Ingroup Hostility and White Supremacy

This is a follow-up of my earlier post I Finally Understand Why We Hate Russia. Now I argue that under the European model of post-modern European supremacy liberalism, the enemy within is worse than the enemy outside. I am referring not to geography or borders, but to ethnicity.  

Before going any further, I’m going to share a common perception of the United States. We perceive ourselves a certain way, other Anglos perceive us a certain way, Latin America perceives us a certain way, western Europe perceives us a certain way, and so on – then there’s the truth of what we actually are. The truth of course is debatable, and no two groups are going to give exactly the same answer.

Our conservative establishment fancies the United States as a new Roman republic, even referring to the historical period of western history after World War II as Pax Americana. Many take this analogy further and say we are in our own transitionary period from republic to empire. Pessimists say we have long past that point and are in the final stages of a deteriorating empire.

I do not share either of these viewpoints. What resemblance does a digital age superpower have with an iron age Mediterranean power? Very little, except in vague, broad strokes. We also tend to have a cartoonishly wrong starting point for such assertions, both for Rome and ourselves. Rome was not “democratic” in anything but the most vague sense of the word, and was very much an empire since its early stages. Imagine the degrees of separation between a farmer in Sicily and policy decisions by the Roman senate. The United States is much more democratic than Rome ever was, and maybe it’s time we stopped using “democracy” as a measuring stick for moral goodness of a nation.

But we have to acknowledge that the major transitionary periods in American history that can be compared to ancient Rome’s evolution from republic to empire have already passed us by. Expansion by conquest, civil war, emancipation of the slaves, restructures of our federal government, income taxes, women’s suffrage, and all of the biggest, most consequential reforms to our way of life have already happened, many of these have happened more than a century ago. All that’s left for the current American system is gradual decline until it’s replaced by a new one. I can’t think of any other way, it’s just a question of if that transition happens peacefully or through violence, and how much violence. Sorry.

One big reason I disagree with the “empire” crowd is because the whole idea is too arrogant. We overestimate our own importance to the world. Sorry. Also the collapse of empires memes dates back to scholars like Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published 1776-89). The meme of empires coming and going in phases seems to originate from Sir John Bagot Glubb in 1950. From Wikipedia:

• The Age of Pioneers (Outburst)
• The Age of Conquests
• The Age of Commerce
• The Age of Affluence
• The Age of Intellect
• The Age of Decadence
• The Age of Decline & Collapse

Glubb noted that in all these example, the penultimate age was marked by defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners, the Welfare State, and a weakening of religion. He attributed this decadence to an excessively long period of wealth and power, selfishness, love of money, and the loss of a sense of duty.

Memes are great and all, but snarky quips aren’t the same as deep commentary that actually adds anything to the conversation. Were 4th Century Roman people quantifiably weaker than 3rd Century Roman people? Were 1950s British people quantifiably weaker than 1910s British people? Were 1940s Japanese people weaker than 1910s Japanese people? I don’t actually think the decline and fall of empires is that simple and the specific causes of the fall of one empire probably don’t apply to a completely different empire.

I don’t want to bash this guy or his work, especially without reading it, but the way people, who also have not read Glubb, apply his ideas to America is just silly. Is 2022 America actually more “decadent” than 1992 America, 1982 America, or 1972 America? I just think it’s funny that guys who were dropping acid and having sex with strangers in the 1960s are now indignantly insisting that America is on the edge of moral collapse. Noooo that’s different!

It’s also personally annoying to me that the guys who have at least some individual responsibility for the problems America has right now – pretty much anyone born before 1970 – old enough to become an adult, find “wisdom,” then support a bunch of stupid ideas anyway. It takes a special kind of nerve to blame millennials, the people that you raised with a bunch of shitty, stupid ideas, then act like you had absolutely nothing to do with it. The vast majority of millennials, people younger than 40, aren’t old enough to have had any meaningful impact on a country’s politics anyway, come on.

I’m painting in very broad strokes here so feel free to disagree, but the other big reason is because Rome colonized the western world. They owed cultural heritage to their own colonizers in Greece, but in terms of power dynamics, Rome went on to rule Greece and there was never a question which party had the upper hand in this dynamic.

