Flit

Is it Right to Cheer Your Co-Ethnics?

Armed and Dangerous is especially both Friday as it deals with the explosive topic of Jewish responsibility for Communism. The problem is that we don't have an objective framework for either racial/ethnic opprobrium or racial/ethnic pride. ESR despairs of ever finding such a thing seriously discussed and solved in his lifetime. Unfortunately, he's right that such lack of discussion cripples anti-racists in their discussions with intelligent bigots, a perverse result that should not stand.

The only avenue of escape is to assemble an objectively agreed to code of racial and ethnic pride and then adopting the mirror image for racial and ethnic shame. Everybody's happy when one of "their's" does well in the world. But what's legitimate ethnic pride? I was born in the city of Timisoara, birthplace of Johnny Weismuller (olympic swimmer on the US team and famously the black and white TV Tarzan that largely became the template for future renditions of the character).

So, should I be proud of a local boy made good? Well, maybe. Johnny Weismuller was hardly proud of his birthplace (he often tried to claim US birth, there was no money to be made by competing on the Romanian olympic team) and he doesn't share the same ethnicity as I have (the Banat region which Timisoara sits in is split internationally and is a local ethnic salad bowl of romanians, hungarians, serbians, and germans with a sprinkling of Ashkenazi jews among other small minorities). Another example, is Henri Coanda's discovery of the principle of jet flight and building/flying the first jet airplane (in 1910!) in Paris a romanian triumph or a french one?

So who gets to decide whether a personality is from the old country, him or me or a bunch of 3rd party historians? Or is it a collective decision?

The list could go on and on of people claimed by more than one group. Sorting it out would be contentious but would shed some productive light on the question of group identification/responsibility. I believe that once you can say who can claim whom, you will probably be able to assign responsibility for the villians to their respective ethnicity (or other relevant groups).

I don't propose that I have the answer to this puzzle but I think that this is a viable way of getting to the truth of the matter because it is simply untenable for the politically correct to argue generically against expressions of group pride. It's a pretty short step to arguing for an abolition of black history month and they just don't want to go there. The only third position is to explicitly argue that there is a permanent ladder of ethnic/race rating and that whites are at the bottom so shut up and take it. That's just not going to fly.

The bottom line is a principle I hold dear. Groups are responsible for their own extremists. They can fail to control them, but then the responsibility has to rest on the group to repudiate them and take whatever measures they can to resist and try to clean up the mess afterwards.

To do otherwise is untenable. As just one example, why should Brazil take back criminal deportees if there is no national/ethnic solidarity that requires them to do so? Wouldn't it pay for a country to meet such people at the border and simply not accept them?

Revisionist whitewash is an attractive option for people especially shamed by one of their own. He didn't exist, he wasn't as bad as all that, he wasn't really one of us. We don't have to adjust and make amends and be on the lookout to prevent future monsters from arising among us,etc.