On Vikings and Victims: White-Guilt in Context

American Thinker ^ | December 14, 2008 | Raymond Ibrahim

[neverdem]

All-permeating "white-guilt" did not appear out of thin air. It has taken a sustained propaganda effort, a wide-ranging mobilization of education and culture, to inculcate and sustain self-loathing among American Caucasians. Like the Coca-Cola ^TM brand, white-guilt needs endless repetition to remain struck in the thought and behavioral processes of the masses.

The movie Pathfinder, which I saw on cable, offers a vivid example of the sort of brainwashing intended to refresh the white-guilt ^TM brand in the thinking habits of young people in particular.

Set around 900 AD, the film deals with Viking incursions into North America.  The Vikings are portrayed as ironclad giants -- more monster than human -- mounted atop massive Clydesdales, barking and grunting obscenities in some strange tongue; the natives, as expected, gentle, innocent, and peace-loving.  This theme, of course, is not new.

Subtleties playing on white-guilt, however, are spread throughout.  Consider the usage of language.  The Vikings speak only Norse, with English subtitles (though the viewer could do without, since apparently the north-men had naught to utter but barbarities and cruelties).  Conversely, the natives rattle off in 21^st century colloquial English.  If the movie was primarily interested in authenticity (let alone objectivity), both languages -- Native and Norse -- should have been used (as in The Passion, where Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic are maintained throughout).  Moreover, if either of the two languages should have been rendered into English, logically it should have been Norse, which is at least etymologically related to English and in the same linguistic group. 

Of course, philological fidelity is not the movie-makers' primary interest; empathy by association is.  Violent Vikings are left to babble unintelligently about fire, war, and iron, while Natives talk of love, peace, and courage -- all in very smooth English.   Americans are supposed to identify with the natives, not their Norse co-linguists, nor, for millions of American viewers tracing their lineage to Scandinavia, their ancestors. 

Language manipulation aside, the depiction of Vikings as brutal warriors and plunderers is at least plausible and historic.  The Native presentation, on the other hand, is neither.  Indeed, the cultural anachronisms of Pathfinder suggest that 10^th century natives were akin to modern-day liberals, easily "traumatized" and constantly in need of "therapy" and "reaffirmation" -- concepts wholly non-existent in the 10^th century. 

From the start, a native woman encounters dead bodies and starts shrieking (she is "traumatized") and running madly -- as if living in 900 AD North America (or anywhere else at the time, for that matter) men, women, and children would not find the sight of rotting corpses banal.  In the midst of this carnage, she happens upon a Viking boy who brandishes a sword at her.  Instead of reacting instinctively -- fight-or-flight -- she casts a loving look at him as if to say "You poor boy; what have they done to you?" and embraces him.

In fact, the main reasons that make the hero of the story, this same young Viking grown into manhood, agreeable, are his "liberal-therapeutic" tendencies.  He has "daddy-issues" (his father beat and abandoned him for not being "man" enough) and is "confused" about his "identity," finally sloughing off his violent Viking (read: "white") heritage in favor of a sort of "multi-culti" native identity, thus making him the triumphant hero we can all support and identify with. 

Of course none of this should be surprising; neither presenting dead white men as the personification of evil nor presenting non-whites as the personification of good -- especially Native Americans, who have all but come to be the paradigmatic "noble other" who suffer countless and untold depredations at the hands of the white man.  This theme is well rooted in popular culture, thanks to academia.  Indeed, this motif is so ubiquitous that none other than Osama bin Laden exploits it to make white Americans feel shame and guilt.

This "noble-victimized-non-white" paradigm has further come to be applied to almost all non-whites.  For example, early sub-Saharans are always portrayed as a peaceful people who simply wanted to live and let live-until warlike white man came along. (Pointing out that it was fellow Africans who sold their kinsmen into slavery is unpopular in polite -- that is, white-guilt laden-conversation). 