When the question did eventually arise, there was a split, and it should be unsurprising that this split happened in Greece, and Constantinople ruled the Eastern Roman Empire. Like the Greeks colonized the Italian peninsula, Great Britain colonized North America. Those colonies in New England became the basis of an entirely new country that eventually eclipsed Great Britain. But today, we should really ask who the senior partner is in this relationship. Recently, the West instructed Volodymyr Zelensky to not negotiate with Russia. That’s a message too important for a phone call, and is best done in person. So Boris Johnson went to Kiev. Not Joe Biden. Boris. We could interpret this as to mean the UK is the junior partner and Joe sent Boris to do his bidding. But it could also mean the opposite. The UK is dictating our policy in Ukraine, not the United States. We should pay attention to small details like this.

With all that in mind, let’s talk about so-called “white supremacy.”

Right now I’m staying with friends in one of the many innocuous trailer parks ringing Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Every day I walk my dog through the neighboring suburb, in what I would characterize as the nice part of town. I always walk the same route and turn around at the same landmark, a gorgeous brick cottage in a cul-de-sac.

Presumably, this house belongs to a retired Marine, which I deduced from some very subtle clues, like the giant Marine Corps flag in his yard. This is all guesses of course, but I assume he’s retired because daily commutes to base would be too far, too many plants for a typical working family to have time for, and there are no visible toys and chaos caused by children. One day earlier this week I happened to see the owner and exchanged waves with him. He turned out to be what I expected, with details filled in. A middle-aged black guy wearing a straw hat diligently tending his garden, rap music blaring from a stereo system, many decibels higher than necessary, at least by my standards. I could not tell you if he is an officer or an NCO. The racial, social, economic, and education divides between American officers and enlisted are much narrower than they were in past generations.

This mundane episode reminds me of Without Remorse, a very silly and nasty movie starring Michael B. Jordan (the actor, not the basketball player) in his personal revenge spree against the bad, bad Russians. Here’s why the guy with his garden and rap music reminds me of Without Remorse. Firstly, Jordan plays the famous Tom Clancy character John Clark, and that’s an odd casting choice. John Clark is the hardboiled Irish American archetype that conservative boomers like Clancy fawn over.

A lot of the movie’s screentime happens in Clark’s home, and it’s not the brick cottage. It’s sleek, minimalist modernist architecture, somewhat like the house pictured below.  

I found this really jarring, and it didn’t help that such a huge portion of the runtime happens in such a house. I found it jarring because I cannot imagine any blue collar military guy, white or black, ever wanting to live in one of these things. This is the house a coastal liberal software engineer would live in. The kind of house the people who made this movie would like. I interpret this in part accidental projection of their own tastes, but it is also a form of virtue signaling.

See, we have this movement that embraces the virtue of intersectionality above all else. But this territory comes with problems. Real military guys are messy and come with all sorts of baggage. But this fictional black military superhero is perfect and there are no problems with him. He doesn’t do any of those things that makes white liberals uncomfortable. Clark doesn’t listen to Tucker Carlson or vote for Donald Trump. He doesn’t like Candace Owens or Kanye West. He doesn’t hang confederate flags outside his garage or play loud music. And he certainly doesn’t go to a southern Baptist church and listen to homophobic sermons about marriage being between one man and one woman. On the contrary, Clark is the kind of black guy who spends $30 a week on his hair at a stylish hipster barbershop. He’s a black guy, but he’s one of the good ones.

This message is driven home even further by his black (presumably lesbian) commanding officer. I would like to see a study that counts all white characters from recent Hollywood movies and all of the black characters, and how many of each, as a percentage, are LGBT.

Without Remorse isn’t an outlier. Outside the Wire on Netflix features American soldiers going on a bloody rampage through Donbass in 2036(!) Ukraine, a dystopian failed state somewhere in the Middle East or Asia or the Balkans or something. No, really, the setting and aesthetics are incredibly vague. Look at the American soldiers in a sea of muddy grays, fighting ethnically ambiguous bad guys. This could have been a scene from Afghanistan in Iron Man and no one would have noticed.

