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Between The Lines: Joe Sobran
by Alex Linder
3 October 2004
[Original here.]
Diversity - The Real Thing
September 16, 2004
I recently got an e-mail message that really shocked and sickened me. It was so ugly that I won't even quote it.
That's a good way to keep anyone from siding with your opponent. So horrible you can't even quote it? As bad as the crimes of the coloreds you spend the rest of the article celebrating? Note the feminine use of 'ugly.' Joe's one step from Barbara Bush refusing to cloud her "beautiful mind" with gross physical facts about problems caused by coloreds.
It was about race. Evidently the writer assumed that because I write critically about certain sacred cows of "diversity," I must share his rabid hatred for other groups.
Ah, the traditional liberal I'm ok, you're a hater.
You characterize without quoting, Joe. That's unfair. That prevents the reader from making up his own mind. How illiberally liberal of you. It's easy to debate a muzzled man. Perhaps your readers would side with other guy if you quoted him? Why do you accord niggers more respect than nigger-describers?
I do take racial, ethnic, and cultural differences seriously. I believe all men are created in God's image,
Detroit is the reflection of God, ah yes, I see. If men are different and the differences matter, how can they be created in the same image? This is one supple god. He needs to get those all-around cleats at Foot Locker.
What is this 'God' anyway? I know what a carrot is, but what is this 'God' thing? At first glance it sounds like an adventitious credibility-enhancer; something you whipped up or pulled out to lend your non-argument a celestial nimbus.
but there is much more to be said about them when they form groups. It's fine to celebrate "diversity," but group differences also lead to hatred and war. No point in evading that fact with sentimental slogans
So...all these men are created in God's image...and they're incompatible. That doesn't speak well for your little 'God,' there Sobran. One of you needs to check into the shop.
At the same time, most of us sympathize with the wistful cry, "Can't we all just get along?" There is a sense in which it's true, as the clich has it, that "the things that unite us are more important than the things that divide us." But the things that divide us, if ultimately less important, are often more urgent, and it's best to face them frankly.
Indiscriminate hatred is often called bigotry, but that's only one kind of bigotry. I know people who are bigoted about Shakespeare, in the sense that they refuse to listen to evidence against their views. A closed mind knows no bounds. It can apply itself to any subject under the sun.
Look in the mirror, Joe: You're closed to the view that what you call "hatred" of blacks is more natural and noble than treating them as individuals. Since the white race always moves away from blacks whenever they show up, the whole race must be evil, by your morality.
Racial bigotry is now the most disreputable kind, and usually we are warned about its potential danger to its targets. But there is a sense in which the racial bigot is his own victim. I felt like replying to my correspondent, "Have you stopped to think what you're doing to your own mind and heart? What kind of man have you turned yourself into? Is that what you really want to be?"
And he might ask the same of you: What kind of man are you, Joe? The kind who avoids discussing the political consequences of group differences to preserve his self-image as loving and just? Is that what you really want to be? Just another fact-averse moralizer?
I'm proud to be a white man, a son of Christian Europe, to which I owe so much. I hate the fashionable derogation of white people.
Yet you're uninterested in nailing the source of the derogation, and resent and avoid others who do, perhaps because their doing makes you appear timid rather than loving and just in your own eyes.
At the same time, that's no reason to react by derogating everyone else, any more than loving and defending your family is a reason for disparaging other families.
False analogy. The conservative's lack of respect for biology's in full display here. Races are competing subspecies, and their competition is a zero-sum game. Recourse to imaginary 'God' won't change that. When one group of families, one race, is under organized attack by another, disparaging other families -- describing, to use the accurate term -- is the first duty of self-defense. Sobran treats a global campaign against the white race as thought it's some kind of hedge dispute.
Europe has produced a very great civilization, of which America is a part. But there are other civilizations that should command our respect too, and even uncivilized people - we're no longer supposed to call them savages - have their dignity. And of course our own civilization often fails to live up to its own standards, sometimes outdoing savages in savagery.
Careless use of 'our,' no real point here. Who does your 'our' include? America without blacks is peaceful. America without jews doesn't launch aggressive foreign wars.
All that aside, the racial bigot denies himself the possibility of friendship, enjoyment, appreciation, and countless other pleasures in the people he hates. If he takes his hostility far enough, he becomes willfully blind to their virtues and ungrateful for what they may have to offer him; he crabbily focuses on their faults and shortcomings, as if these were the only things worth noticing about them. And of course he'll be tempted to violate their most basic rights.
