I’m pretty sure that’s the intended response to this screed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “Amerika, du hast es schlechter” (“America, You’ve Got it Worse”).  The author is a boy — a German — name of Stephan Richter.  He co-founded The Globalist, an on-line magazine (homepage here).

A quick scan through several of the articles on this morning’s (04 Dec 14) page shows some common sense (“How to Deal With the Return of Hard Power Politics in Europe“: We’re not going to put Putin back in his sandbox without both diplomacy and the acknowledged ability and willingness to fight with both arms free).  That’s combined with some touching if perhaps starry-eyed hope-over-expectation (same article: “Hence, the third track in dealing with Russia now is one on which a competition of values is presented. It is a track that has always existed and has become stronger and stronger with the rise of the kind of technology that allows individuals to connect across borders — and without governmental regulation.  This third track, then, is maximizing the interconnections among people.”).

We also have some breath-of-fresh-air offerings (“How African-Americans and African Immigrants Differ“), which I wish had been co-authored.  The author is an immigrant from Sierra Leone; I wish he’d found a West Indian immigrant to pitch in, since we have a not-inconsiderable contingent from there (judging by their accented English a family of them was my back-yard-fence neighbors in Charleston in the 1990s).  I also wish the article had been longer, since its central idea is the comparison of how the two groups’ differing histories (the one descendants, by and large, of slavery, and the other frequently survivors of civil war, murderous domestic tyranny, and poverty the likes of which has never been seen on these shores since the days of the earliest European settlements) lead them to interact with and participate (or not) in the predominating “white” society and culture.  Thomas Sowell has touched on this notion as well, here and there (he may be among the deeper students of immigration and integration, worldwide, that we’ve got in the U.S.).  It deserves much more extensive examination than The Globalist offers space.  Interesting observations, though:

“When they come to the United States, it has been my experience that Africans can easily identify with white Americans because they understand each other. Before migrating to the United States, the majority of Africans have had little to no direct negative experiences with whites. They simply do not hate them.

* * * *

“Most African immigrants to the United States often live in mixed neighborhoods instead of black neighborhoods and they easily integrate. African immigrants know who they are. They are not easily offended when someone tries to put them down. They know where they come from and why they are here.”

I’d like to see this author explore the psychological intricacies of that last sentence.  He needs an essay-length format, at the least.

We also have the first installment of an entirely predictable That Awful South screed (and surprise! it’s from Comrade Richter): “America’s Mezzogiorno: A Thanksgiving Reflection“; the author seems to be mostly thankful that he’s not a Southerner.  The feeling is mutual, buddy.  He trots out the usual nonsense about how the rest of the country is “subsidizing” the South through the “spreading” of defense facilities “and production” through the South.  Oh dear.  It’s as if he’s never set foot outside the beltway.  Or worn a uniform (he’s German, and of an age that he would have had either to be drafted or done his “Zivildienst,” so that blind spot is hard to understand).  Let me explain it to him:  Where defense installations are placed is a function in North America (which has a continental climate and a very non-uniformly-dispersed population), overwhelmingly, of (i) weather; (ii) population density, and (iii) land values.

To illustrate:  Across most of the northern tier of the country, for a large portion of the year the weather is simply too brutal for infantry to train without massive health issues arising.  By all means, do cold-weather training, but only a dip-stick or someone with no other options would willingly base his ground forces where for weeks at a pop the high temperature will reliably be 15º F.  You can’t get around the fact that most of the South, most of the time, in most years, is well-suited for year-round outdoor training.

Population density:  Geez, do we put the Minuteman program and the B-52s in the Northeast Corridor, where something like a quarter of the U.S. population lives, so that when the Soviets (or now the Chinese) pickle off an alpha strike, they wipe out the centers of commerce, finance, and government?  Or do we scatter them over the Dakotas and Montana, where we can minimize the number of, you know, dead civilians?

Land value:  When the U.S. military went from pretty damned tiny to among the world’s largest, land was cheap in the South, not well-suited for agriculture, and in many areas not even very much used.  Hey:  Let’s buy up enough land to put Fort Hood in Westchester County, or maybe in Livonia, Michigan, or even Cincinnati.  Or we could put it out in the dried-up Texas landscape.  Well, Comrade Richter might reply, we could have put that up in the Dakotas, too.  See my comments about weather, above.  See also a map of the damned country.  It costs a boat-load of money to move stuff around an area as large as the United States; do you put major enterprises where you can get things to them relatively easily, or where you’re going to have to build all those networks from scratch? [In 1986 someone did a study of West Germany’s energy consumption:  They found that fully a third of their use was just moving people and things around the place.  Like the Victorian statesmen, Brer Richter’s been looking at the wrong-scale map.]