Incidentally, this movie was filmed in Budapest. Now compare that scene from the movie with all the recent footage the world has been seeing from Donbass over the last few months. Is there any resemblance at all? No, because grays and ambiguous architecture/people is a trick filmmakers use when they realize they cannot realistically give an accurate portrayal of the subject matter, or they’re being intentionally dishonest. The former Soviet bloc is portrayed as a rusting monolith, so everything in the Soviet sphere is portrayed with the same rusty, muddy, gloomy gray.

Ukraine is a country that borders Russia, which in fairness, really doesn’t narrow things down as much as you think it would because almost everything borders Russia, and nobody could look Ukraine up on a map before filming. Jan Mikael Håfström, the director, is a Swede.Heh, I would have thought a European would have a better understanding of world geography than Americans, or at least that’s what they would have us believe. But lately, I’m not so sure. I suspect West Europeans think everything East of Austria is a scary wasteland filled with orcs. Anyway, Outside the Wire stars two black actors.

Jack Ryan Season 3 is being filmed in the Czech Republic, another scary country in the Middle East/Asia/Somewhere. So, presumably, the bad guys are Russian. As a general rule, if a western film or show is about Russia, it will be filmed somewhere close to Russia, but not in it. One of the starring characters of Jack Ryan is James Greer, played by Wendell Pierce.

Why so many black dudes fighting Russia? Isn’t this a peculiar setup? Members of a traditionally “othered” outgroup, African Americans, serve as shock troops against a traditional ingroup, white people. Isn’t it even more peculiar that the black people are depicted as “the good ones” and the white people are depicted as subhuman savages? Well, no. It might seem weird but it isn’t. Here’s my theory.

Terms like xenophobia, racism, and reverse-racism (implying that “correct” racism goes a certain direction), are all interesting, but can distract from the underlying forces at work. It all boils down to the ingroup and the outgroup, us and them. Us are of course superior to them. Preferably, us should also look different than them. This is the ideal arrangement, and why the liberal establishment fell in love with mandatory masking during the COVID “pandemic.” The master class can flit around at crowded parties and birthday bashes while the servants have to cover their disgusting, pathetic faces. It’s such a perfect system no wonder our rulers still cling to it, even long after COVID became yesteryear’s fad.

Mandatory masking is nice, but having your servants being born different is even better. And that’s my explanation for the ruling class’s schizophrenic obsession with open borders and mass immigration. I call this a schizophrenic system because Europe and the United States actually go out of their way to create the humanitarian disasters that cause tens of millions of people to want to leave their own countries and go to the “collective West.” Then we can play Mother Teresa with the crowds of refugees from the countries we are busy destroying.

As a side note, I suspect the West actually gets off from herding crowds of scared, hungry people into camps, so invents every excuse to do this, and has the same attitude of sanctimonious righteousness each and every time.

Anyway, migrants from Africa and the Middle East pouring into Europe are not meant to be equal. In a system with finite resources (which is the nature of every system until we invent those magic replicators from Star Trek), unlimited immigration just means more and more people being dumped into the thrifty worker class hovering just at or below the poverty threshold.

It is hard for me to imagine mass immigration, especially now after the enormous expenditure required by the COVID lockdowns, as anything but a calculated attempt by globalist elites to shatter European welfare states.

So in this post-modern liberal fantasy within our own minds, gentrified LGBT black people serve foot soldiers in our war against the real enemy, that big country full of bears and insufficiently liberal white people. But here’s the catch, Russia isn’t all white, and it is more liberal than we like to pretend it is. Consider these lines from Putin’s 2022 Victory Day speech:

Comrades,

Soldiers and officers from many regions of our enormous Motherland, including those who arrived straight from Donbass, from the combat area, are standing now shoulder-to-shoulder here, on Red Square.

We remember how Russia’s enemies tried to use international terrorist gangs against us, how they tried to seed inter-ethnic and religious strife so as to weaken us from within and divide us. They failed completely.

Today, our warriors of different ethnicities are fighting together, shielding each other from bullets and shrapnel like brothers.

This is where the power of Russia lies, a great invincible power of our united multi-ethnic nation.

An enormous country celebrating multi-ethnic diversity. Imagine! Russia does diversity better than Europe and that must be absolutely infuriating.

