Deconstructing Obscenities and Raising Complexities

This week's obscenity: “White Supremacy” which we ALL agree and feel very secure in considering, don't we, very disgusting?

It’s a fact of an almost evolutionary nature that any cultural space is bound to be occupied by a dominant culture as a result of the displacing manoeuvres that fighting for control of that space always involve. This is as true in human affairs as animal ones as we are not so high-minded as to be above such natural selection and survival of the fittest. The word “white”, in cultural terms means the culture that obtains in Europe and most of America. What does 'white' culture represent? In Europe and most of America it represents a highly successful culture based on Enlightenment values and the Judeo-Christian tradition with its emphases on morality and, equally, mercy and forgiveness, the rule of law, and successfully evolved political and legal institutions. It so happens that this culture was evolved, generally, by people with white skins. Hence the name I give it. To enable it to evolve there were times when ‘white’ European culture was obliged to be militant to survive as at the battles of Tours (732), Lepanto (1571), Vienna (1683) and the Siege of Vienna (1529). It was this that made it ‘supreme’ and, in a sense, to use modern parlance, we are all 'unconscious' white supremacists benefiting from those times.

Is it, then, the ultimate condemnation to be a white supremacist? Of course the Ku Klux Klan are the quintessential white supremacists. The objection to them is that they don’t practice the values of the ‘whiteness’ I describe above. They substitute for its cultural and intellectual creed a literal genetic racial creed, and refuse those who are not literally white biologically the opportunity to join white culture insisting, instead, on a spurious racial purity. For them whiteness is real skin colour rather than a quality of mind evolved by white people. Having said this they come from a place that noticed and appreciates the special value of my version of original white culture and their whole programme sprang from this appreciation. This means they are a mixture of bad and good things. All of this, of course, makes the world a more complicated place than it might at first seem. It's certainly much harder to know who to revile for being repulsive through and through.