The South is also penetrated by a great deal of navigable water, from the Mississippi to the Ohio to the Tennessee to the Red to several others.  In the East you’ve got the fall line jammed up against the coast (except in, you know, Virginia and the Carolinas).  Additionally, across a huge chunk of the Upper South (Tennessee and northern Alabama) there was the TVA to provide cheap power, which had been building since 1933.  That program was most definitely not started as a government largesse operation, but rather as a pilot project for the destruction of the private electrical utility industry (Amity Schlaes tells the whole sordid story in The Forgotten Man).  The war intervened and the TVA become a one-off, but that had not been the design.  The Tennessee Valley was selected for the opening moves in the attack because of its cheap land (take a look at the lands those lakes flooded before the TVA came), its relative political backwardness, and its poverty, which made resistance less likely.

So let’s see:  Cheap land, easy access, useful climate.  No, no, no:  Let’s take our army and build its 102,000-acre (Ft. Campbell, Kentucky), 214,000-acre (Ft. Hood, Texas), or 100,646-acre (Ft. Riley, Kansas), and 160,000-acre (Ft. Bragg, North Carolina) facilities right outside Springfield, Massachusetts.  Or in Pennsylvania somewhere.  When we need someplace to put a brand-new 16,000-acre naval base for our Ohio-class submarines (too big to fit elsewhere), let’s buy up Newport, Rhode Island and do it there.  Or an even better idea:  Let’s take the naval installations at Norfolk, Virginia (which are historical outgrowths of maritime industry dating back before the Revolution, I’ll remind our dim-bulb author), shut them down, and go replicate them . . . oh . . . I don’t know, maybe in Oregon.  Because that’s such a better use of money.

Comrade Richter also seems to ignore the extent to which Southern California’s modern economy was pretty much built on the defense dollar.  Pull federal activities (military and otherwise) out of Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, and what exactly do you have left, except for hard-rock mining?  As for manufacturing, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, General Dynamics, Northrop-Grumman, General Motors, and Colt acquire new home addresses in Richter-land.  The steel mills which produce the HY-80 that’s in all those submarine hulls?  Those are in Arkansas, it seems.  Hanford is now in South Carolina.  USS Kennedy (CV-67) was kept in the fleet and put through a SLEP to keep not the Philadelphia but rather the Dothan, Alabama Naval Shipyard in business.  And let’s not forget the submarine fleet built by General Dynamics in Baton Rouge.

None of the above is to deny that Congresscritters of all stripes fight to pump money into their home districts.  It’s why Oak Ridge is in Tennessee.  But there were and remain very legitimate reasons why it was completely logical to build enormous bases for specific kinds of military activities (e.g. Edwards Air Force Base, which is not in Cobb County, Georgia) where the military built them.

Richter is also much exercised about Southern states’ reluctance to accept federal money to expand Medicaid programs, or as he says, “Washington sends money to help these regions to overcome wide-spread poverty, which is – 150 years after the end of the Civil War – often still race-based.  However, the South — as based largely on the wishes of its republicans governors — doesn’t want to have a huge chunk of it!”  For starts, coach, poverty is not “race-based”; it may be racially-correlated, but so is murder.  No one goes around enrolling blacks to be poor, nor does anyone check your skin color before you go broke.  [By the way, Richter’s own article’s last sub-heading is “Poverty is blind to race”.  Well, jackass, which is it?  You can’t have it both race-based and race-blind.  Pick your asinine position and stick with it, at least.]

More importantly, Richter ignores the principal reason why the expansion of Medicaid was resisted:  The federal money was time-limited.  Three years, but the program expansions would have been permanent.  We all got to see what happened in Tennessee, which did pretty much exactly what Richter demanded, starting in 1994, and almost bankrupted itself.  At one point something over a quarter of the state’s total population (including people making $60,000-plus per year, this back in the 1990s) was on the public dime.  The average patient had 19 active prescriptions.  It took the state more than a decade worth of litigation to prune the program back.  So no, dear ol’ Stephan, this refused offer of “federal money” for a limited time to blow up your state’s budget forever and ever was not some perverse desire to keep the darkies down, but rather a prudent refusal of a poisoned chalice.

But hist! it’s not all federal money that Them Awful Southerners don’t like.  “Contrary to their ideological opposition to Medicaid, Republican governors and legislatures in the South accept two types of federal funds: Farm subsidies and defense contract money.”  Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, the Central Valley, and the Cadillac Desert are not Southern institutions, ol’ sport.  That’s not to say that the sugar industry does not have its hand in the till (it was the principal shareholder in the largest U.S. sugar company who was on the telephone with Wm. J. Clinton while the latter was getting his knob polished by a 20-year-old intern named Lewinsky), or that hogs and chicken don’t see to it their share comes their way.  But the Big Dollars go to the Midwest and Plains states.  And by the way, farm subsidies and defense contract dollars don’t go to states or state legislatures, but rather to individuals and private businesses.  So there’s simply nothing there for “Republican governors and legislatures in the South” to accept, nitwit.

But what allows Them Awful Southerners to suck so hard at the public tit?  Why of course, it’s that they’re all a bunch of <pass the smelling salts, please> Republicans.  O!  The horror!  Yes, Southerners make up over half the Republican House majority.  This enables the South, which accounts for 37% of the population and 34.2% of the economy (what a mismatch!! takes your breath away, doesn’t it?), to force the rest of the 435 House members to shovel money all over the place.  Or something.

