A World Without Western Civilization, by Jim Goad. An old white man, Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, recently said:
This “old white people” business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization? …
You go back and Google “old white people,” “old white men,” [and] you’ll find that that comes out of the mouth of leftists constantly. They have decided it’s open season on white people in America from an ideological standpoint. And I hope it stops there, but somebody needs to stand up for the contributions that have been made by Western Civilization. And if we disparage our roots, if we disparage what makes this a great nation, then we’ll lose the formula for being an even greater nation. So I stood up for our foundation, for our history, for our culture, of Western Civilization.
King of course was gas-lighted by his cultural opponents, who were apoplectic but notably did not address the issue he raised. Jim Goad goes on the rhetorical attack — lots of easy targets.
The oniony-looking Rebecca Onion of Slate asserted that it made “no sense” to judge groups by their historical inventions, despite the fact that a given racial group’s level of technological innovation is tightly correlated with its relative success and prosperity.
Writing for Salon, a certain Sarah Watts didn’t appear to be joking when she credited Africans for inventing “humanity.” (I suppose other inventions were hard to come by.)
There are reams of evidence of technological innovations by the ancient Chinese, the ancient Indians, and the ancient Semites—emphasis on the “ancient.”
Zinger! Then this:
Most uncomfortable for egalitarians and their ilk is that there are vast landmasses—sometimes entire continents—where the indigenous inhabitants have invented virtually nothing. Sub-Saharan Africans are not known for contributing much to rocket science, and black Americans are so underrepresented as inventors that everyone has heard a gazillion times about the mulatto who improved blood-storage methods and George Washington Carver’s wondrous dalliances with the magical peanut. The so-called “Native Americans” are credited with inventing the spinning top, which somehow proved incapable of defending them against the white man and his guns. And Australia’s aborigines? Well, let’s not talk about them, because they’d be embarrassed.
Ouch! Then this crushing observation:
If you were to note every manmade item within your field of vision, chances are that nearly every last gadget and trinket was invented by a white [or North Asian – ed] man. According to Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, whites have historically dominated the fields of physics, math, chemistry, medicine, biology, and technology.
What’s grossly ironic is the specter of people using white computers hooked up to white electricity sent across white power grids to criticize the very white people who made their whining possible. Even worse is the ubiquity of white people pejoratively using the word “white people” as if it somehow doesn’t apply to them. That right there is a collective mental illness for the ages.
And the finale:
Slate’s Rebecca Onion warns that “the idea of white technological superiority has often served as justification for oppressing or displacing nonwhite people.”
But flip that around — denying white technological contributions and distilling all of white history into one massive blood libel of torture and enslavement of nonwhites can serve as justification for displacing white people.
