Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Everyone is Racist to Nazis

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May 18, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

16:53

Everyone is Racist to Nazis

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	Hey folks, before I start this video I just want to give you a quick update on what I'm doing with my Manhattan show.
	I've decided that what I'm going to do is start it with the presentation that I want to give, which is about the ideological collapse of the left because of its own internal inconsistencies meeting one another face to face in the real world.
	After that I figured I'd do a panel discussion, which will be a QA session with the audience and the people on the panel to talk about whatever relevant issues you think should be discussed.
	I've only got one other person confirmed for the panel yet and I'm not going to reveal them until I've got the entire panel, but I'm going to try and make it as good and interesting a dialogue as can be had.
	I don't just want people who all agree on the same subject, obviously.
	And then after that we'll just be hanging out with you guys at the bar drinking.
	So, a link will be in the description if you're interested in attending, and I'll get on with the video.
	So, I just finished reading Towards a Political Philosophy of Race by Falguni Sheff.
	In it I learned that through the magic of postmodern linguistic wizardry, everyone is being racist to Nazis.
	Let me explain.
	A liberal-minded person views race as biological, that is, non-political.
	It is simply a description of your genetic heritage.
	To a liberal, what you are is not important.
	What is important is what you do.
	In the introduction of the book, Scheth wonders why the Jewish members of the Frankfurt School didn't incorporate race into their philosophies after being targeted by the Nazis for being Jewish.
	Scheth unironically asks, why wasn't race an intrinsic feature of law or of political institutions?
	And then goes on to lift the core of her theory from Martin Heidegger, a literal Nazi who was a member of the Nazi party for over a decade and a person who actually persecuted Frankfurt school member Herbert Marcuse by implementing the Nazis' racial policy against Jews when he was rector of Freiburg University in 1933,
	which was the reason that Marcuse fled to join the Frankfurt School in exile in Geneva before arriving in the US.
	Some questions just answer themselves, I guess.
	Scheff begins chapter one by paraphrasing said Nazi, suggesting that society views race in the same way Heidegger believed it viewed technology.
	That race as something given or neutral and thus renders us blind to its essence.
	Scheff thinks that we should look at race as a technology itself, not as a state of being, but as a process.
	That race is an instrument that produces certain political and social outcomes that are needed to cohere society.
	Race as a technology is then defined by Scheth using three dimensions.
	First, race is a vehicle deployed by law to create cognitive constraints that make us think about humans as belonging to races through a system of classification of elements.
	The elements are anything perceived by the established political order to be unpredictable or undependable and ultimately threatening to the well-being of the political order itself.
	In the context of Western liberal democracies, these elements could include mass immigration and cultural shifts, mass unemployment, general lawlessness, theocracy or terrorism.
	Scheth refers to these elements as the unruly.
	The second dimension of race as a technology is to conceal the creation of categories of these unruly behaviours, which serve as the foundations upon which race is grounded.
	This sounds complex, but if you view the world as effect then cause, instead of cause then effect, it suddenly makes sense.
	Any idea has to be constructed in one's mind and must be defined by certain identifiable data points.
	The idea of race is based on certain identifiable qualities.
	For most people, these qualities are morphological, but in Scheff's opinion, these qualities are also behavioural.
	These behaviours are the unruly elements that would, if left unchecked, threaten liberal democracy.
	These are essentially the foundations on which stereotypes are based, and the second dimension of race as a technology is to conceal the creation of these foundations, the setting of the stage for future racist actions that will not be perceived as racialized because nobody saw the foundations being put into place.
	The third dimension of race as a technology is that it conceals a population's relationship to law and sovereign power by supposedly objective moral, political, and therefore legal judgments.
	In Schef's opinion, there is a basic tension between the ethos of sovereignty and the context of liberalism, as in any sovereign power, even a liberal one, must manage its populations to maintain its social order.
	Anything unruly that would disrupt this order must be pacified and domesticated in order to maintain the liberal state as a liberal state.
	According to Scheff, race, as I construe it, is that which lies between the right of sovereign power and the mechanics of discipline, and is distinct from the exercise of disciplinary and regulatory power.