The Republican South dates from the 1980s, at the earliest.  The defense facilities which Richter deplores having been built in the South were built during the — not year, not decades, but — generations when Democrats controlled, and not by wafer-thin margins, both houses of Congress.  The Soviet-style American agricultural system was a brain-child not of Newt Gingrich, but of FDR’s Soviet-inspired “planners.”

Yes, “The rest of the world is perplexed by the anti-government attitude and/or gross negligence toward the people by the governors and legislatures in the American South.”  What Richter really means by “the rest of the world” is the dozen or twenty or so people who’ll speak with him (if he’s as tiresome and ill-informed in person as he is in print).  He might ask the Chechens, the Uighurs, the Marsh Arabs, the Crimean Tatars (if any are still alive), the Volga Germans, the surviving Russian or Polish or Hungarian Jews, the Hmong, the Kurds, the Yezidis, the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, or the Armenians about their understanding of “anti-government attitudes,” particularly their attitudes about powerful, centralized government.  How about the immigrant from Sierra Leone who’s got an article in his own damned magazine; did Richter ask whether he is “perplexed” by the notion that government (especially Great Big Government) ain’t your friend?  Or he might just take a look at where the floods of immigrants over the centuries came from and went to.  I’ll give you a hint so you needn’t pull your head out:  They didn’t go to Tsarist Russia, or Bismarck’s Prussia, or to Spain, or to dirigisme France.  For that matter, he might take a look at where the internal migration in the United States is headed.  It’s no accident that the IRS no longer reports it, but you can find the numbers if you try.  They’re flooding South, ol’ boy, and they’re not leaving.  Individuals might goof and guess wrong about where they need to be living, but millions of people over the course of several decades now can’t be explained away as some sort of latter-day Flagellant movement.

This article in The Globalist is, in other words, just another installment in a long line of Them Awful Southerners pot-boilers (of which it’s not the first I’ve exploded).  I’m only mildly surprised he didn’t work the word “protocols” into the title.

There’s more from Brer Richter:  “Take the Money and Run,” in which he recites the by-now-tired data (genuine enough, to be sure), that for every dollar a “taxpayer” in, say, Mississippi pays, he “receives” $3.07 in “benefits,” and 45% of Mississippi’s economy “comes from federal funding.”  Of course, data like that remind one of the old joke in response to the data point that “everyone three minutes, someone is robbed”: Doesn’t he get tired of it?  Given that roughly 40% of the American population pays no federal income taxes at all, one can be forgiven for posing the aggregation issue to Comrade Richter.  I’d be interested to see whether in fact the average Mississippi resident who is a net payer of federal income taxes is doled out $3.07 in direct or indirect transfer payments.   Because if the complaint is that for every tax dollar coming out of Mississippi there are $3.07 being paid to residents of Mississippi, I’d like to know who’s paying and who’s receiving.  Are they in fact the same people?  And what unspecified “federal funding” is Richter talking about?  If he’s talking about payments to or for the benefit of poor people . . . well, yes, you would expect states with poorer populations to receive more federal dollars, in the aggregate, than places with fewer poorer people, or places with more and wealthier people to skew the averages.  If he’s got a point to make, let him cough up some data that actually say something.

For Part III of his I Don’t Like Southerners and Neither Should You, our learned mentor explains to us “How the South Really Operates.”  I was truly looking forward to this read, because after spending over 40 of my 50 years living in the South, and paying attention to what happens and who makes it happen, I confessed myself flummoxed.  Richter to the Rescue!  He enumerates four aspects in which he informs us how the South really operates.  First come agricultural hand-outs, in which he recites several prominent Republican politicians who happen to be Southerners and who suck at the public tit of agricultural hand-outs.  See my comments above re: where the agri-business money is actually, you know, at.  And by the way, just as a counter-example, I believe it’s Dianne Feinstein (it may be Pelosi, but it’s definitely one of the California Congressional delegation) whose husband owns a good chunk of a company that processes some sort of seafood or fishery product in, I believe it is, Guam (possibly Samoa; I’ve slept since I read about this).  Guess which American overseas possession is uniquely exempted from minimum wage laws that apply to the others?

Second comes that awful ol’ Congressional power.  The South which accounts for 37% of the population overall has just over half of the Republican House caucus, and therefore — you really have to envy Richter his simple-mindedness — 53% of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense, and 55% of the subcommittee on homeland security.  God save the mark.  Well, you know, numbskull, if Congressional committee assignments were to be handed out based on state population instead of party affiliation, where would the majority party come up with committee members from states which decline to elect members of that party?  But the litany of horrors does not stop there:  Oh noes: Fully 63% of the committee on military construction and veterans affairs subcommittee come from the South.  Maybe Comrade Richter would care to examine where the all-volunteer force comes from and where American veterans live?  Don’t worry, ol’ sport:  I’ll do the math for you.

