From Cannon Fodder to Privileged Elite
A fairytale of whiteness created from the ashes of history
In 1999, a bookstore in the Czech Republic had only one book for sale in English. It was slim with a black cover, seemingly self-published. Inside pages unfolded the little-known experience of Eastern European Romas being rounded up and sent to concentration/extermination camps, along with the other designated undesirables. As difficult as it may be to believe, survivors found the camp located in the Czech Republic (and run by locals) even more sadistic than the camps run by the Germans. An unforgettable passage recounts Roma women being given soap to wash themselves. The women did not use the soap to wash; they consumed it. Guards had told them the soap was made from the remains of their children boiled down. While their physical fate was controlled by the guards, their spiritual faith was not. By consuming the soap, the women sought to embody the essence of their children, creating an act of holy Christ-like spiritual communion.
In Ireland, a museum dedicated to the ‘Great Hunger’ from 1845-52 (not to be confused with the Great Famine which came 30 years later) contained various informational placards. Like the Roma passage, one memorable placard proved more harrowing than the rest. It described that hunger became so rampant in parts of Ireland that cannibalism erupted - including the consuming of one’s own dead children. A letter by a parish priest chronicles, with neither judgement nor horror the following: "In the village of Drimcaggy four were dead together in a poor hut – brother, two sisters, and daughter. The flesh was pulled off the daughter's arm and mangled in the mouth of her poor dead mother – her name was Mary Kennedy.”
The famine was linked to a potato crop due to a mold infection. Potatoes are not native to Ireland but soon after their introduction, they became a food staple for the rural poor. Unlike other crops, potatoes could be cultivated on the small plots of land allotted to them in the British semi-feudal system.
While the potato crops failed, other crops, and husbandry, continued. Not only did they continue, they continued to be exported. Livestock, butter, peas, beans, rabbits, fish and honey were sent from the shores of Ireland to Britain and elsewhere. Over one million died during the famine reducing the population of over 8 million to over 6 million. Another million or so emigrated. Not everyone saw this as a bad outcome. “The attitude among many British intellectuals (was) that the crisis was a predictable and not-unwelcome corrective to high birth rates in the preceding decades and perceived flaws, in their opinion, in the Irish national character.”
The Irish were not the only ones on the European continent to be pushed to the furthest realm of human conduct by starvation. While nature precipitated the famines of Ireland, the 1932 famine in Ukraine was cultivated by human hands under the orders of Stalin. It too has a name: Holodomor which means Holod: hunger - Mor: death. Like Ireland, the victims were farmers. Unlike the rural poor Irish, the victims of the Ukrainian famine had a long history of farming self-sufficiency and prosperity. These farmers had resisted the ‘collectivism’ that had already captured the rest of the Soviet Republics. Stalin’s response was to crush traditional Ukrainian family farming, with all its cultural appendages, and replace it with ‘collectivist farming’ where allegiance was to the State. This would then ‘emancipate individuals’ from profit motive - a goal much heralded by US intellectuals. It was, despite the spin by New York Times Journalist Walter Duranty among other progressive apologists in the US, an intentional act of genocide that left by some estimates, 10 million dead. Mass starvation led the Ukrainians to the same unthinkable path as the desperate Irish - cannibalism as a ‘means’ for survival.
While journalist Malcom Muggeride sought to bring the atrocities to the World’s attention, the progressive publication Nation Magazine gushed over Duranty’s reports from '“a great nation in the making.” While Duranty sang the praises of Stalin, private communications revealed he knew of the slaughter. But as he rationalized with chilling disregard for the murdered victims, “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
The above are just a few isolated incidents. European history is replete with the pouring of blood of those who are ruled whether for land, for religion, or for social/economic experiments. Escaping their fate of being pawns in brutal games of chess meant leaving their homelands, many for the United States. By the mid-1800s, advances in ship construction allowed for more cargo - the cargo of desperate people hoping for a better life. Ships were aptly nicknamed ‘floating coffins’ as a large portion of cargo died in route, sometimes as high as 30%. The ‘cargo’ was then dumped into a land that welcomed their cheap labor but not the babble of languages they brought nor their immense poverty that sullied the landscape.
The ‘lived brutality’ was weaved into Upton Lewis’s fictional tale ‘The Jungle’ (1906.) It helped percolate the suffering of others into the social consciousness. But it was new technology that truly brought their woes to light. This technology was the ability to capture the images of young boys with black faces who worked the coal mines with its dust and darkness, or of small girls perched on stools to work the industrial looms located in dirty factories. These photographs, and those of their families with exhausted physically broken parents, moved the public that change was necessary.