	The law cuts against certain populations, distinguished by racial characteristics and behaviors, so that these populations fall outside of the protection of the law by design, taming those populations by forcing them to adapt to the prevailing set of laws in order to survive.
	This is what Chef calls racialization, the creation of race within a liberal democracy, and it's why postmodernists claim that liberal democracies are inherently racist.
	The racism of the sovereign lies in the ability to create races of subjects, using any number and quality of characteristics within the domain of life over which it has control by which to demarcate them.
	From the perspective of the liberal democracy, it holds the populations closest that are most in accordance to its system of values, and those populations that demonstrate unruly values most distant.
	The liberal populations strengthen the polity, unruly ones weaken it, and so it is the unruly populations that must be racialized, as in controlled with customs and laws and punished if these laws are broken.
	To a non-postmodernist, this might seem obvious.
	Any person who seeks to upend liberal civilization by violating the natural rights of others must be prevented from doing so for the good of others.
	Liberal democracies categorize certain behaviours as criminal because they hurt other people, either their person or their property.
	Of course, if you're a far lefty who runs on feels, you might portray the protection of the citizenry of a country like this.
	If you're in the group that's racialized and pushed out and you don't get the protection or the benefits or whatever it is, well then that'd be bad for you, wouldn't it?
	So you better stop being unruly and toe the line.
	That's right.
	Tow the line, said with necessarily ominous weight.
	Toe the line not oppressing your wife because an ancient Arab warlord had a problem with women.
	Toe the line by not running around the streets smashing up property and beating bystanders unconscious with poles and bats just because you hate your boss.
	Tow the line by not burglarizing your neighbours so you can go to college.
	The liberal state is just so oppressive, mum.
	Although most people will, of course, consider race to be biological.
	For Schef, this is not so.
	As she says, by the end of my argument, it should become clear that these physical signifiers are not the basis, but the final representation of the process of racialization.
	The racialization comes first, due to the population in question displaying marked behavioural differences that are not compatible with liberal democracy, and are then ascribed as a stereotype to a certain set of racial markers.
	Racialization is Scheff's term for the creation of a distinct, vulnerable population that is perceived to be a threat to the prevailing order.
	Racialization is the process of delineating a population in contrast to a dominant or powerful population, and a corresponding political tension.
	This population can be highlighted according to any range of characteristics, none of which have to be racial qua phenotype or blood or physical characteristics.
	They might be religious, social, economic, etc.
	Or indeed, ideological, as Scheff describes.
	The threatening features are rarefied, which means made real, as features that are intrinsically representative of those populations, with allowable exceptions.
	These rarefied features are then targeted as violating the beliefs, principles, or trajectory of a prevailing regime.
	This includes contrasting ideological frameworks, like Islam, and the danger can be represented or manifested by something else that may or may not be tangible, such as outward garb, physical comportment, accent, skin colour, or something even more subtle.
	According to Scheff, there is also a crucial feature that provides the basis for the vulnerability of a population.
	The unregulated existence of this group is believed to engender potentially detrimental consequences for the larger population.
	And this is how we racialize Nazis.
	Ideologically, Nazism is very much a contrasting ideological framework to liberalism that defines itself as not only incompatible, but in opposition.
	We can see this from a few blunt statements from the Nazis themselves.
	We are socialists, enemies, mortal enemies, of the present capitalistic economic system, with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system.
	Gregor Strausser, Nazi Party official from his 1926 pamphlet, Thoughts About the Tasks of the Future.
	The sacrifice of the individual is necessary in order to assure the conservation of the race.
	The nature and internal organization of the new movement make it anti-parliamentarian.
	That is to say, it rejects, in general, and in its own structure, all those principles according to which decisions are to be taken on the vote of the majority.
	One person must have absolute authority and bear all responsibility.
	Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf.
	If you think that Nazis can be identified as distinct from liberals by virtue of their ideology and their beliefs, the wearing of swastikas, the way they walk, and in the accent in which they talk, even in their Aryan skin tones and their cultural hatred of everything Jewish, you've racialized the Nazis according to Scheff's postmodernist framework.