The Veterans Administration has a nice state-by-state interactive map showing each state’s veteran population data as of September 30, 2014.  Out of their estimated 21,999,108 living veterans, 8,208,679 lived in the states of the old confederacy (plus West Virginia and Kentucky), or almost exactly 37% of the total.  I don’t know which states Richter includes to get to his 37% of the U.S. overall population living in the South, so you can’t really draw a great deal of meaning from those numbers.  The U.S. Census Bureau has a convenient estimate of each state’s population as of July 1, 2013.  Let’s see what percentage of each state’s gross population consists of veterans.  In the states of the former confederacy (plus Kentucky and West Virginia) we range from a high of 9.46% for Virginia (which you really can’t treat as a meaningful number since so much of Virginia is actually South District of Columbia, but there it is) to 9.03% for West Virginia to a low of 6.35% for Texas.  Throw out the high and low and you get an average of 8.00%.  Only two of the states other than Texas are even below 7.5%: Louisiana and Mississippi.  Just for giggles I ran the same numbers for several large northern states, and Washington State as well (there’s HUGE defense industry and installations up there, which Comrade Richter seems to have forgot about).  Here are some numbers:  California: 4.83%; Michigan: 6.65%; New York: 4.54%; Massachusetts: 5.67%; Illinois: 5.60%; Washington: 8.66%.

The VA site also has a spreadsheet that breaks down each state’s population by era of service.  So you could theoretically strip out the all-volunteer veterans from the draftees.  You could strip out the dwindling World War II contingent and the Korean War contingent.  You could strip out the Vietnam contingent (reckon which states saw the most student draft deferments: those with large or with small college enrollment among the overall population).  I don’t have the time or energy to do so.

Gee, what would someone who believes in, you know, representative democracy think?  Reckon he might figure that for House members from those states with a higher percentage of their voters being veterans (veterans vote disproportionately to their numbers, recall), getting on the veterans affairs subcommittee might be . . . you know, maybe . . . representing his goddam voters?  Anyone want to bet which states’ representatives scramble to get on the maritime affairs committees?  Wyoming, perhaps?  Maybe in Richter-land.

Then Richter recycles his shop-worn defense spending as a welcome stimulus.  This part of the article is more than a bit incomprehensible, since what he talks about is salary caps for CEOs of defense contractors and salaries of management relative to engineer or worker, and then recites the average CEO pay for the five largest defense contractors.  Only one, Lockheed-Martin, is headquartered anywhere near the South, and that’s Bethesda, Maryland (which I categorically deny to be Southern in any meaningful sense).  In fact, in not a single sentence of that section of the article does he even mention the South.

The final section of How the South Really Operates is a diatribe against Georgia and its decision not to get on the Medicaid expansion bandwagon.  Again, the program expansions, which would have been permanent, were going to be funded by the federal government . . . for three years.  You wouldn’t let your 16-year-old budget for his first motor-scooter on that basis.  Richter’s pretending that a state can do so is just irresponsible.  He of course recites all the ills of the current system (all true enough), but he doesn’t answer Question No. 1:  Where is the damned money going to come from?  If he thinks that any governmental entity, state or local, which exists in a polity in which there is free movement of money, people, and economic activity across borders can budget on a nice-to-have basis, he’s just stupid.  Period.  There’s no other way to describe that outlook.  In a free society people won’t stand still and let you skin them.  They’ll leave, and then what you’re left with is Mississippi.

You know, I’d actually intended this little post to be a take-down of his comically ill-informed anti-American splenetic in the FAZ (he does, however, manage to work into even that one an accusation that the South is still Fighting the War; I’d really like to know from which data he draws that conclusion since I’ve not noticed it in anyone of above-average intelligence in over 40 years; even when we were kids playing army, we fought not the Yankees or even the dinks or gooks, but rather the Germans (which was hilarious because one of my best buddies had a grandfather who’d been a machine-gunner . . . for the Kaiser)).  I’d not thought I’d spend the whole thing exposing his English-language fatuities.  But I can never resist an easy target, and boy howdy! Stephan Richter’s incomprehension of the American South is a stationary target at point-blank range.

Someone hand me a cigarette.  I feel all aglow.

Update [08 Dec 14]:  In the context of why the national Democrat party seems to have such problems running successful candidates in the South, Moe Lane drives the ten-ring:  “It’s not demographics, and it’s certainly not gerrymandering, and shoot, it’s not even Barack Obama. It’s that the people who run the Democratic party [expletive deleted] hate the South.”  Brer Richter’s thoughts merely express openly what the Democrats’ national-level leadership mutually congratulates itself on believing.

The gently ironic part of it is that it doesn’t have to be that way.  In my semi-rural county, which voted for Geo. W. Bush twice, for McCain, and for Romney, all by enormous margins, and which by a similar margin in a recent Republican primary swamped the Establishment incumbent in favor of a Tea Party insurgent . . . all three of our trial judges are Democrats; our sheriff is a Democrat, most of our elected county-wide officials are Democrats, and a good number of elected officials at the municipal level are Democrats.

