AOC says the White race doesn’t exist. Richard explores her strange identitarianism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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Many Germanies Exist
00:07:45
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| There's a very big difference between whiteness and national, like your actual culture, right? | |
| Whiteness is an imaginary thing. | |
| Being German is real. | |
| Being Italian is real. | |
| You know, being English. | |
| You're going to name any other Axis powers there, AOC? | |
| These are rich cultural heritages that are based on values and they are so much a part of what make our cultures and our societies what they are. | |
| Okay. | |
| This is just very interesting. | |
| So she said these cultures are based on values. | |
| I mean, how do I start on this? | |
| I think the notion of a white race is, in terms of a biological concept, is more coherent than the notion of a German. | |
| Now, she said that whiteness is imaginary, but then being a German is real. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, all of these are concepts. | |
| So they sort of all are imaginary on some level. | |
| They all exist in our head. | |
| We come up with words to describe reality and reality never quite fits into those words. | |
| It never does. | |
| I'm certainly more than willing to say that. | |
| What is the border of whiteness? | |
| Well, what's the border of German-ness? | |
| We're using a word and putting it on reality and seeing if it works. | |
| And if it's more descriptive and predictive, then we continue to use it. | |
| That's all it is. | |
| But the notion of a European is more coherent than a German. | |
| And I mean, this gets back to a lot of things that I would talk about in terms of identitarianism many years ago, where she's reifying the nation state here. | |
| And I don't even think she, I don't think she's thought through this enough to quite know what she's doing, but she's reifying the nation state. | |
| Now, what is Germany? | |
| Germany became an entity many decades after the United States became an entity. | |
| Many decades after the United States nation was defined in a way through the Naturalization Act and the notion of free white people. | |
| If you're free, white, and of age, come on down. | |
| You're welcome here. | |
| Got to be a good character. | |
| That's all we demand. | |
| And even there, we're kind of lax. | |
| America was sort of, it wasn't an immigration policy because it was open in so many ways, but it was a kind of definition of the nation. | |
| Now, English has never been our official language, but it certainly has defined what it means to be an American. | |
| And English culture does as well. | |
| Although I think there's even, isn't there like just as many people of Germanic descent as English descent in the country? | |
| There certainly is in many places, certainly the Midwest. | |
| Someone said in the chat, slightly more. | |
| Yeah. | |
| We're a German country in a way. | |
| There are more people who identify as German, but actually genetic testing shows that most people in America are just English. | |
| Right. | |
| That's a founder effect. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because they were sort of here first. | |
| And they, so you create a new gene pool and that the founders have a great deal of effect of what it's going to be like even hundreds of years later, maybe even a thousand years later. | |
| But you see my point, which is that there's always going to be a fuzzy border on any concept. | |
| There's a fuzzy border on the concept of what is a mammal. | |
| There's always going to be a duckbill platypus. | |
| It's this exception, but it's an exception that proves the rule. | |
| And to get back to what I was talking about before, you know, like the nation state, there was a lot of blood and tears that went into the formation of France that went into the formation of Germany. | |
| Germany became, in a way, Prussia-ized in order to achieve that national identity. | |
| As late as the 1950s and 60s, this is a kind of a legend, but it gets to a point when Conrad Adenauer would take the train from the Rhineland, which is his home. | |
| He's a, of course, German chancellor, post-war German chancellor, extremely consequential post-war German chancellor, old, generation older than Hitler. | |
| He kind of took over after the young guys fucked everything up. | |
| When he would take the train to Berlin, he would close his windows so he wouldn't look out onto Asia in his mind. | |
| This horrible Prussian, Eurasian, brutal, Protestant industrial culture. | |
| He preferred the more organic green Catholicism of the Rhineland. | |
| Might have Konrad Adenauer had a little more in common with the French, in fact. | |
| Isn't that Rhenish culture of Germany kind of French in so many ways and architecture and mentality and sentimentality? | |
| You could say all of those things. | |
| What does it mean to be Tyrolean? | |
| There is a culture that has its own accents and dialects in many ways that stretches across Germany and Switzerland and Austria. | |
| It's kind of Tyrolean. | |
| It's a particular thing. | |
| So in a way, the nation state that she is reifying, she's just taking for granted, basically, if Germany exists. | |
| Because I don't know, she went to a beer garden or an Oktoberfest festival once or something. | |
| It's not even German culture. | |
| It's Bavarian culture, by the way, which is Catholic as well. | |
| It's different than what we would associate with Germany. | |
| But anyway, the nation state is first off created through blood and tears. | |
| You are forcing different regions, smaller locales, regions that are, that cross over borders into one sovereign entity called Germany or France or Great Britain or Russia, etc. | |
| So the nation state is on some level both too big and too small. | |
| It doesn't get at bigger regional cultures. | |
| It doesn't get at this civilizational idea that we call the West. | |
| But it's also sort of too big in the sense that it doesn't really capture, it sometimes suffocates and squashes regional dialects and so on. | |
| Whether you're a Yankee in Massachusetts or a Westerner who loves the rodeo or a Southerner, being an American has on some level suffocated those regional identities. | |
| They're not, we shouldn't reify these things. | |
| We should recognize the difference. | |
| There are many different Germanies. | |
| So she doesn't want to recognize whiteness because coming from her standpoint, whiteness can never be a oppressed group, a visible minority, to use a Canadian terminology, according to the Civil Rights Act. | |
| You can't really be discriminated against if you're white. | |
| You can't join the great gravy train of diversity and inclusion and the welfare state, et cetera, if you're white. | |
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Why Being German Isn't Black and White
00:00:36
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| That's what she's saying. | |
| So that kind of thing is imaginary, but being German is real. | |
| Because, in her mind, her mind being German means that you sit on a bench and drink vice beer and pinch a girl wearing a derndel in the ass every September. | |
| So, anyway, I don't think she's thought through any of these things. | |
| I think she has a very kind of like weirdly nationalistic conception of race that's just odd. | |