

Uniquely among the peoples of the world, they have done terrible harm. Every one of them is an oppressor by nature.

Whites must be stamped out and their memory abominated forever.

That is the moral instruction of all respected thinkers, writers, political leaders, publishers, social trend-setters, preachers, professors and teachers of this new era.

John Murawski outlines the evolution of this moral enlightenment at Real Clear Investigations. We quote parts of his essay:

In a 2021 lecture at Yale University titled The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind, psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani described her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor”.

Around the same time, a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed academic journal described “whiteness” as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility”. [The way water has a particular susceptibility to the condition of wetness – ed.] The author, Donald Moss, had also presented his paper as a continuing education course for licensed therapists who would presumably treat patients with this condition. The paper advises: “There is not yet a permanent cure.” …

The escalation of this inflammatory rhetoric is reaching the highest levels of American society, as when President Biden insinuated [stated – ed.] in a fiery campaign speech last week that Donald Trump supporters are “white supremacists” …

This new rhetoric is not coming from dropouts and loners at society’s margins; it is being advanced by successful professionals who have scaled the heights of respectability and are given a platform on social media and in prestigious cultural outlets …

Such inflammatory rhetoric is defended or downplayed by cultural gatekeepers. The incidents have been piling up especially in the past few years, especially since the election of Donald Trump to the White House during the ascent of Black Lives Matter in the age of social media, and even include cases of people calling for the hate of privileged groups and insisting it’s not hate speech. 

In its ultimate sign of success, this messaging has taken hold in public schools, corporate workplaces, medical journals, scientific research and even diversity training in federal agencies. It’s not limited to any single race but endorsed by whites, blacks, Asians and others, and disseminated in diversity materials and workplace-recommended readings that characterize white people as flawed, predatory and dangerous to society. Its sudden spread has caused a sense of culture shock and given rise to acrimonious school board meetings and employee lawsuits over hostile work environments as legions of teachers, students and workers have been educated about white privilege, white fragility, white complicity, and the moral imperative to de-center “whiteness” so as not to “normalize white domination”. …

Its advocates insist there is no double standard; they argue they are simply speaking truth to power, which should cause discomfort. In this belief system, reverse discrimination can’t exist because social justice demands tipping the scales to favor marginalized groups to correct for centuries of injustice. …

The idea that stereotyping and denigrating entire groups has no place in a society that strives for equality is [was -ed.] one of the signature achievements of the Civil Rights era. By the 1970s, openly expressing racist slurs and jokes against black people was seen as a distasteful holdover from the Jim Crow era … signifying low education and low intelligence.

The prohibition against racist speech rapidly became generalized to all identity groups. Ethnic slurs against Poles, Italians, Asians, and others became verboten as did mockery of gays and the disabled. Many words once commonly used to describe women, such as “dame” and “broad” became unacceptable, while terms that were once seen as neutral or descriptive, such as “colored”, “Oriental”, and “Negro”, suddenly took on negative connotations, and became unutterable in public …

But at the same time that these language taboos against expressing prejudice were becoming widely accepted across the political spectrum as a matter of civility, a far-more radical effort to regulate speech was percolating on the left.

This movement sought to limit speech on the rationale that language was a form of social control and therefore the source of oppression and violence. The assumption that hurtful language leads to harmful policies ultimately produced today’s cancel culture phenomenon, where otherwise well-regarded professionals are investigated, suspended, canned, or booted from social media for simply questioning the factual claims of Black Lives Matter …

Speech codes have been a staple of college campuses for decades but the stakes intensified after Donald Trump was elected president and the nation underwent a social transformation that some call the Great Awokening. Seemingly overnight the bar for permissible speech rose for the oppressor and dropped for the oppressed. And now it was overtly about politicizing and weaponizing speech to save humanity from itself.

On Christmas Eve in 2016, just weeks before Trump took office, a Drexel University political science professor, George Ciccariello-Maher, pulled an attention-getting stunt on Twitter: “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

“For Christmas”! “Genocide”! Spoken in  the true spirit of the season!

The next day, the provocative professor pushed the nuclear buttons again: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” ..

The core proposition of this mindset can be traced to philosophers like Michel Foucault, who developed theories of language as a form of societal power and domination, and Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist scholar whose now-classic 1960s essay Repressive Tolerance argues that the oppressor class and the oppressed cannot be held to the same standard. Marcuse proposed that the classical liberal doctrine of free speech is a mechanism that benefits capitalists and others who wield power, that the struggle for “a real democracy” paradoxically necessitates “the fight against an ideology of tolerance”.

(Warning: Even if you read the whole book you will not find any sense made of that claim.)

The subversive intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s passed on the torch to Critical Race Theorists and radical feminists, and in the 1990s the critique of bourgeois liberalism was taken up by Stanley Fish, a post-modernist literary critic and critical legal scholar who ridiculed the idea of “free speech” and “reverse racism” giving wider exposure to these esoteric scholarly arguments.

“By insisting that from now on there shall be no discrimination, they leave in place the effects of the discrimination that had been practiced for generations,” Fish wrote. “What is usually meant by perfect neutrality is a policy that leaves in place the effects of the discrimination you now officially repudiate. Neutrality thus perpetuates discrimination, rather than reversing it, for you can only fight discrimination with discrimination”. …

Only torment, humiliation, subjugation, massacre will do.