Boys, we've got a liberal here. A Constitutional scholar who thinks blacks have "basic rights," unlike the men who wrote the Constitution...men whose judgment he affects to revere. But of course he and the rest of the race liberals know better than Thomas Jefferson and the race realists. Leap into the safety of abstractions - "men" with "rights." How's that working out in the real world, Joe? Do you live around niggers? Why not? Aren't you depriving yourself and family of the wonderful positive externalities of these holy simians? That seems churlish and morally obtuse to me, Joe.
Sobran's writing in the conservative-utopian vein, where men are undifferentiated, and there's world and time enough for all. Tell it to the old folks trapped in nig city, Sobran. Are they deficient in appreciation of the "friendship, enjoyment, appreciation, and countless other pleasures" the surrounding jigs afford? Joe? Your position is equivalent to telling a women being raped, "Hey, at least you're getting laid."
You got a pus reasoner there, buddy, if you don't realize that on one hand you're praising the white race, while on the other you're derogating it for protecting itself by moving away from the niggers you claim God made in his image.
This may sound like sentimental twaddle,
Nah, just workaday liberal science fiction; the typical conservative-liberal-utopian's attempt to smear the man who treats honestly with racial differences the conservative fears to address. If blacks and whites can't get along, and are, as the Founders and I, if not you, agree irreconcilably different, then yes, what you write is indeed twaddle.
but I don't think so. I think it's simple realism.
That's a smooth and jewy touch, Joe, that "realism." You write like you're a professional. Our Joe seizes for himself the ground he knows he'll be attacked from. No, it isn't "realism," Joe. You were closer with "twaddle." Can the fact that some blacks are fine people exist side by side with the fact that blacks and Whites are inherently incompatible races? Not in Joe's world. Just like Fred Reed dealing with jews, he pretends there's no inherent incompatibility between treating blacks as individuals and protecting the white race. Time plus blacks destroys everything valuable. Thomas Jefferson knew that. Joe Sobran knows that. Joe Sobran dares not say that. It would cut into his finances. He'll stick to the tiny stuff, and imply others aren't as morally advanced as he, when the Big & Unavoidable comes up. How liberal.
I owe too much to too many people to write off any group as a whole.
Non sequitur. Retreat into subjectivism. Planted axiom: what Joe Sobran feels he owes other groups is the proper way to assess racial compatibility. Sobran would mock this sort of ridiculous, retreating anti-reasoning in anyone else, on any other subject. Funny how the conservatives always go weak in the knees and prostrate themselves -- not before the facts of racial reality but before the dictates of Semitical Correctness. If the races can't get along; if in factd they're inherently incompatible, as Thomas Jefferson said, do you think Joe Sobran will write the fact publicly?
I understand that racial stereotypes usually have a good measure of truth, but the variations within every group are so great that whenever possible we should - to use another cliché - treat individuals as they come.
Yeah, that'll work as well with nigs and shitskins as it does with alligators, bees and sharks. Pure liberal pap, embarrassing as whatever the anile WFB just squirted. Why should we treat as individuals men who attack and gain advantage over us by acting as a group? We shouldn't. In order to feel good about himself, to feel that he is a "good" person, the Catholic sacrifices all reason, history, and evidence. There's no man as selfish as the moral man. He'll sacrifice the whole world for his conscience.
Tragically, this isn't always possible. Sometimes a generalization is all we have to go on.
Yeah, that and all recorded experience, biological knowledge, common sense, etc.
And we often encounter the type who, as we used to say, "gives the whole group a bad name." I could tell you some stories. At times I've been embittered by those walking stereotypes. But I've also been confounded and even ashamed when people I was biased against behaved with a grace I hadn't expected, acting in response to the better angels of our nature.
Angels. Yes, cynicism can be as naive as optimism, so I've learned from experience to,
There's a little gimcrack paradox, worthy of Chesterton.
as I like to put it, "look for the angels" - the people who, given a chance, will react to a kind gesture with their own kindness. The more you try to act like an angel, the more of these angels you'll meet. The bigot is always looking for devils. And, with a sour pleasure, he'll find them.
Yes, we are to act as though the intelligent, kind, courteous exception is more important than the stupid, violent, nasty usual. Keep on pretending that our attitude rather than the objective nature of the thing encountered is the problem, since after all, we daren't take arms and in opposing end it.
That's great advice, Joe. Why don't you move to God's Country, Detroit or Zimbabwe, and see how that works out for you.
"No"?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Joseph Sobran
A. Linder
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