Counter-Currents
Project 1619: When Will Conservatives Stop Begging Nonwhites to Love Western Civilization?
Ricardo Duchesne
1,366 words
Andrew Roberts is a renowned conservative, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, and Visiting Professor at King’s College London, who believes that everyone in the world can be educated to love the democratic values of Western civilization. If only blacks and immigrants were taught to appreciate the immense value of Greek philosophy, Roman law, the Sermon of the Mount, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, they “could learn about the best of their civilization, and how it benefited — and continues to benefit — mankind.”
But unfortunately, the West is denigrated rather than celebrated, and this misguided education is what fuels the animosity against this civilization. In an article published today in the Weekend Australian, “No reason to taint with guilt our faith in Western culture“, Roberts laments “the New York Times’ inane and wildly historically inaccurate 1619 Project, which essentially attempts to present the entirety of American history from Plymouth Rock to today solely through the prism of race and slavery.”
Project 1619
For those who can’t keep up with the relentless drive of the Left against the West, let me inform you that the “1619 Project” was initiated by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 with the purpose of “reframing American history” around “slavery and the contributions of African Americans.” The year 1619 was chosen to counter the “white supremacist” idea that America began in 1776. The first enslaved Africans arrived in America in 1619, and since black Americans were crucial to the emergence of a democratic culture in the United States, this year should be commemorated as the one that gave “birth” to America and the Western world generally. A project curriculum was thus developed to be used by all grades from elementary school through college.
In August 2019, The New York Times Magazine, under the editorship of Jake Silverstein, published a special issue of 100 pages with ten essays, a photo essay, and some fiction by African-American contributors only. Fueled by the George Floyd riots, millions of copies of this magazine issue have now been distributed to schools, museums, and libraries as “required reading material.” The titles of the essays include:
- “America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One“
- “How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today”
- “What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery”
- “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?”
- “How America’s Vast Racial Wealth Gap Grew: By Plunder”
You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here.
Western Civilization is Not “History of Humanity,” But of Whites
Conservatives believe that these are just misguided individuals who need to be taught that the West loves them too, cares about them, for the West is about democratic participation, open to all individuals. What makes the West great is precisely its cultivation of values for “humanity,” and the West welcomes immigrants from all races and judges individuals by their character alone. As Roberts sees it:
Instead of apologizing for Western civilization, we should still believe in it and be proud of it. For all that we must, of course, take proper cognizance of other cultures, in terms of both its sheer quality and quantity the legacy of Western culture is unsurpassed in human history. We are deliberately underplaying the greatest contributions made to poetry, architecture, philosophy, music, and art by ignoring that fact, often simply in order to try to feel less guilty about imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, even though the last was a moral crime committed by only a minority of some few people’s great-great-great-grandparents.
Ever since I started studying Western civilization some three decades ago, I have heard this argument in the conservative media. In the meantime, the Left has managed to replace the teaching of Western civilization across all colleges, which was once a requirement in most campuses, with a world history course that celebrates the “equal value” of all cultures while condemning the West for colonizing Africans, Asians, and Aboriginals and suppressing their “incredible contributions.”
Andrew Roberts says that “what the old Western civ university courses really did was to root a people in their past and their values.” But which “people”? Roberts is afraid to say that the West was created by Europeans, and that ancient Greece, Rome, the rise of modern science, and the Enlightenment have nothing to do with nonwhites. This is not their history.
He thinks that so long as we cherish the current diversity of the West, and define it as a “democratic culture” that believes in the equal rights of all foreigners to be its citizens, it follows that the history of this civilization includes “humanity” and should be celebrated by humanity. He can’t allow the thought to enter his head, for fear that he will be called a racist and anti-Western, that no matter how we think about the West, there is no way around the reality that this civilization and the United States were created by Whites.
He thinks that as long as we find a few conservative nonwhites, a Thomas Sowell or a V. S. Naipaul, who cherish the way that “Western values of tolerance, individualism, equality, and personal liberty” gave “birth” to a “universal civilization” for “humanity,” we can have solid hope that millions and millions of immigrants, and millions of American blacks, will eventually come to love a civilization created by Whites. He can’t admit that Sowell and Naipaul only love the West insofar as this civilization is open to diversity. He can’t face up to the reality that a people that self-deny their history by interpreting it as the “product of humanity” will never be respected but will be laughed at and requested to hand over their history to other races.
Diversity and Immigration = Eradication of Western History
This is particularly important to blacks. Blacks have contributed next to nothing to history and next to nothing to American history other than being slaves. If they are to make themselves relevant, they must make slavery the foundation of the United States and the West. This is what Project 1619 is about. In order to make themselves relevant, blacks must “re-imagine” American history in such a way that they stand at the center factually, as the creators of democratic government; and morally, as courageous fighters against the white perpetrators of racism.