The most recent rehashing of the "noble-other vs. evil white-man" paradigm is based on the U.S. response to the Islamic world post 9/11.  Following al-Qaeda's lead, academia and the media have been quick to portray George Bush as a ravenous brute (like the Vikings, also speaking an unintelligible tongue)  who mindlessly attacks the peaceful others -- this time Muslims -- in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. 

What seems to be missed by all, however, is the simple fact that, if whites have been traditionally aggressive or exploitative of non-whites, that is not because the former are intrinsically violent (a racist point, incidentally) but simply because they were able to.  And that's the bottom line of all history: Capability.  Did whites defeat and uproot Native Americans, enslave Africans, and colonize the rest because they lived according to some sort of unprecedented bellicose creed alien to non-whites?  Quite the contrary; they did so because they -- as opposed to natives, blacks, et. al. -- were able to do so. 

Had 10^th century Native Americans developed galleys for transoceanic travel, or advanced fire arms, or compasses, or organized military structures and stratagems -- or any of those other things that have made the Western way of war supreme -- and had they arrived on the shores of Dark Age Europe, is there any doubt that they would have done the same exact thing?

Would they have conquered and subjugated in the name of empire, or would they have looked at the inferior pale savages and "respected" them, in the name of "diversity," leaving them wholly unmolested?  What if 18^th century sub-Saharan blacks were technologically or militarily more advanced than their northern neighbors and could have easily subjugated and enslaved them?  Would they have done so, or would they have left them in peace in the name of "multiculturalism"?  These are the hypotheticals that no one seems interested in asking, since the answer is not only clear as day but immediately places whites and the rest of humanity on the same moral grounding. 

Nor can the argument be made that non-whites did not reach such a militarily advanced state because they were a peaceful and content people.  If so, why then did they also constantly war, kill, rape, plunder, and sell each other into slavery -- as history so unambiguously records?  If this is how they treated, and often still treat, their own kin, what would they have done to the "other," such as the white man?  As for Muslims, history attests that whenever there has been a caliphate on the ascendancy, it had no compunctions whatsoever about launching devastating wars of conquest.  Approximately 85% of the "Islamic world" today was subjugated during the Islamic conquests (or, according to the white-guilt lexicon, Islamic "expansions").

None of this is meant to exonerate the crimes of the white-man, but rather to put them in context by indicating that all people -- white, black, yellow, red, whatever -- are the same; they war, and, when capable -- keyword -- go on the offensive in search of conquest and hegemony.  Depending on scope, it could be either tribal or international hegemony.  Some religions incite these innate "passions," others mollify them.  Yet these passions-which, according to that astute philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, "carry us to partiality, pride, revenge and the like [e.g., war and conquest] -- apply to all of humanity.  To say otherwise is to be racist.

[glide625]

Not that it really matters because I’d never be able to find the link, but I read a snippet somewhere yesterday that pointed out that the demoralization of the European American is a central tenet of the Obama ideology. And it’s worked and will continue to work in my humble opinion. European Americans have been “set up” for the last 50 years for this. My guess is that many if not most will volontarily take their place at the back of the bus, surrendering their fate to the new masters in charge who seek to rob them of any vestige of liberty, property or wealth and most importantly, opportunity. The remainder I suspect, (hope) will simply elect to get off the bus altogether, exit stage left and make new lives for themselves and their offspring somewhere else away from and out of the gulag that will be ObamaNation.

[Wildbill22]

http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
Congressional record stating the goals of Communism.

And in the words of a KGB defector;
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32cxf_yuri-bezmenov

Bottom line is the communists and specifically the Soviets, were using our own culture against us.

[lentulusgracchus]

I don’t consider England as part of Europe.

You are correct. It is part of Oceania. Long live Ingsoc!

[Condor51]

*** Didn’t China introduce firearms to us? ***

No not firearms, Gun Powder and Rockets ('fire works').
Marco Polo brought it/them back to Venice (plus Spaghetti).

