It’s extremely disconcerting to me that in the wake of Trump’s mafioso style speech at the WEF forum this afternoon that no news outlets, from what I’ve seen, have condemned the scum bag’s comments on Somalians. Though its understandable that the Greenland issue will be the thing many journalists would have been looking to, you’d think an outright, blatantly racist comment would grab the headlines. As of yet, not the case.
It is hard to imagine any other current political leader saying something similar. Maybe Javier Milei and Viktor Orban. But I don’t think Putin or even Giorgia Meloni would have such a sense of superiority or lack of self-control. But what am I talking about? Self-control isn’t the issue here. The issue is the racism itself, the lies, and the total lack of self-awareness.
If an American President was so concerned with “low IQ” people committing heinous crimes, then why not start with the inbred rednecks of Mississippi, or some other Bible-belt shithole? Now there’s some low IQ people. Maybe Trump doesn’t see it that way. Maybe he believes the Great Lie upon which much of modern Western civilisation is built. We are talking, of course, about white supremacy.
Before I get into this, I’m not someone who uses terms like “white guilt” or even “white privilege”. I’m not going to apologise for happening to be white or for colonialism. How can I? And this isn’t because I didn’t do it or I wasn’t there. It’s just because I can’t. What would it even mean? What would it change? What would it accomplish? Nothing.
Terms like “white privilege” are essentially the language of American Liberalism. There’s a constructed falsity about them that makes me cringe. It’s something only an American mind would come up with, being so digestible it could fit on a t-shirt and sold. Another commodification, one that is meaningless and completely self-defeating.
My only role in the fight against racism and white supremacy is to call out the Great Lie, and to call it out all the time. Being from Manchester, England, I am surrounded by the Great Lie all the time. Manchester was the centre of the Industrial Revolution, an economic powerhouse at the height of the British Empire. As English people, we’re taught that our role in the Industrial Revolution makes us great. As Mancunians we’re supposed to be proud of it. We work dead hard, we’re grafters, we’re the backbone of the world, and all that shite.
Yet Manchester’s history is actually a dark one. It’s not one to be celebrated at all. Firstly, going back to its Industrial origins, Manchester’s nickname at that time was ‘Cottonopolis.” Chosen because of the wet climate, Manchester was home to numerous factories dealing in the textile industries in which cotton was a vital commodity. Now where did the cotton come from? The American South. And who was picking the cotton? We all know who.
That is just one of numerous examples of things that together make up the Great Lie. In essence, the Great Lie says that Western civilisation is great just because. We’re intelligent, innovative, we simply produced great minds, The Enlightenment blah, blah, blah. That’s just the polite opinion, by the way. The less charming opinion, and what has resurfaced in the bluntness of its assertion, is that the West is innately better. European countries and their colonial offspring’s were more advanced, making it inevitable that Western civilisation would dominate others. Proper law of the jungle, dog-eat-dog stuff. This frame of mind says “Yeah, slavery was bad but every civilisation in history had slaves and at the end of the day it’s not our fault that our ancestors were more technologically advanced and therefore stronger than yours.” It is, of course, pure bullshit. It’s a cop-out, a deflector from the real truth, that white people have created a better world.
That’s worth reemphasising. That white people have created a better world. So, it’s not like every white person whose world view is moulded by the Great Lie thinks white people are inherently better in all ways than non-white people, its that white nations have created the civilised world. Yes, bad things were done, but that’s just how human being were. And we still would be, if it wasn’t for our civilised ancestors.
Many of our ruling classes believe the Great Lie, yet are not, explicitly or consciously, at least, white supremacists. The King of England believes the Great Lie. Prince William believes the Great Lie. Keir Starmer believes the Great Lie. Our schools teach kids a history of the world constructed by the Great Lie.
To challenge the Great Lie is to acknowledge that everything we know about history is in some way or another incorrect. It is to acknowledge and reconcile with the fact that the countries we were born in have terrible, shameful histories. It is to know that an exploited country like Congo should be one of the richest on Earth, rather than one of the poorest. And it is to know that we live in comfort, even relative comfort at lower-class level, compared to billions of people who were born in countries exploited for centuries by our own.
And its to know that the real “low IQ” criminals are in the White House.