There is a thread over at TC about Chechnya, the Boston Bombings and white people. It has been reblogged at Oogenhand where Vanessa made the comment that white converts to Islam are extremely scary.

In the comments Julian O’Dea notes.

Of course, the absolute worst white bastards of all are those English. They didn’t end up with an empire “on which the sun never set” by being nice guys. And then the WASPs more-or-less invented America. And white men more-or-less invented civilisation.

Yes, we are scary.

Julian is correct. Since I’m adopted, I know three family trees, my adoptive one and my birth mothers. She’s all to identifiable — the first thing she did when we met was went to the Irish peerage references and showed me her grandfather. I’m descended from and officer in Cromwell’s Army” four hundred years later his hame remains a curseword because of the manner in which he conquered. And my birth mother is descended from members of the Taranaki regiment on one side and Retired Indian army soldiers on the other. Which is huge fun when Maori demand my ancestry: I just tell them where my great-great-great grandfather was buried. Vanessa expands on this.

White men gained power, not because of violence, but because of innovative technology and organization

That’s precisely what makes them scary. They’re not just violent, but clinically focused and horrendously efficient.

I’m German, you know. People think German men are cowards, but they’re not. They’re just very slow to anger, and thank God for that. It is as if the white men of the world have been asleep, and they’re starting to wake up. It’s going to get very scary very fast.

The problem with the white men is violent or we need to be scared of the right meme is not that it is inaccurate (because the right, historically has been violent and white men did not set up an empire by being nice) but that baiting white men, telling them they are guilty of all the sins of the world, and arguing for a race war or separation may… get you separation or a war. Separation is already happening, from homeschooling to people moving to the Mountain States of the US or the South Island of NZ to get away from the tension.

Because you do not want a race war. We have had a few of those over the last century, and they have been disasters. As the Rott points out, it will be defined as freedom versus fascism.

…that you cannot, must not, ever compromise with Evil, because that way Evil will always win, and The Other Side ARE evil. They may not even know it, they may be the nicest of people with the best of intentions, but they are, nevertheless, Evil’s henchmen.

Orwell, and he was not exactly what you’d call a Right Wing Death Beast by any stretch of the imagination, made a point of noting how the pacifists of the Two Decade Armistice were “objectively pro-fascist”, even though there was not a fascist bone in their bodies. We don’t doubt that for a second. You have to understand that Europeans during the Two Decade Armistice had every reason in the world to be pacifist. You think the Civil War was traumatic? It surely was, but WWI did things to the European psyche that you would not believe. Anybody NOT being desperate to NOT go through that again back then would have had to be heartless.

Yet the fact remains. For all of their well-intentioned and perfectly rational desire to avoid another conflagration like WWI, they were still enabling the fascists and, as such, were objectively pro-fascist. 1939 proves Orwell’s point, we believe. The fact that WWII was even worse than WWI only pounds in the painful fact more.

And if you are playing post modern games around politics of identity, you are, like the pacifists of the 1930s, objectively fascist. The tactics of terror aim to get an overwhelming response that alienates the people.

This may work (and can work) with internal terror. It has never worked when the terror comes from without. Again, consider that both sides used bombing as an instrument of terror in WWII — and it just made everyone more stubborn.

In particular, fear a race war. Because the Europeans have had too much practice in winning them.