Each professor and journalist strives to surpass the others in the use of obscene words to express their righteous loathing.

The New York Times stood by …. Sarah Jeong, a Korean-born graduate of U Cal Berkeley and Harvard law school whose Twitter oeuvre trafficked in crude racial stereotypes. Jeong, who was fond of the hashtag #CancelWhitePeople, tweeted out such sentiments as: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” And: “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

As the New York Times was pilloried for its double standard progressive digital pundits, Vox came to Jeong’s defense, patiently explaining for the umpteenth time that Jeong was to be exempt from censure because “there’s no such thing as ‘reverse racism'”.

That Whites are uniquely evil and entirely dispensable cannot be said often enough or with sufficiently satisfying vituperation.

To clarify(as Professor George Ciccariello-Maher was careful to do): Not only would white genocide relieve the world of a useless and terrifyingly destructive life-form, it would also satisfy the burning desire of non-whites for revenge – a point made by Frantz Fanon in his classic work The Wretched of the Earth.

Genocide would be the one and only acceptable final solution to whiteness; the “permanent cure” of it; a full accomplishment of “social justice”, for which the wretched of the earth have long panted.

(Maybe a few specimens of whites could be kept in captivity to be studied, experimented on, taunted, mocked, laughed at? What say you?)

… from triumph to abasement.

“So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness.

Having control of the White House and both Houses  of Congress, what have the Democrats accomplished with all that power?

Their priority was to undo what President Trump had done.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record.

What had Trump achieved? Most importantly –

The greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past. …

Then came the rule of the Left and –

Within eight months the following was finalized [by the Democrats]:

Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause.

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists.

Whereupon –

Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts.

China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.

At home, gas prices have soared.

Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink.

The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century.

A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes …

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective non-enforcement of existing laws: wors, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.

And among the shocks administered to Americans as their country fails and falls, acts of treachery and deeds of corruption:

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists”, or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive? …

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding.

All who voted for Trump are declared to be “white-supremacists’ and “terrorists”. Peaceful protestors are labeled “insurrectionists” and locked up without charge as political prisoners, while  violent protestors are called “peaceful”. The “peaceful” rioters, arsonists, and killers are alone exempted from having to wear masks in obedience to the absurd restrictions imposed on the rest of the nation in the time of pestilence, on the grounds that their ideological correctness sanitizes and immunizes them.

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. …. There were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

When there were –

120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. … The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020 [when Biden “won” the election]. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality.

Convicted criminals have been let out of prison by the thousands. The innocent are punished. The guilty go free – and are rewarded.

America’s undoing has taken less than a year.

Is it all over for America as the world’s one-and-only, unchallengeable, superpower?

Despairing thinkers on the Right think so.

Roger Kimball writes in part at American Greatness:

“Never forget [9/11].” “We remember.”  The sentiment [is] invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism.

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered …

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the “woke” perspective that has laid waste the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military?

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity”. The explicit cost for such gender programs was $787 million; the real cost was much higher because “gender goals” were folded into almost every initiative we undertook in Afghanistan. …

The dissolution of the British Empire—one of the most beneficent and enlightened political forces in history—took place for many reasons … Part of the reason for its dissolution was inner uncertainty, weariness, a failure of nerve. By the middle of the last century, Britain no longer wished to rule: it wanted to be liked.

The promiscuous desire to be liked, for states as much as for individuals, is a profound character flaw. …

When we ask what nurtures terrorists, what allows them to flourish and multiply, one important answer concerns the failure of authority, which is the failure to live up to the responsibilities of power.

Christopher Bedford writes at The Federalist;

How many are willing to confront the deep, decades-long rot that is the actual reason we lost in Afghanistan?

America is sick. …  If we don’t make the choice to confront [that fact] directly, it will kill us.

In his view the decline has been recent and rapid:

If all of these things — that riot and that disease, and the ever present specter of racism — were to disappear right now never to be seen again, this country would still be very, very sick. The United States — our home — would still be feeble compared to five years ago, let alone 10, 15 or 30.

Mark Steyn said in an address to the Gatestone Institute that China’s “moment” has come, and the “transfer” of superpower status has already begun:

We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.

American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China. …

Everything we need comes from China. China not only gives us the virus, we are also dependent on China to give us the personal protective equipment ‑ all the masks and everything ‑ that supposedly protect us from the virus. …

We’re living in the early stages of a future that is the direct consequence of poor public policy over the last couple of generations. …

Right now, we are witnessing a non‑stop continuous transfer of power to a country that is serious about using that power. This is China’s moment. My great worry is that actually, the transfer to China has already happened. The baton has already been passed. We just haven’t formally acknowledged that yet.

America has been a benign superpower, as was Britain in the nineteenth century.

Communist China will not be benign.

If America’s decadence, its putrid sentimentality, its self-abasement, its effeminization allow China to become the next world-dominating power, the Leftists, the anti-white racists, the “woke” liars and cheats who now rule America will learn too late what “systemic” oppression really is.

Will the rest find that sufficient compensation for the loss of freedom?