Among the bunch of people I regularly find myself working (and drinking beer) with are people who range all the way from caricatures of far-right reaction to cartoonish lefties who actually think Dear Leader’s got it all figured out.  No.  Really.  There are people — and not dummies, either — who truly think that way.  We all work together, we all pitch in together, and together we’re making our county a better place to live, where each year’s crop of high school graduates has something to look forward to other than an entire lifetime trapped behind a cash register at the stop-n-rob.  Not that “politics” doesn’t get discussed, and heatedly sometimes, but here, for the moment, we can accept our differences as being good-faith disagreement.  Among the most cartoonish of my leftish friends is a fellow who got there by way of his religious convictions . . . and the fact that for a period when he was younger, if his family had meat on the table it was because he’d gone out and shot it in the middle of the night.  I think he’s wrong on the merits, but I can accept his thinking as coming from somewhere honorable.

At the national level, that assumption is simply denied to Republicans.

So Moe Lane’s right:  When you spend a half-century insisting that everyone who lives in a particular place is for that reason inherently evil, and that everything they think, believe, and hope for is necessarily an outgrowth of that evil and need not be engaged with for that reason . . . Well, exactly what did you expect in terms of electoral outcomes?

For roughly 150 years — say, from the 1830s to sometime around 1980 — the South resolutely maintained that Everything is About Race.

When years ago I took a course in Southern history (from Barbara J. Fields, one of the more impressive professors I ever had), among the more interesting tidbits of information we covered was that what we now call “racism,” at least in the specific form existing between American whites and American blacks, was an invented ideology that was used to justify slavery ex post, not the other way around.  And it specifically founds its organized proponents in response to the coalescing abolitionist movement.

Certainly Anglo-Americans always looked down on blacks as being inferior.  What needs to be borne in mind, however, is that Anglo-Americans, aping the attitudes of their kinsmen back home, looked down on everyone who wasn’t English.  The Irish had been regarded as vaguely sub-human for generations.  “Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he be caught young.”  That observation (by Dr. Johnson, no less) was not made humorously; he really did regard the Scots as inherently not the human equivalent of the English (this despite Edinburgh University’s already being world famous for its medical faculty).  Later on, during the heyday of the Raj, Englishmen assured each other — in perfect earnestness — that “the wogs begin at Calais.”  These attitudes weren’t by any means unique to the island, either.  The Spanish during the generations of the Reconquista developed a highly detailed (I would say “sophisticated,” but since it rested on an understanding of humanity that is neither more nor less than monstrous, I’ll use the more value-neutral expression) system for shoving humans into a hierarchical structure based upon the “purity” of their blood.  Gobineau, the godfather of modern “scientific” racism, was French.

And everyone knew — just knew — that the Jews had to file off their children’s horns and trim their tails before allowing them outside.  Et cetera.

American white-on-black racism, as a coherent theory, developed and first came to flower in the specific atmosphere of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.  As is true of pretty much everything and everyone, it was a product of its time and bore the cultural stamps of that fact.  Which is to say that it had the vocabulary of modern science to frame its arguments.  Gobineau was similarly a product of the same era.

And as is also true of pretty much every argument that just happens — conveniently — to support the less defensible side of any argument (see, e.g: “climate change” causes everything from ice forming on the Great Lakes earlier in the season than for 40 years past to earthquakes to unusually quiet to unusually stormy hurricane seasons) the defenders of chattel slavery eagerly seized on “scientific” racism to show that American slavery, so far from being a blight, a disgrace, and a monstrosity, was inevitable and just and even beneficial to its victims.  Well.  Who could have seen that coming?

Ah! but life comes with so many double-edged swords, doesn’t it?  By embracing racism to justify the indefensible, the South backed itself, ideologically, into a corner.  If something is supported by scientific fact, you can’t very well choose to wash your hands of it, can you?  The South’s painting itself into a moral and ideological corner was a position that made come true John Brown’s scaffold prediction: that the sins of this guilty land could never be washed away except in blood.  And so it came to pass, in blood (nearly one percent of the gross American population died in that war; nearly a quarter of Southern males of military age did not come home: that’s death on a Great War or Great Patriotic War scale) and ashes.  Quite a bit of it Southern blood and almost exclusively Southern ashes.  But racism was the gift that kept on giving, so to speak.  It trapped the South’s consciousness in amber, like a beetle.  I mean, losing a war doesn’t alter scientific fact, does it?  Quite on the contrary, losing a war when you’re right on the merits does nothing more than to suggest all the more strongly that you mount the barricades (see, e.g: inter-war German politics).  It tells you that you must hold all the more tightly to the principles that got you into it; that you dance ever more insistently with the one that brung you to the dance.  It makes it nearly impossible to climb down, in short.

And that’s how it played out in the South for decades.  The South didn’t — couldn’t — climb down.  Indeed, the further the war receded into the past, the more fervently those who had never carried a rifle or served a gun waved the flag and mouthed the certainties that had ruined their ancestors.

