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“When we attribute to primitive and prehistoric people only our virtues and none of our vices, we dehumanize them as much as ourselves.”–Dr. Lawrence H. Keeley, “War Before Civilization”

Besides globalists, international-minded elitists who live in comfortable surroundings and Irish republicans, nothing is more annoying and in more dire need of a throat-punching than leftist college activists.  How we got to students shedding crocodile tears and flinging shit at a statue of a long-dead imperialist from a day and age that saw students arming themselves, flying monarchist colors and barricading their university from Communist militants in Bavaria and swelling the ranks of anti-republican, anti-Communist freebooting military units is totally beyond me.

But I digress.

Today, there are few things more loathsome than college activists.  They scream for diversity and yet when one looks at their protests (or their pathetic attempts at them), they tend to be snow-white like the communities they were born into.  They rail against elitism and the evils of capitalism and yet they are overwhelmingly of comfortable middle-class extraction.  They want to experience the world but instead tend to hit up the usual Spring Break spots and attend cookie-cutter resorts meant for tourists rather than drinking with the actual locals in their actual neighborhoods (of course, if you were a regular guy in say, Ciudad Juarez, would you drink with some spoiled little brat with a neckbeard from Cal-Berkeley?)

Suspiciously Non-Diverse Activists

A group of suspiciously not-very-diverse college activists.  Note the token Asian woman in the corner though, so it’s all good.

So what has triggered my ire as of late?  Well, it’s been an ongoing thing.  See, these pampered little bastards have apparently decided the statues of Cecil John Rhodes, by all means a brilliant adventurist, imperialist, businessman and scholar who’s wealth of accomplishments vastly dwarf those of his protesters, must go.  We’ve seen all the trendy little hashtags: #RhodesMustGo, #RhodesMustFall and the usual virtue-signalling the Left has become known for.  What originated at the University of Cape Town in South Africa (where protesters decided to fling shit at his statue until it had to be taken down for sanitary reasons) found its way to Oxford University, where a student by the name of Ntokozo Qwabe touched off a campaign to get the statue of Rhodes removed, due to like, feelings and stuff (Qwabe, by the way, was able to attend Oxford thanks to the scholarship set up in Rhodes’ name, and to this day, hasn’t returned the money.  Principles are flexible, fickle things, y’know).  Left wing rags such as The Guardian have cheered these developments on, because one has to find happiness when all of one’s assets have to be liquidated just to keep the lights on for a few more years.  Donors to Oxford, however, weren’t having any of this hashtag nonsense and told the university that countless millions in donations would be withheld if the statue were taken down.  The university buckled, activists decried the fact that “Caesar Rhodes” would remain, and then dispersed to await the next great cause.  See?  Standing up to bullies really does work.  Imagine that.  If only the American GOP had understood that 35-40 years sooner…

So why the rage over Rhodes, and what of “white”-washing?

When Cecil John Rhodes passed away in March of 1902 in Muizenburg, Cape Colony, he left behind money to form what became known as the Rhodes Scholarship, the world’s very first international study program.  True to the idealistic and altruistic spirit of his time, he opened up the scholarship to any British resident living in Britain and her colonies, to the United States and to Germany, in order to render war impossible through international cooperation and understanding between the greatest powers of the world.  Now, we have to note something here.  Rhodes, during his empire-building activities in Southern Africa, made it a point to extend suffrage as much as possible.  Though he regarded Africans as uncivilized barbarians, Rhodes was an imperialist in the old progressive mindset: anyone could be civilized if given the opportunities from better, more advanced civilizations.  “Suffrage for all civilized men south of the Zambezi!” was his cry, and he meant it with the spirit of this scholarship.  So here’s where we get to the crux of the issue.

Young progressives today, particularly the protest-happy crowd, hate history, and they hate it with a passion.  See, history is inconvenient for them once they study it beyond the stale, Marxist interpretations they are spoon-fed by aging professors who haven’t come to terms that the world has passed them by.  To most, history is “boring” and “icky” and full of dead white guys.  To the dedicated (i.e., hopeless and beyond salvation), history is full of evil whites doing evil things to completely, totally helpless people of color, who for some reason will remain helpless until the right white people come to their rescue.  And so the whitewashing shall continue.