	You disgusting bigots.
	Scheff uses her framework for identifying racialized populations to highlight the racism of the liberal state against Muslims, but unfortunately for her, the categories she uses are aeracial and therefore can be applied to any ideological or cultural group.
	Here's an example of a far-left tabloid newspaper being racist towards Nazis.
	Racism is not a popular position in any liberal democracy.
	So when Richard Spencer was assaulted on the 20th of January 2017, the celebration of this illegal act against Spencer was a demonstration of hegemonic power against a figure in a small, racialized movement called the alt-right, the spiritual heirs to Nazism.
	As the Guardian says, for many, there's solidarity as people laugh at the awful racist discomfort.
	This is a demonstration of the closeness of the Guardian's readership to power.
	They are the central, naturalized population, and the Nazis have been rendered the new evil race, hence the newest exception population.
	We are not on an equal playing field.
	They are not operating in good faith, so civility isn't even possible.
	They are Nazis.
	This statement is a demonstration of the racialization of the Nazis in the mind of the Guardian author.
	We have identified the characteristics, a belief in Nazism, their universally held opinions of behaviour, in this case a lack of civility in good faith, and racialized them by simply saying they're Nazis, as if anything done to them is now justified, such as their continued racial oppression.
	And of course, the Nazis are a vulnerable population because, if left unchecked, their very existence is a threat to the hegemonic, anti-racist worldview of the far left and the liberal state that supports them.
	A punch may be uncivil, but racism is worse.
	Indeed, we tolerate punches in some circumstances, such as defense or when the fists are in gloves or in front of an audience, but there's no dressing up racism.
	Thus it becomes acceptable, even amusing, to watch a group of communists use social media to track down a Nazi, identified by his armband, and show the world that a Nazi falls outside of the protection of the law by launching an unprovoked assault that went unpunished by sovereign power.
	So why do postmodernists have a problem with us being racist towards illiberal ideologies like Nazism and Islam?
	The answer is quite simple and almost childlike in its utopianism.
	The promise of liberalism is universalism, that it can create a governmental system for all mankind.
	The inherent contradiction is, of course, that the social contract of liberalism requires the consent of the governed.
	And what happens if you have at least one population that actively rejects it?
	If we live in a society where Islam is not in the ruling system, we need to work to change that.
	But what does that mean in practical terms?
	If...
	It means if there's a contradiction between Islamic law and a British law, a British law can go to hell.
	Liberal democracy must create what Scheff calls exceptions to its promissory rules and excuses itself from failing to uphold the standards it purports with unruly populations that might pose a threat to the liberal order itself.
	It is in this contradiction that Scheff believes that the liberal state to be an inherently racist state because of her perceived racialization of the unruly group.
	This is, of course, the consequence of the rubber meeting the road.
	In theory, liberalism does promise these things, but no plan survives contact with the enemy.
	And in the case of utopianism, the enemy is reality.
	That liberal values have not yet conquered the world and extirpated all other social values is the reason that liberalism is not yet capable of creating a world state that can encompass all mankind.
	And so for the liberal state to maintain itself, it must distinguish between liberal-minded groups and those that actively reject liberal values.
	A liberal state relies on the sovereign holding a monopoly of force in society exercised through just laws for the protection of its citizens, their property, and their ability to hold power over the state itself through democracy.
	If individuals are unable to abide by the shared values of a liberal democracy, the state itself is required to take action through the execution of its laws to prevent a breakdown of order for the good of the populations that it legitimately represents.
	From what Falgunicheff has laid out for us here, from the viewpoint of the liberal state, it's okay to be racist towards Nazis, because Nazis would represent an existential threat to the liberal order.
	They are not tolerant of difference, democracy, individual autonomy, or human rights, so they are opposed to the fundamental values of the state.
	And it is this need to otherize anti-liberal populations to maintain the liberal state itself that makes liberalism, in the eyes of the postmodernists at least, inherently racist.
	But until the liberal world empire is upon us, however, we'll just have to keep being racist towards criminal elements who want to destroy our civilization.

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