Not until the ovens of Auschwitz cooled, and Americans could see the logical outcome of the proposition that some people aren’t truly human, was there an undeniable counter-example which had the potency to punch through the moral certainty the South had been carrying around its neck like a rotting fish for 70 years.  It’s too much to say that the Holocaust launched the civil rights movement, or that the fires of Warsaw provided the embers on which a million and more “whites only” signs were incinerated.  It is true, though, that what happened in Europe between 1939 and 1945 was that which could not be explained away, which could not be made to fit into any data set containing the idea of the sub-human.  It introduced a cognitive dissonance that, like all such phenomena, had to express itself.

Of course, just as wars turn their bloodiest when it’s plain which side is going to lose (compare the casualties post-March, 1918 with what had come before; compare the post-Stalingrad casualties on the Eastern Front to what came before), so it all played out with the South and racism, all over again, everything minus the invading armies.  Just as the abolition movement had provided the grain of sand about which the bastard pearl of racism formed, so the civil rights movement in its day brought those pearls out of the drawer, to be paraded around in broad daylight one last time.

I grew up in a small town in the South.  True, it was in what is usually described as the Upper South, which if not fully culturally distinct is still ascertainably different from the Lower South or the Coastal South.  And by 1980 the idea that Everything is About Race was dead there.  When I got to Charleston in the late 1980s, it was dead there, too.  I’m not saying that everyone joined hands in a circle and sang Sunday school songs.  I’m not saying that there neither was nor is any consciousness — on either side — that You’re Not Like Me, but no one, and I mean no one of any consequence at all, even pretended any more that “race” as such was anything like a guiding concept around which you could build a society.  The few people who still dared to express with favor the Old Ideas earned only looks from their listeners that said, as plainly as if they’d snorted it out loud, “What rock did you just crawl out from under?”  David Duke’s political career fizzled and went out.  By the late 1980s George C. Wallace was actively courting black votes . . . and was getting them.  What can it say about the resilience of race as a socio-political anchor that even Strom Thurmond in South Carolina found it inexpedient to wave that flag any more?  Whether he still believed it in his own heart is not the question, but rather whether he felt he could safely retain or had to jettison it from his political organization in order to stay in office.

So after 150 years even the South finally joined, kicking and screaming, perhaps, the consensus that, whatever else you may think about “race,” it’s not part of the bedrock of society.

And then came 2008.  We elected a candidate who promised to “heal” divisions which existed, if at all, mostly in the context of old scars (which undeniably might and did throb from time to time) of past fights.  What we got was a mountebank who himself and with his senior accomplices relentlessly pounded on the idea that yes, Dorothy, everything is and will always remain about race.  They not only never not let slip the chance to shut up about any tempting news-item that had the least “racial” component to it, but they actively involved themselves in those situations, and invariably on the side of inflammation.  Gentle Reader will note that not once has that administration ever pitched in on the side of “you all both need to calm the hell down and take a powder.”

On the contrary, they’ve gotten the official machinery of the federal government involved specifically to make about race situations which had bugger all to do with it.  A half-Latino neighborhood watch guy gets jumped and damn near killed by a punk who happens to be black, successfully defends himself, and in the process kills his assailant.  Does it matter that the survivor of the attack is anything but a WASP, that he grew up in a mixed-race family, that he actively campaigned on behalf of justice for a different black kid who got done wrong by the local police?  Of course not.  He must be prosecuted for murder, and threatened with financial ruin for “civil rights” violations.  A police officer is beaten by a violent felon (within minutes after committing the felony) who nearly succeeds in seizing the officer’s weapon, and then who, when ordered to stop and surrender (remember that the assault on the police officer was all by itself a felony, and so the officer had the right and the duty to arrest him for that if for no other reason), charges the officer and is shot dead.  Let’s send White House officials to the criminal’s funeral.  Let’s use our race-huckstering surrogates (Al Sharpton) to stir up orgies of looting, arson, and physical attacks.  Let’s enlist all the grievance-mongering organizations to insist that “justice” for this violent felon commands that we criminally prosecute an officer who did no more than his duty.

Quite the opposite from being the “first post-racial president,” we have in power and will for more than two years more have in power an administration that has successfully set about un-doing 150 or more years of moral progress in this nation.  He and those like him are doing it for the cynical reason of electoral advantage.  With the failings of the socialist economic model becoming ever more glaringly apparent, and the (to borrow a line from the socialists themselves) contradictions of the FDR political coalition fracturing the solidarity of the machine that delivered over 70 years of political domination to the Democrats, the left-extremists who have captured that party on the national level at least cannot hope for ascendancy without nearly 100% loyalty from their dwindling base.  Hence announcing that the borders are for all intents and purposes open.  Hence the vilification of every American black who strays from the plantation (ask Mia Love, Timothy Scott, and that other Republic fellow — can’t call his name from memory, whose accomplishments the NAACP has yet to acknowledge, let alone celebrate).  Ask Thomas Sowell.