I found this gem of a post here which broke down various things regarding international elites and the professors who are part of that community, and, in a piece tackling lunacy at Harvard, named multiple blacks who had been involved in upper education since the 1850’s to destroy the premise that blacks have always been poor, dumb and never afforded opportunities by whites (which is, in of itself, a racist premise because it supposes that blacks will always need the help of white liberals in order to ever advance in life.  Malcolm X is getting more correct by the day, I swear to God).  One of those names stuck out to me: Alain LeRoy Locke, who was the first American black to receive the Rhodes Scholarship.  Now, follow along with me here.  Progressive conventional wisdom (read: hysterical screeching carefully balanced with subtle social conditioning) would have you believe that this would have been a recent development, like say, the Civil Rights Era from the 1950’s to the 1970’s, and that blacks getting any kind of advancement was literally impossible until the 1950’s when things magically started turning out for the better thanks to the federal government and courageous, pasty white people from tolerant and compassionate Northern states.

Something isn’t right with that premise though, because history.  Locke, who none of these neckbearded protesters could tell you about, received the Rhodes Scholarship in 1907 after obtaining degrees in English AND Philosophy from Harvard University , and did it  back when those degrees required a working knowledge of both Latin and Ancient Greek.  Something is amiss here…let’s see, when did Rhodes die again?  1902.  Oh wow.  Woooowwwww.  Only 5 years after the “evil-racist-imperialist-and-like-all-the-bad-things-literally-Hitler” Rhodes had passed away, we see a black man getting a scholarship in his name to study at Oxford, in the heart of the evil, horrific and terrifyingly racist British Empire at the very height of its glory, in a year where only 73 Rhodes Scholarships were allotted in the entire world, and where the United States only got its allotments in 1904.  And mind you, this wasn’t an ordinary black man, either.  Locke would go on to become the intellectual cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance, and would inspire a generation of black intellectuals; so much so that Martin Luther King Jr. would refer to him in his speeches.

Progressive history doesn’t account for people like Locke, or W.E.B. Du Bois, or many others.  No, for the young, hip and trendy progressive, minorities of any kind were poor, oppressed unthinking wards of evil patriarchal white men until they were saved by brave, courageous, snow-white men (and the federal government, run more or less by white men).  That same principle is seen in the progressive’s attitude to the non-white world.  In their mindset, it was the white man who came, conquered a peaceful, happy people, corrupted them with civilization’s evils and forced them to fight each other in brutal wars of conquest.  And the whites were all the same, much like the blacks they so horribly enslaved.  But here is where we see an insidious whitewashing.  Progressives leave out numerous things when decrying the situation in “Africa”:

-The Arab and Turkish slave trades that extended as far west as Mali, and as far south as Dar es Salaam. They were extensive, were centuries older than its more infamous Atlantic counterpart, and wound up enslaving millions more than the Europeans did. And contrary to what we are told today, the slavery practiced by the Muslims in Africa was not a very happy proposition. In fact, it was downright brutal.  And the Arabs would not be compelled to abolish it until the 1890’s, when…*gasp!* the British and French began getting involved.  With Arab settlement came Islam and ethnic tensions that often flared up over the years, and still do (Darfur, one of the great progressive causes of the last decade until it wasn’t, was a result of this: the Sudanese government deliberately favored Arabs and segregated Arabs from non-Arabs, and began persecuting the non-Arabs with glee, resulting in the genocides of that region).

-Africans not only engaged in trading slaves, they saw Europeans as willing customers and eagerly traded prisoners to the Europeans. In fact, for centuries, Europeans were the junior partner in this relationship. Europeans never bothered with the interior of Africa until the 1870’s, figuring that they leave that business to the people who understood it best: the native African kingdoms that headed the slave trades.

-Africans were absolutely brutal to each other in ways that boggle the mind (and still are today: look up what “necklacing” is and you’ll get an idea). Genocides were thorough, raids were constant and tribal hatreds ran very, very deep. Think of all the people we don’t know about, all the links in the human web we’ve lost, all the tribes we will never find because they were utterly slaughtered and erased.  If anything, imperialism in the long run wound up saving many tribes and preserving their languages.  The slaughter continued in earnest after the Europeans began leaving Africa at the behest of economic distress and liberal academics who shed their tears and screamed bloody murder from the confines of comfortable homes in Britain and the United States.