Here’s what I think this all boils down to. Yes, terms like racism and xenophobia are cool, but really, these are all just forms of ingroup and outgroup hostility. The vast majority of modern literature assumes that we always have ingroup love and outgroup hatred, but it’s just not true. I’ll give an example that just about anyone with internet access and a social media account has seen.

Let’s say there is a viral video of a drunk person smashing up an American convenience store. Now let’s say this person is black. You might see some edgelords making edgy racist comments about him, but you probably won’t. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the majority of white commenters are consciously avoiding making a racial comment. Yes, it’s true. The social benefit of outgroup hostility, making a racist comment, are vastly outweighed by the angry replies by other white commenters accusing him of being racist. This is ingroup hostility. You’re actually more likely to see racial remarks from black commenters. This is also ingroup hostility, but directed by black commenters at the other black guy smashing a store.

The second and equally significant reason that you won’t see a lot of racist comments in social media videos like this is because all of the major American platforms will delete and ban anyone who does. The more draconian social media giants get, the less context matters. The Facebook bots will just as quickly ban a black guy for saying “nigga” or a gay guy for saying “faggot” and I haven’t seen any compelling evidence to the contrary.

Now, reverse the roles and it’s a white guy trashing a convenience store. The coastal liberals who were previously biting their nails about subconscious institutional racism against the black guy have just activated CAPS LOCK. He is HICK HILLBILLY TRUMP SUPPORTER WHITE TRASH. That’s ingroup hostility for you, and the people who love it the most see no irony in what they’re doing. Oh no, they’ve built a worldview around themselves where all their rules only work one way, and never against themselves when talking about people they personally dislike, which is usually lower-class white people.

Consider this headline:

Protesting Journalist: Trump Supporters Zombified by Propaganda

 Consider this story about how Trump brainwashes (mostly white) Republicans:

Surveys conducted immediately before and after the outbreak of the January insurrection report that the majority of ordinary Republicans expressed support for the insurrection and for Trump. Overall, across the series of initial polls, a ‘silent majority’ – about 60% of Republican respondents – indicated that they endorsed the conspiracy theory pushed by Trump. But are these results reliable indicators of Republican views prior to the insurrection?… Did the majority of ordinary Republicans actually sympathise with Trump’s decision to attempt an insurrection?

History will ultimately decide how much of the blame for initiating the bloodshed rests on Donald Trump alone, as well as his GOP acolytes, and how much responsibility rests with the tacit acceptance of ordinary Republicans. It is important to determine this issue morally, to assess culpability for the conflict, and legally, to prosecute potential crimes. Understanding Trump’s soft power can also provide insights into the long-term consequences of the conflict for his leadership and for the future of our democracy.

Actually I’m just kidding, those weren’t stories about white Republicans. They were stories about Russia (here and here). I just swapped out “Putin” with “Trump” and “Russian” with “Republican.” Try this for yourself. Take any accusatory article from BBC or CNN, replace “Russian” with “white people” or “Republicans” or “Trump supporters” and it’ll not change at all. The collective hate boner against Russia is just more white people ingroup hostility, and it’s not even imaginative.

The collective West can intervene in any country in the world with no consequences. No hysterical headlines accusing European and American soldiers of mass rapes. Girls don’t dip their panties in red paint and stand outside the American embassy. American and EU citizens aren’t robbed and cut off from their bank accounts.

The concept of “sovereign nations” is just idealism, and not even good idealism. Communities are defined by people, families, shared blood ties, and culture. Declaring yourself a “sovereign nation” isn’t magic fairy dust that makes it okay for you to commit genocide, and a morale shield against your neighbors who want to intervene and stop your atrocities. “Sovereignty” is bullshit, a vapid idea that Europeans selectively apply to “nations” that they want to use as strongholds to wage aggression against their enemies. No one talks about Syria’s sovereignty. Or Iraq’s sovereignty. Or Libya’s sovereignty. No, only places like Ukraine and Taiwan, fake countries that Europe uses to house weapons and threaten their enemies. It’s not even hypocrisy, it’s just blatant white supremacy.

Featured image source: Truthseeker08 on Pixabay

Ian Kummer

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