They’re doing it principally for electoral advantage.  At least I’m wiling to grant them that much.  That’s how partisan politics works (it’s also why the Founding Fathers so sternly inveighed against what was then called “faction”).  There is, at least as to some of them — and alas! Dear Leader must be counted among these — another explanation.  A more subversive, sinister explanation.  An explanation which arises from a fundamental rejection of the American Experiment, and which seeks the splintering of American society, which underpins what these see as the abhorrent position America occupies in the world.  Thomas Sowell writes in several places about how the Ceylonese civil war came to pass.  At one time Ceylon was merely an island occupied by two culturally distinct groups, the Tamil and the Sinhalese, with the latter outnumbering the former.  What we Americans know as “affirmative action” was enlisted after independence to “rectify” alleged socio-politico-economic imbalances.  Unscrupulous leaders on both sides realized the potentialities of the situation, and began the same sort of race-baiting that we have come to expect from the current United States president.  There then followed decades of bloody civil war.  They made of a beautiful island a howling charnel house.  And as is the case with all civil wars (in fact, all wars in general), the longer it went on the more extreme the leadership on both sides became.  Carnage.

The Ceylonese civil war paralyzed the island.  Now, Ceylon is — I won’t say of no — but of very little consequence in how the rest of the world lives and works.  They could completely blow the place off the map and very few people outside their immediate circle would be tossed into physical or economic disaster.  At the risk of understatement, that’s not true of the United States.  Our position, for better or worse, is the anchor bolt to which most of the rest of the world is tethered.  There are some things that are just not going to change so long as the United States remains what and where it is.  This fact is recognized by the Marxists.  The destruction of American cultural and economic hegemony is therefore the lodestar of their political universe.  And the easiest way to destroy anything is to exploit the fissures which are already there, the fault lines which already run — however latently — through the structure.

Our Dear Leader is a Marxist to his core.  He was born to one, he lived for years in a household headed by one, he was raised to adulthood by two of them.  Launched on the mainland, he gravitated to them, sought out their political support, and eagerly received their teachings.  The world as he earnestly desires it to be cannot come about without the destruction of the United States as the world’s predominating cultural, economic, and political power.  It cannot.  Its position must therefore be destroyed, and whatever tends to that end is to be pursued.  Relentlessly.  Exciting passions, hacking open wounds, stoking fires of manufactured outrage are his efforts to pry open the fissures and faults in American society.  Because what disunites us weakens us.  Because we are the enemy.  Because our own president harbors an unextinguishable animosity for the country he leads.

Once more, Everything is Once More About Race.

Via Instapundit, we delve into the wayback machine to April, 2002, back before Matthew Yglesias learned to hate George Bush.  Ol’ Matt tosses out for consideration a — I don’t think “time-honored” is really an apt expression — resolution of what we might call the “Palestinian Question.”

This is what Matt submits for consideration:

I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied territories.   * * *  All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It’s not like there’s not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it’s just that the other Arab leaders don’t want to cooperate.

He’s right, of course; forced expulsions of mass population groups are humanitarian disasters.  It’s not by accident that I phrased it as “the Palestinian Question,” with its echoes of “the Jewish Question.”  It was, after all, on this day in 1941 that Hermann Goering instructed Heinrich Himmler to began preparations for the Final Solution.  That instruction resulted in the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942 and . . . well, world history knows the rest.

On the other hand, and this is a sobering Other Hand to contemplate:  Among the less fortunate consequences of Wilson’s, Lloyd George’s, and Clemenceau’s fiddling with the borders of Eastern Europe in 1919 was the existence of enormous groups of — shall we say — ethnically inconsistent groups in the new countries established by the treaties that ended the Great War.  The Sudeten Germans are only the most historically infamous.  In truth there were pockets of people all over that part of the world who were linguistically and culturally distinct from their surrounding populations.  Poland, which was re-created for the first time since 1795, was a mish-mash of Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians (I did a will a number of years ago for a Polish-Ukrainian fellow), and sundry other groups.  Hungary was speckled with non-Magyar populations.  The Slovaks themselves were tack-welded together with the Czechs.  And those are just the examples I can think of sitting here at my computer.  Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of the South Slavs, had Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and Albanians.

The result was pretty much as you might predict.  Politics, in addition to absorbing the poisonous brew of communism and class conflict unleashed by the war’s end, also broke very strongly on nationalistic and ethnic lines.  Not to be too blunt about it, but it hamstrung the new societies.  All the strife and mutual suspicion that had been — and not entirely successfully, either — bottled up by the crushing weight of centuries of Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern rule exploded over the land.  Precisely at the time when the world was radically changing beneath everyone’s feet, and by “everyone” I include the United States, and new and creative thinking became an even greater necessity, those countries were mired in bogs of ethnic conflict.

It is, I will suggest, a nearly universal phenomenon that conflict brings to the forefront the most extreme positions of all factions.  This is true of purely political conflict (witness what’s going on in the United States today); it’s true of military conflict (in conflicts as divergent as the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Great War, and the communist take-over of China you can observe the steady rise, with the length and desperation of the struggle, of the most hard-boiled, ruthless, and unscrupulous commanders and factions); it’s true of class conflict (Hayek outlines the process in The Road to Serfdom).  And sure enough, it’s what we can observe unfolding across Eastern Europe during the inter-war period.