With progressive whitewashing, Africans are reduced to pacified, convenient, interchangeable black people with no history of their own and the continent is reduced to a single entity, completely ignorant of its great diversity.  The history of the continent is reduced to simplistic notions of a pure, Rousseauean existence that was shattered by whites (Arabs being left out because non-whites can’t oppress other non-whites, apparently).  The dissonance occurred when it was implied that only Communist organizations (with natives educated, funded and organized by liberal whites while studying abroad in European universities) would be able to fix all of Africa’s problems during the decolonization era.  After that didn’t work out–African nations fell into poverty, disease, genocide and tragedy–it began being implied that only NGO’s, humanitarianism, rock concerts and philanthropy would be able to help.  We saw armies of suburban, middle class whites travel to Africa to help the poor, beleaguered blacks, hang around for a few months to feel good about themselves and then return home to their comfortable middle class surroundings, happy they could return home to count their blessings and talk about how sad it was that people on the other side of the world were suffering, probably over some Starbucks or something.  The entire exercise is essentially that of a hands-on zoo: you get to leave your happy, middle class home, work among natives in their own lands, get your pictures taken so you can status-signal your progressiveness to the world, and then head back to your familiar surroundings while the Africans you helped out continue to mill about in misery, awaiting the next group of gullible, young white adults to repeat the process while nothing ever really gets done.  The tragedy is that Africans continue to die (and reproduce at unsustainable rates with considerable encouragement from progressive whites living half a world away), their governments fall into total kleptocracy, and more of them (usually working-age males) continue to stream into Europe, where eager progressives hope to turn them into…well, white people with skin color.  This last point is one I’ll hammer on in a moment.

Progressives are also very touchy on American history.  The fact that Boston, Newport and Bristol were major slave-trading centers is whitewashed, and even though we know that few people in the South owned slaves–the massive plantations staffed by hundreds of slaves were restricted to only the wealthiest people in the entire country and were thus far and few in between–it is hammered on over and over again that blacks were kept down in the South while free in the North.  Never mind that after the American Civil War, when blacks began migrating by the thousands to Northern cities, they were vigorously resisted (and starting in the 20th century, supposedly equality-loving, non-racist whites began moving out of the cities and into white suburbs, maintaining ethnic divisions in the cities).  The fact that an estimated quarter of the 4 million freed slaves were dead within a few years of the Civil War due to disease and starvation (along with being murdered by other freed slaves) is gently swept under the rug.  We always hear of racist lynch mobs running amok through the Reconstruction, and yet progressives omit the parts where Union soldiers happily ignored the plight of blacks after Emancipation; scores of bodies of dead blacks were heaped into ditches all through the “liberated” South.  But that’s all brushed aside.

As I pointed out earlier, protesters of the Rhodes statues probably couldn’t tell you who Alain LeRoy Locke was.

There is a reason that goes beyond their general ignorance.

For the more aware among the progressive crowd, as the whitewashing must go, black history has to be distorted and downplayed in order to paint whites in an evil light.  Figures like Martin Luther King Jr. appear out of seemingly nowhere and with the aid of sympathetic whites, burst onto the scene to fight Jim Crow, a racist white establishment.  The Tuskegee Airmen are known only because of their oppressed status and their fight against racism instead of their outstanding war record that included 3 Distinguished Unit Citations, 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 14 Bronze Stars, and over 1,500 combat missions flown.  Black accomplishments are always overshadowed by the racism topic, and the white presence is always consistent: either they’re evil segregationists or sympathetic, heroic whites.  And the latter are everywhere: even Nelson Mandela had his; Joe Slovo, a Lithuanian immigrant to South Africa, was a high-ranking member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, and is held in high regard by progressives the world over.

So what do white, activist progressives want nowadays?

They want a few things, actually: they want life to be a sort of Avatar, where they can tap into their inner Jake Sully and become the (strangely opaque and monotonous) diverse people they loudly proclaim they protect.  There’s a popular old, and very true, statement that good girls like to date the bad boy in order to tame him.  The same goes for activist leftists and the non-whites they slather over.  They want to take minorities and make them into little hip white people that believe in the same things the activists do, from third and fourth-wave feminism to their pseudo-environmentalist mantra and their hatred of old white guys, even though they stubbornly refuse to relocate from their predominantly white, middle class neighborhoods and universities.  They don’t want actual and diverse non-whites.  The minorities have to be sanitized for suitable consumption first.  They want the kind you find at universities and gentrified, urban areas.  Anytime a progressive seeks to wander about the non-white world that hasn’t been made safe for the activists, things like this tend to happen.  Or this.  And this.  And just plain psychotic shit like this. And many other incidents just waiting to happen, or have happened and were just swept under the rug because causes are pretty important.

If there is only consolation in the fact that these activists are able to swindle large chunks of university student bodies, it’s that should we ever become a Socialist Utopia or some other “darkest-timeline” entity, it’s that they will get exactly the multicultural, diverse and vibrant society that they want.  And unlike the wealthier ones who were wise enough to forge good connections, they won’t be able to get away from their paradise (like J.M. Coatzee running away from South Africa, or the hordes of liberal blue staters moving to solidly red state areas to escape the consequences of their actions).