Mixed signals from white nationalists...
Apr. 26th, 2016 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsVDare, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, is a political magazine that regularly publishes nationalist, anti-immigrant, and "pro-white" pieces. VDare may have started out as just an anti-immigrant rag, but it has devolved into a evolved into a neo-reactionary hot-house of silliness.
While tracking down the ridiculous VandeHei article this morning, I stumbled into VDare mostly by accident, and they put up a full-screen "donate to us" pop-up before I got any deeper. The pop-up, though, is hilarious.
It's bannered with a photo of two small children, white girls in white dresses with their backs to the camera, peering out over a meadow. VDare then exclaims: "We can have a world of clean, safe cities, advancing technology, sustainable development, and increased human potential. We can have societies that are prosperous, peaceful, and have high social trust. We can have a culture that generates great works of literature and art, just like our Western forebears." This is followed by a testimonial: "Our opponent, the elite native American secularist has gained victory after victory in his quest for a 'diversified' America," followed by a request to "donate today!" It ends with the tagline, "Keep America American."
I'm not sure what they mean by "native American secularist." Surely they're not talking about the continental aboriginals. It would entail a strange lack of self-awareness to not appreciate that "native Americans" would have loved to "keep America American" on their own, starting back in 1492.
But overall, the message here is so muddled as to be incoherent: we're already marching toward clean, safe cities. We have all the things they claim they want. Oh, and we have vibrant, colorful cities filled with the smells of a hundred different cuisines, we have we have Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and unbelievers, people of every color and nation and creed, getting along with high enough social trust to share the bus, the restaurant, and the sidewalks together.
As for the notion that we don't generate great works of art and literature, bullshit: we are drowning in it. We praise Shakespeare, but there are thousands of Shakespeare-quality playwrights and screenwriters living today. We know how to teach them to be great artists. We have the leisure and luxury of cranking out all manner of artists to the point where we're overwhelmed by the quantity of high-quality art, music, and literature.
For all of VDare's earnest hand-wringing about cities, it's clear that their vision is small-town, homogenous, and dull.
I'm all for the return of the city-state. It's clear that nations are ego-building exercises foisted on us by kings and princes, ideological constructs that demand VDare's flavor of homogenization.
Civilization, civics, civility and city all come from the same root, and all have a similar meaning, the most fundamental of which is this: A city is a place where one is likely to meet strangers. Civility is having the grace to maintain a residence and livelihood well in such a place. VDare's imagination would narrow a city down to "Strangers... but not too much stranger." It's a paltry imagination. It deserves its place on the ash-heap of history.
While tracking down the ridiculous VandeHei article this morning, I stumbled into VDare mostly by accident, and they put up a full-screen "donate to us" pop-up before I got any deeper. The pop-up, though, is hilarious.
It's bannered with a photo of two small children, white girls in white dresses with their backs to the camera, peering out over a meadow. VDare then exclaims: "We can have a world of clean, safe cities, advancing technology, sustainable development, and increased human potential. We can have societies that are prosperous, peaceful, and have high social trust. We can have a culture that generates great works of literature and art, just like our Western forebears." This is followed by a testimonial: "Our opponent, the elite native American secularist has gained victory after victory in his quest for a 'diversified' America," followed by a request to "donate today!" It ends with the tagline, "Keep America American."
I'm not sure what they mean by "native American secularist." Surely they're not talking about the continental aboriginals. It would entail a strange lack of self-awareness to not appreciate that "native Americans" would have loved to "keep America American" on their own, starting back in 1492.
But overall, the message here is so muddled as to be incoherent: we're already marching toward clean, safe cities. We have all the things they claim they want. Oh, and we have vibrant, colorful cities filled with the smells of a hundred different cuisines, we have we have Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and unbelievers, people of every color and nation and creed, getting along with high enough social trust to share the bus, the restaurant, and the sidewalks together.
As for the notion that we don't generate great works of art and literature, bullshit: we are drowning in it. We praise Shakespeare, but there are thousands of Shakespeare-quality playwrights and screenwriters living today. We know how to teach them to be great artists. We have the leisure and luxury of cranking out all manner of artists to the point where we're overwhelmed by the quantity of high-quality art, music, and literature.
For all of VDare's earnest hand-wringing about cities, it's clear that their vision is small-town, homogenous, and dull.
I'm all for the return of the city-state. It's clear that nations are ego-building exercises foisted on us by kings and princes, ideological constructs that demand VDare's flavor of homogenization.
Civilization, civics, civility and city all come from the same root, and all have a similar meaning, the most fundamental of which is this: A city is a place where one is likely to meet strangers. Civility is having the grace to maintain a residence and livelihood well in such a place. VDare's imagination would narrow a city down to "Strangers... but not too much stranger." It's a paltry imagination. It deserves its place on the ash-heap of history.