Not that any particular population group escaped a scorching in the Second World War, but, as is also depressingly typical, the ones across whom the storms lashed most fiercely were those perennial outsiders: the Jews and (to a much lesser extent because there were so many fewer of them) the Gypsies.

Americans, and even Western Europeans, tend to entertain the fond recollection that The War in Europe Ended May 8, 1945.  Well, the war may have ended, but the fighting and the suffering sure as hell didn’t.  The Poles turned on the few surviving Jews.  Pretty much everyone who wasn’t German turned on the pockets of Germans.  And the Soviets bestowed their ministrations on everyone.  And then it started.  Long lines of civilians, pushing prams, hand-carts, or wagons.  Or just carrying a battered suitcase, with everything they owned that wasn’t on their backs in it.  Young and old, off they marched, away from places where their ancestors had lived for centuries.  The Sudeten Germans had settled in Bohemia something like 800 years before.  The Poles in what became the western reaches of the Soviet Union had been there even longer.  The sundry ethnic groups spattered across the former Austro-Hungarian empire had been on their lands for similarly impressive periods.

No matter.  In 1982 I went to the Deutsches Museum in what was then still East Berlin.  I remember seeing one of the placards the Poles put up in Prussia.  Every German had 24 hours to leave town, taking only what could be hand-carried.  Just like that.  In fairness to the Poles, the exact same thing was happening to their east, as millions upon millions of them were kicked out to make room for the Soviets.  The numbers involved were prodigious.  Just among the Germans, somewhere between 12 and 14 million people were on the move in 1945-47.  Add to them millions of Poles, sundry Slavic groups, and of course the forced repatriations to the Soviet Union, and it’s easy to believe the figure I saw once (my memory is a bit fuzzy and I can’t recall where I saw it) that something like ten percent of the gross population of Europe was on the road, mostly on foot, and uniformly on a one-way trip.  In contemplating the physical reality of that process, we ought not forget that the winter of 1945-46 was one of the coldest in recorded European history (George Bush hadn’t invented global warming yet, after all), and the fighting had absolutely played hell with the planting and harvest for well over a year.

All in all, I think Yglesias’s point about it being a humanitarian disaster is fully justified.  In fact the only reason we don’t remember it more is because of what it immediately followed.  With the smoke — metaphorically — still rising from the ovens at Auschwitz, and the rubble still smoldering at Dresden, Warsaw, and dozens upon dozens of other Eastern European cities, what are the tribulations of a couple dozen million refugees?

But behold!  For all its post-war trauma, the one thing that Europe has not had to deal with since 1945 has been the ethnic strife that plagued it before the war.  All that civilian suffering at least produced largely homogenous populations which had the social cohesion to work through their challenges.  Just by way of example, it is no accident that it was the Poles who in the Solidarity movement set the first charges that exploded Soviet rule . . . nor should we underestimate the importance in that development of their adherence to their Roman Catholic faith, a church headed by (I’ll suggest this is one of the most fortunate coincidences in recent Western history) a Polish pope.  With one exception — the Velvet Divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks — the lands that formerly relished nothing so much as a street fight between the Party of Ethnic Group A and the Party of Ethnic Group B, all to be followed by a quick pogrom through the Jewish Quarter, have been freed of at least the endless ructions and violence of ethnic strife.  And notice what’s now happening:  As Europe has been over-run with unassimilated adherents of the Religion of Peace, who periodically turn out to shoot at the police and burn cars and buildings, all the while sucking on the public tit of the European Welfare State, the ethnic strife is returning.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern to what happens when you have significant populations of non-assimilated ethnic groups embedded in societies that uphold irreconcilable value systems.

The unassimilated Arabic populations of Israel’s territory (and I expressly include Gaza and the West Bank as Israeli territory; they conquered it from countries trying to destroy Israel: when you pick a fight and lose it, that’s what happens, viz. you lose territory and you’re entitled to zero sympathy) harbor for their chief ambition the physical destruction of Israel and the physical extermination of its Jewish population.  They are willing to stop exactly nowhere in the pursuit of this goal.  They put rocket launchers in schools and hospitals.  They use their own population as human shields.  And they will never give up.

So however awful it may be to ask the question, and whatever may be the implications for us all in contemplating the issues raised by that question, I think Yglesias’s question deserves a hard-boiled look:  Which humanitarian disaster is worse: the present one or one involving the forcible removal of these people?

[Updated (05 Aug 14)]:  In fairness I ought to observe that the former Yugoslavia in fact has experienced traumatic and bloody ethnic strife since 1945.  And the reason?  Well, after World War II it did not go through the “ethnic cleansing” process that Eastern Europe did.  So when communism collapsed and there was suddenly no longer a common boot on everyone’s neck, all the checkerboard population groups looked about and . . . got down to business.  All of which would suggest that what we’re witnessing in Israel is not unique to the peoples involved or the specifics of their conflict.  Depressing.