Everybody but white people . . . .

is allowed to be a racist and espouse racist theories of this, that, and the other thing.

Indigenism, for instance.

'Stolen lands': dozens arrested as Hawaiians protest $1.4bn telescope

Pretty dark, really

Just what was Conrad up to in his Heart of Darkness, 1899.

Yes, yes.

He opposed the massive hypocrisy of imperialism.

But not necessarily imperialism, nor even colonialism, judging just by this book.

Though obviously he saw and loathed all the horror of the Congo.

Via this book, he and white people in general have nevertheless been angrily denounced for racism.

As to the latter, racism - specifically, the idea of the racial inferiority of blacks to whites - has historically been used as an excuse for the most unspeakable crimes and the most inhuman rapacity.

That doesn't make it false, though it may well be that.

And it is certainly possible Conrad believed in the racial inferiority of blacks without for a moment buying it as an excuse.

In any case, he was a profound pessimist, atheist, amoralist, and even nihilist.

So what was he up to?

And a very fine writer.

Was that an apology for persecution and torture?

The Faithful and the Faithless

Too much credit to the Japanese Shogunate?

Would Anderson defend General Aussaresses, an important figure in the French use of torture, though not so much punitive as investigative, to deal with the Algerian FLN?

(The General was punished by the French Republic, staunch defender of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, not for using torture but for defending its use in a book.)

Or does he mean to defend the supposed aim of the Japanese, though not their methods?

Were the missionaries then, and are missionaries now, somehow in the wrong?

Come to that, does Anderson himself see Christian missionaries as colonialists or imperialists?

They were neither, though of course they were protected by both.

No free speech for them, and no free exercise?

How does Anderson see Western efforts to impose contemporary Western values - women's, gay, and LGBT rights, for example - on non-Western societies?

Where it's been going all along

Call to topple Christopher Columbus statue from its Barcelona perch

Hey, hey.

Ho, ho.

They have more sympathy for Twain, To a Person Sitting in Darkness than for Kipling, The White Man's Burden.

None at all for the liberal imperialism of J S Mill.

But all of that concerns imperialism and the supposed civilizing mission that was cited in its justification, and justifies interventions today.

Colonialism, something quite different, is at issue in the attacks on the half millennium long white peopling of the Americas, of Oceania, and various other parts of the world.

As massive and destructive of indigenous societies and cultures as the Volkerwanderung was to the Roman world, but also its opposite because the European civilization that replaced utterly the native societies was so vastly and progressively their superior.

Cultural appropriation

CBS' Nancy Drew Will Be Diverse

That means she will not be white.

Nor will she be an enterprising teenager.

She will be a non-white city cop, thus rejecting traditional sex roles and whiteness at the same time, transforming a traditional icon of both into quite something else.

This is part of the PC project to abolish traditional sex roles - pretty far advanced already - so that in reality as well as on tee shirts "girls rule" and turn whiteness into a badge of shame and inferiority.

Some whites are not shutting up about it.

They will pay the usual price.

Gays can be proud of and demand ego-validation for the most gut-wrenching obscenity.

Primitive natives or their descendants around the world can be proud of and demand ego-validation for the most benightedly savage traditional cultures.

Euro-whites must regard with shame, not pride, the vast, powerful, and rich Occidental civilization constructed by their ancestors and still maintained by them, along with its continuing, crucial, and beneficent global rayonnement.

Tough call

Which is worse, being ruled by a sociopathic egoist or an idealist equally without scruple or remorse?

The Congo ruled by King Leopold or Cambodia ruled by the Khmer Rouge?

Reading Chernyshevsky, What is to Be Done?

Of course, in his theories of human motivation and moral duty he combined both egoism and utilitarianism, like Bentham and Mill before him.

Unlike Sidgwick, who saw egoism and utilitarianism as competing ideals of rational conduct.

Wilson and Rhodes

They were indeed racists, both of them.

Wilson segregated DC and Rhodes brushed aside savages and other locals in support of both colonialism and imperialism in Africa.

Of the two, Wilson, whose politics were even more deplorable on other grounds - think of The Great War and its aftermath - , was probably the "visceral" racist.

Rhodes was just a civilian conquistador, playing his part in the ebb and flow of history driven by power and money, the rise and fall of the wheel of fortune.

And he was a marvelous builder of works of civilization; think of the Cape to Cairo railway.

Far more horrific than either in his treatment of black Africans was King Leopold of Belgium.

I have no idea whether or how far racism had anything to do with his psychopathic dealings with black Africans.

But I don't think he had anything to do with any American universities, anyway.

Of course, whining about any of this at this late date is driven by nothing but hatred of certain features of Western Civilization that are key aspects of it to this day such as capitalism and, oh yeah, being mostly an affair of white people - male white people.

You know, "Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go!"

And the college administrations, well knowing they would receive no support from elites were they to do anything else, surrender everything like the empty suits they are, like liberal punching bags in the pages of Dostoevsky.

Neither Wilson nor Rhodes - nor indeed Leopold, I suppose - is celebrated today for racism or for racist acts or policies.

But never mind.

They and pretty much all the major figures of Western Civilization for the last two or three centuries were racists of one stripe or another, or in one degree or another, and so every one of them, nearly the entire panoply of political and cultural leadership of the Occident, offers an easy target for anti-racist outrage and victim rhetoric.

Nearly all of them (some women excepted) were sexists, too, with similar caveats.

If no racist (or sexist) can be honored or celebrated pretty much nobody of importance to the Occident over the last few centuries can be honored or celebrated.

Yep.

Now you're catching on.

They will be pushed aside to make way for the culturally marginal women, mulattoes, Asians, Indians, and LGBT sexual outlaws the cultural revolutionaries have already spent decades grooming to replace them as the new heroes of the new, post-white, post-male, post-Christian Occident.

Anyway, that's what they are trying to do.