[lentulusgracchus]

My guess is that many if not most will volontarily take their place at the back of the bus, surrendering their fate to the new masters in charge who seek to rob them of any vestige of liberty, property or wealth and most importantly, opportunity.

Minoritarian regimes are often motivated to become repressive, and possibly mass-murderers. Example: the Alawite-run Ba'athist regime of Syria.

Low bridge, y'all.

[lentulusgracchus]

[xrmusn] “Ah but Mr Denny FORGAVE his attackers. Now that is White Guilt.....or some such malarkey...”

I believe it was Christianity.

Disagree. Stockholm syndrome. That, and the fact that Mr. Denny was brain-damaged by the attack.

His attack remains, like the Goldman-Simpson murder, an unjusticed travesty.

[lentulusgracchus]

[Article]

Moreover, if either of the two languages should have been rendered into English, logically it should have been Norse, which is at least etymologically related to English and in the same linguistic group.

Not to quibble, but Joseph Greenberg and other scholars showed 20 years ago that all human languages are philologically related. There are 30-odd "Native American" (Amerindian) language families, all related. Old Norse is a language of the Northern Germanic group, English a language of the Western Germanic group, both being part of the Indo-European family of languages. Indo-European languages in turn are part of the so-called Nostratic Superfamily of languages (which includes the Semitic family and some others). Ultimately all language superfamilies are related.

At least that's the current scholarship, as of the last time I looked at a Scientific American or Discover article on it.

[PGalt]

Good post. Better thread. Thanks to all contributors.

[Dick Bachert]

Political Correctness:

”A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”

By spreading this definition around, perhaps we can employ one of the more effective methods of deflating and defeating the fools who practice and promote it: RIDICULE.

Unless stopped – and soon – PC will DESTROY Western Civilization -- if it hasn’t already.

PASS IT ON!!

(Credit hereby given to my late cousin Karl Benton Clark for either creating this definition or bringing it to my attention

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

Read neverdem’s comment about Marxism. It is the answer.

[dennisw]

Raymond Ibrahim ... Is a Coptic Christian and mostly posts at Jihad Watch. Very good article

[Yorlik803]

You hit it right on the button.
Whatever sins White people may have,they pale when you look at what other races have done. The Chinese alone have killed millions of thier own people, and Africa is much better off now that the Blacks ran off the whites in Rhodeisa. And India sucks now that the Brits left.
The American Indians have a long history of genocide when they fought other tribes.

[Eternal_Bear]

Inuit traditions say they got along with their Greenland Norse neighbors most of the time though there were clashes. The Inuit vehemently deny they wiped out the Norse and that other white men (probably English or German pirates) were responsible for that. This is not implausible since the English exterminated the Swedes from their North American colony in the 17th Century.

[woollyone]

...because, as everyone knows, if you are blonde&blue, you are most certainly a racist.

[Oztrich Boy]

Language manipulation aside, the depiction of Vikings as brutal warriors and plunderers is at least plausible and historic

Vicious slanders spread by malcontented owners of seafront property

[Fishrrman]

“Even those who are proud of European and American culture already see Europe as lost. They look at the growing 5% to 10% muslim minority in Europe and simply give up. That’s like a football team ahead 70-0 giving up as soon as the other team scores one touchdown. Our side may have demoralized itself, but that is not an excuse to give up and forfeit the game”

What’s happening in Europe has no relationship to the game of football. None.
The white/Christian Euros who are not “fighting back” are behaving that way for [either one of] two reasons:

Reason 1:
They are hopelessly liberalized/secularized, and actually have come to believe that embracing the notions of “multiculturalism” will save them. They hope and fantasize that the new hordes of Islamics can yet somehow be pacified, either through “assimilation” [which won’t happen] or by appeasement in the form of housing, benefits, anti-discrimination laws, etc.