Roberts thinks that blacks will forgive whites once they are taught in a Western civ course that “the abolition of slavery did not merely happen by votes in Parliament and proclamations from presidents; it was fought for by (and against) Christians with much blood spilled on both sides.” But those who control the Left, and the masses of immigrants continuously arriving in the West, don’t care that whites were the only people to originate the abolition of slavery. On the contrary: this claim is seen by them as yet another instance of whites pretending that they are a morally superior people.
Project 1619 is merely one more step in the eradication of White history. Across Europe, not just in America, Australia, and Canada, the history of the West is being radically reinterpreted as a history of immigrants. All Europeans, the Germans, the Brits, the Spaniards, and the Swedes are being taught this lie to justify the current program of mass immigration and replacement. “Reframing” a people through race mixing-immigration requires “reframing” their history as a history of “diverse immigrants.”
Andrew Roberts and conservatives can beg all they want for Western civ courses, but these courses, and any learning that portrays whites in a positive light, will never be allowed in the race-mixed West that Roberts endorses. Non-whites will respect whites who affirm the West as “their civilization,” not as the civilization of “humanity.”
Love for the West and the promotion of diversity are totally incompatible goals.
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Notes
This article originally appeared at the Council of European Canadians.
20 comments
Another annoying deluded philosemitic muppet.
@Emmanuel Goldstein
Are you referring to Roberts or Duchesne here? I’ve seen Duchesne’s name trashed and put through the gutter so many times by verminous WigNats and Nazbols over the last 6 months that for all I know, you are going after Duchesne for focusing too much on the accomplishments and superior character of Whites and not buying into WigNat fantasy of “we must stand up for whites just because they are our race!”
A comment about the entire article: Once again, Ricardo Duchesne hits it out of the park with persuasive arguments. Conservatives and center-left liberals have this Peter Pan like fantasy of all non-whites being akin to cute woodland creatures, all of whom are would-be friends. The reality is radically different, and yet, fools like Andrew Roberts refuse to drop their delusions.
I think he was referring to Roberts – a good historian, but one who knows (((who)) butters his bread. Roberts has an elite life, but not the courage or intellectual integrity to say anything truthful that might jeopardize it.
Duchesne is an excellent scholar, a real asset to the white preservationist movement (though I dissent from the way – surely intentional – his analyses of Western Civ effectively minimize the Christian contribution via omitting to discuss it at its deserved length and depth).
@ Lord Shang: Re: “the Christian contribution via omitting to discuss it at its deserved length and depth)” … very lengthy discussion of the subversive and inversive moral character of Abrahamic christianity can be found here: https://chechar.wordpress.com/
Thank you. I’ve read and enjoyed some of Chechar’s hard-edged racial nationalism, but I am too squishy to agree generally (this is hilarious as most people who know me consider me the most hardcore person they’ve met). I believe in the use of extreme violence in defense of mostly moderately and ‘commonsensically’ conservative ends. Also strange is that, although I’m a philosophical agnostic, I totally disagree with those who blame Christianity for the West’s racial decline. I’ve argued this so many times, however, I hate to have to do it all again. The West’s decline has occurred in tandem with its secularization, and even today, white Christians are far more racially preservationist than white atheists or agnostics. I grew up in a very Christian home; my family would be perfectly comfortable with perhaps 90% of the analysis at CC. The notion that a liberal a$$ like the current Pontiff somehow a) is doctrinally correct, and b) representative of the views of most white Catholics, is ludicrous. Ditto the idea that some Episcopalian or Methodist social justice whiner is the “truest” Christian, more so than centuries of white Christians who were both pious and race realistic (by today’s standard, hugely ‘racist’). Taking Christ seriously does not make one into an SJW; quite the opposite, in theological (if not always also sociological) fact. Finally, white Christian conservatives are the “target-rich” area for intellectually sophisticated white preservationists to go hunting for converts. Who else is there: secular SJWs or other leftists? libertarians? Really, making the cause of white preservation seen to be hostile to, instead of compatible with, Christian faith, must rank as the dumbest prowhite approach out there.
On a slightly different tangent, isn’t it odd that we’re the only people who don’t get huffy when others appropriate our culture?
Outside of East Asians most other cultures, beyond a few interesting spices, have little we would want to appropriate, whereas we created and possess what many of the people who hate us covet.
Someone should tell Roberts that Melting-Pot was tried and failed awhile back. Failed because non-whites rejected it. Guilting and Beatdown have replaced it.
The height of hypocrisy is reached when Western Liberals and neo-cons both, assume that “all people” universally wish to be socially Western and politically democratic. Non-White peoples have no visceral desire for Western “demo-crazy”. The races of man differ significantly in cognitive, temperamental and behavioral traits, and these traits have a genetic origin.
