Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Shelby Steele wrote an excellent essay yesterday that I think helps explain why the US tried to make due with a minimum number of troops and an "occupation lite" in Iraq -- in part it was to appease the 'occupation is the root of all evil' fetishists. Frankly, I think this is another way in which Palestinianism has come to poison the political discourse. Sometimes 'occupation' is necessary, legal, and for the good, but the word has come to be repeated and twisted so badly that people suffer because of it.
White Guilt and the Western Past - Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not...