Reason 2:
They are realistic in their assessment of the situation before them, and choose to do nothing because they fully understand that those “things they must do” to rectify their dilemma are so extreme as to be unpalatable to their internal constitutions and unacceptable to the outside world. Thus, they resign themselves to their inevitable fate.

Nevertheless, there _are_ those who are “proud of [their] European culture” and who _are_ speaking out and - if given the power to do so - are willing to take those unpalatable actions to drive out the influence of Islam in Western Europe. However, you (and many others here) would be among the first to put down the political groups of which I’m speaking. In England, there is the BNP. In France, there is the National Front. In Austria there is the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO). Denmark has the Danish People’s Party. Belgium has the Vlaams Blok. There is the League of the North in Italy. And there are additional parties in other Western European countries that not only recognize the danger of creeping Islam within their borders, but actively campaign and publicize against the Islamification of Western Europe.

And within EVERY country in which these parties exist, their leaders and members are labeled racists and bigots. Not only are the nationalist parties attacked for their message, they are often the subject of overt attempts to silence them or even ban their participation altogether within the political arena. At the extreme, they are murdered (example: Netherlands politician Pim Fortyn).

I contend that the ONLY political parties that have the potential to save Europe from Islam are indeed these nationalist parties. They understand the threat, speak out, name names and point fingers. They are unafraid to call out Islam on its intents and goals for Europe. And - given the power to do so - I contend they are the ONLY parties in Europe which would take proactive steps to reverse European Islamicization.

Europe cannot be saved by appeasement and by multiculturalism. What will “save” Europe (and by saving it I mean preserving it as a continent ruled and dominated by white/Christians, and where that culture prevails as it has for centuries) will be, can be nothing less than outright racism and discrimination against those who are non-Euro and non-Christian. At the very least, actions which will be called racist and discriminatory.

Those are hard words to speak in a forum dedicated to the notions of freedom. Yet in a reasoned and rational world, when confronted with problems that are all-but insurmountable, one must assess the dangers and forge a pathway forward based on cold-hearted reason. In view of that, I ask anyone reading this: how can ascendant Islam be “reasoned” with? In view of Islam’s history, how were their previous historical “advances” successfully reversed?

In the original article, the author mentions the American native Indians and the Viking invaders. Juxtapose this to Western Europe. It is now the white/Christians who are the “natives”, and the Islamics who are the Vikings. The numbers of the native Christians are shrinking, their will to resist is crumbling, and the strength of the invaders is growing by leaps and bounds - not only by sheer numbers, but in their cultural influence and the willingness to speak in a unified political voice. Given this, what outcome is probable?

I have written before on FreeRepublic, that the white/Christians of Western Europe have only two choices before them:
1. Boxcars, or...
2. Burquas.

If they cannot discover the internal fortitude to choose option #1, they WILL get option #2.

- John

[wintertime]

So sorry, Leftism. I can't find neverdem’s comments on Marxism.

I would like to read his comments about a solution.

Thank you.

[wintertime]

It is up to the parents to school thier children on the greatness of this country and its culture at home. The education system is used to propagandise, indoctrinate and rewrite American history. STAND AND FIGHT!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Parents should never allow their children to be indoctrinated by a Marxist, not even for a minute. Schools are **not** the only places. Please consider the church Sunday schools and youth programs, scouting, summer camps,...etc.

But...By far, government K-12 schools, colleges, and universities are the worse offenders.

Conservatives must begin to set up alternatives.

[AmericanVictory]

How about American culture?

[PapaBear3625]

Even those who are proud of European and American culture already see Europe as lost. They look at the growing 5% to 10% muslim minority in Europe and simply give up. That's like a football team ahead 70-0 giving up as soon as the other team scores one touchdown. Our side may have demoralized itself, but that is not an excuse to give up and forfeit the game.

The Muslims in Europe are disproportionately on welfare. The crisis point will arrive when the European middle class can no longer support the Welfare State, or when the survival of the Welfare State necessitates the expulsion of all immigrant welfare recipients.