Thus the Left, bold as they now may be, hugely fears current and future genomic revelations, because these invalidate the central tenet of the Left religion: that all men are infinitely-malleable blank slates, and can thus be made to be socio-metrically equal.
Consider: one decisive genomic revelation could politically decapitate the Left. We surely need this now.
In my experience Blacks are interested in Classical civilisation and literature only to the extent of being aggrieved that the Greeks and Romans ‘stole’ all of ‘their’ advanced knowledge and technology from the ‘black’ Egyptians (and/or Nubians, Ethiopians etc).
Shortly after this larceny was perpetrated upon the darker-skinned races (and cunningly covered up) Africa was hit by wypipo slavery. This explains that continent’s backwardness.
It is only a matter of time before school history curricula will have to be ‘decolonised’ to accommodate these comforting Afrocentric fantasies, but even then I fear black students will continue to do poorly in Classics. It may be some centuries before we have them mastering the Jussive Subjunctive and Second Aorist.
The role of We Wuz Kangz History in all its versions (“You didn’t build that”, “Egyptians wuz NIgs”, etc.) as shilled by Globohomo’s tentacles (education, mass media, “alternate” history like that Jew who made a bunch of “reconstructions” for the Roman emperors) is to do the following:
1. Legitimatize current immigration and demographic dysfunction (“muh roman empire was a land of immigrants”).
2. Reconcile post-60s reddit-brand science popularization and other uses of certainly Western creations/inventions/notions with Anti-White politics. Here, it’s not that stuff like democracy and feminism and muh science are bad tools of the White Men, it’s that they were never from the White Man to begin with. Mind you, one can trace this to the fantasy of the Islamic Golden Age.
“…a people that self-deny their history by interpreting it as the “product of humanity” will never be respected but will be laughed at…
Yes, will be and are.
When it war OURS and ONLY OURS we were respected and Worth Oriental Gentlemen stood in line to join us. M. K. Gandhi was proud to join the British army, becoming a decorated sergeant major in the colonial forces, and only began to despise the Empire in the days between the World Wars when the Oxford Oath crowd was eroding faith in the enterprise of world domination.
As George S. Patton put it, people despise a weakling and go out of their way to trash the cowardly. The streets of Portland and Detriot, not to mention Rotherham and Paris, are full of evidence for those who need it.
Ache!
I meant “WORTHY oriental gentlemen” because I didn’t want to say wogs but the keyboard gremlins always find me out.
It’s only tangential but I wanted to inscribe my irritation somewhere. Re:
When Will Conservatives Stop Begging Nonwhites to Love Western Civilization?
I just got an email from the White House trumpeting Trump’s accomplishments du jour:
Welcoming five “amazing” new American citizens….not one of them White.
Followed by an enthusiastic gush over the centenary of female voting.
Some days I think his ONLY value is that he is not Hillary Clinton.
When I read about Trump’s naturalization ceremony on Twitter, I just laughed. I jumped off his train when he signed that absurd Omnibus bill in March 2018 because I knew right then he was a liar and a fraud.
If there are actually dissident rightists who shrugged off him celebrate diversity, i don’t know what to say.
I get my political views from good sites like this. Trump got my last vote ever in 2016.
Trump is useless, but Biden is evil, racially and in every other way. The lives of most whites – and all non-libtard whites – will be better under Trump 2, worse under Biden. Period.
I’ll push back on Trump being “useless”. That’s a massive understatement. Legal immigration is unchanged under him and that’s were 90% of the immigrant growth has been since 2008. He isn’t doing nothing, he’s participating in the displacement.
Also, he’s totally normalized Zionism as a core GOP tenet. Not that it wasn’t pre-existent, but it’s openly celebrated in every way no. Pompeo addressed the convention fro Jerusalem for crying out loud.
Trump Term 2 will get you what he got you Term 1: tax cuts for Big Biz, Pentagon waste, Zionism. That qualifies as “evil” to me. YMMV.
Midwestern Guy:
I totally disagree.
White nationalists must be careful about maintaining a balance between denouncing white politicians – esp “conservative” ones – when they ‘stray’ (eg, Trump’s disgustingly ‘panderous’ {is that a word? it should be} “criminal justice reform”, which was nothing more than a sop to blacks which will worsen crime, while likely doing nothing to increase his 202o black vote share), and recognizing the limits of their power and applauding them when they try to do the right thing.
Trump has brought issues to the fore, esp illegal immigration, which the cowardly GOP would have preferred never to discuss. Trump did not do nearly as much as I would have done on that issue, let alone ending the legal invasion, but he has vastly increased public awareness; made anti-immigrationism into a “legitimate” element within the broad GOP policy mix; and repeatedly taken small steps to combat aspects of the invasion, only to be thwarted by either the Establishment GOP or some liberal Federal judge (or even the SCOTUS). There are limits to what one man can do, even the President. What other GOP 2016 candidate was even discussing immigration at all?
Trump has similarly taken small steps towards a more nationalist foreign policy, like hectoring the “allies” to pay more for their defense (to some positive effect), and more importantly, beginning the removal of some US troops from Germany/Europe, even if only incrementally (which, however, is important symbolically). His Admin has moved in different ways to recover some portion of lost American sovereignty viz various transnational agencies (all of which the US should get out of, but the dispossessionist regime {ie, the ZOG and its transnationalist extensions} has been constructed over at least the past three quarters of a century, and has powerful forces across our society backing it; positive movement there is unlikely to be other than incremental). And he has made some small improvements to both America’s trading relationships, and to awakening the American people to the dangers and hypocrisies of de-industrialization and diminution in living standards conducted under the false rubric of “free trade” (free trade in goods is an entirely different matter from economic globalization; GOP con-men-servatives promote the latter while hiding under the rhetoric and praxeologic of the former).
Trump was also very good on the economy (not as good as he could have been, but his economic policies were easily the best since Reagan’s). You obviously don’t understand the role that his overly modest corporate tax cuts (I think ALL business and investment taxation should simply be abolished), as well as excellent if again too modest deregulatory policies, played in leading to the best new job-creating economy in half a century, until it was destroyed by the totalitarian mishandling of the Chinavirus by Democrat-run states and cities.
The real reason why Trump’s reelection is so important is that he’s NOT Bernie/Biden. Trump will NOT do all the evil things Democrats promise: open borders, amnesty for 35 million illegal aliens, defunding urban police departments, the Green Screw Deal which will destroy the American private energy sector, antiwhite judges, total gun control, ever more abrogations of free speech, more harassment of Dissident Rightists, more persecution of whites and destruction of our heritage – the list of Democrat promised evil is endless. Anyone who cannot see this is a moron; anyone who petulantly and immaturely doesn’t vote Trump to resist this agenda of pure antiwhite bigotry is a fool and an asshole.
The link Ricardo Duchesne provides for his own “White Men Responsible For Almost All The Greatest Human Accomplishments” is well-worth following. It really is an embarrassment of riches.
In recent years we’ve been selling ourselves short out of consideration for the sensitivities of black underachievers (see how nice we are?) but now that the resentful untermensch is getting uppity we can no longer afford any false modesty.
https://www.eurocanadian.ca/2020/07/white-men-responsible-for-almost-all-greatest-achievements.html
“America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made It One”
This is an odd assertion.
* Whatever their other foibles, Orval Faubus and George Wallace were populists with segregation reflecting the will of the majority of voters of their states.
* The civil rights agenda was imposed on the USA by elites via court orders, promotion of lawbreaking (civil disobedience), and deployment of federal forces to suppress recalcitrant localities.
* The victory of the civil rights movement (CRM) in the 1960s has led to a massive expansion of unelected bureaucracies to enforce increasingly repressive regulations in the interests of “equality.”
* The majority of Americans have consistently opposed forced busing, affirmative action and non-White immigration. The CRM and its allies have consistently pushed these policies against the will of the people.
* With America now (allegedly) a “democracy” there has been an imposition of censorship under the regime usually termed “political correctness.” Open scientific research on genetics and IQ, among other things, has been effectively shut down.
* The content of black American democracy has included (since the 1960s) periodic rioting in American cities, this on top of gang-banging, driveby shootings and other forms of urban guerrilla warfare. Can’t get your way by peaceful means? No problem, oh partisans of the black demos…start a riot!
* We have seen the alleged triumph of black democracy from the Haitian revolution through African de-colonialization and into the Rainbow Nation™ of South Africa. And with that triumph, black-run polities quickly devolve into one-party (or failed) states marked by corruption, crime and infrastructure collapse.
So where’s that democracy?
Lord Shang is spot on. Andrew Roberts, whom I knew well at Cambridge, understands very well the harm that mass immigration has done to the British people and (notably in Eminent Churchillians) makes it tolerably clear that he disagrees with those who allowed the demographic transformation of Great Britain in general and England in particular.
Unfortunately, he also subscribes to the Churchill myth and Germanophobia more generally (he is the only British historian to enthuse over British involvement in the First World War as well as the Second: in refusing to distinguish between the two, he is consistent, but doubles down on being wrong!).
Even more unfortunately, he cares more for invitations to cocktail parties thrown by neo-con war criminals than he does for the truth, which is a sad state of affairs indeed, for “the man who knows the truth but dare not tell it is truly a miserable creature.”
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