While the anguish and suffering of the immigrants was real, these immigrants brought hope that the mechanics were there to change their fate. The United States promised a land of riches, and with tenacity, the immigrants demanded this promised vision become reality. And it did. It was not overnight. It was not easy. And it was not welcomed, but it came. Whereas many first generation immigrants never escaped terrible poverty, it was possible that their children could. (This is the story of my maternal grandmother who, one of nine children, was permitted two years of high school because hopes were pinned on her.)
Now the memories of these immigrants who suffered and sacrificed are now being erased for the ‘common good’ of social justice. History is being perverted to create a fairytale that never was. The ghosts of the past are being recast by voices that say that the European blood that runs through one’s veins make them, once again, pariahs of society. The term ‘White Privilege’ is literally white-washing the struggle of those who came to this country with nothing, and who were scorned for their poverty and backward ways.
The accusations are everywhere from media to well written books. For example, inventor and writer, Kevin Ashton laments ‘the game of claims’ in the scientific world, ‘is rigged in favor of white men.’ (How to Fly a Horse - The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery) While the likes of Mr. Ashton are trying to level the playing field for past real atrocities, his analysis and conclusion is more akin to a snake swallowing its own tail smacking of the white elitism he seeks to bring down. As proof of his statement, he provides examples where male scientists failed to give credit to their female colleagues, or worse, stole their ideas and made them their own. Rivalry, jealousy, the stealing of another’s ideas and presenting as one’s own is not unique to white men. It is a dismal trait of humans. But the creation of stereotypes that envelope large swaths of a population that were never embraced with open arms does a disservice to the struggle so many faced to create a life they could call their own.
But this isn’t the only troubling aspect of Mr. Ashton’s conclusion. No one discusses the contributions to society from these dastardly white men who made their way into the upper scientific sphere. Consider the phone in one’s hand that allows us to communicate throughout the world. These devices, while often serving as silly distractions for many in developed countries, can bring real change for others. “Smartphones are seen as a huge symbol for opportunities in bridging the gap for easy access to improved healthcare, education and economic growth.” (Women Love Tech)
Our lights, our cars, our airplanes, even our flush toilets are products of men whose blood is tied to Europe and thus to whiteness. Do we really wish to suppress this ingenuity? Is it truly progress to regress the potential for innovations that could possibly serve all of humanity?
Returning to the question of ‘whiteness’ and privilege, the question that needs to be asked is, “what is the purpose of erasing the struggles of so many who entered this country? If the young knew that the Irish and the Ukrainians succumbed to cannibalism to survive, would they still deem them people of privilege? If images of the slums where Jews, Southern Italians and other ‘undesirables’ resided were shown, could the narrative continue?
What would happen if the young knew that the lineage of today’s Progressives was tethered to the Eugenics Movement and its goal to perfect humanity? What would they think of the Movement’s push to limit immigration starting in the late 1880s to its culmination in the 1924 with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act? This act slowed the migration of the foreign-born from places such as eastern and southern Europe (Russia, Poland, Italy, and the Balkans) with Catholics and Jews of those countries being particularly suspect. Why? “These populations were deemed ‘unfit’ and ‘insane’ constituted an excessively large proportion of the national population in these regions. The act all but ended immigration from East Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.” Today’s progressives surely would disown this past and its connection to the ‘Elite.’ But is disavowing tenable when the narrative is, once again, to foster hate and division?
When immigrants came to the United States, many carried with them the prejudices fostered in the countries they were fleeing. Italians looked down on the Irish, etc. etc. Within a generation much of the animoisty was gone. Perhaps living side by side forced them to transcend their prejudices? Perhaps economic need fostered cooperation? The point is that these various groups did transcend their hatred and suspicion. It is that transcendence that needs to be fostered but it has to be organic because humans are organic. We are not machines. We cannot artificially formulate human harmony by edicts. It comes from recognizing a supreme consciousness we all share that it is enveloped within each individual. When anthropologists find very ancient burial rituals, they point to the emergence of a belief in a supreme being. What is missed is that by carefully preparing a body for burial, those who did so believed in the divinity of the deceased. It is the recognition of this divinity that must be fostered going forward.
Philosopher and social critic Lewis Mumford wrote:
“If we are to create balanced human beings, capable of entering into world-wide cooperation with all other men of good will-and that is the supreme task of our generation, and the foundation of all its other potential achievement - we must give as much weight to the arousal of the emotions and the expression of moral and esthetic values as we give to science, to invention, to practical organization. One without the other is impotent. And values do not come readymade: they are achieved by a resolute attempt to square the facts of one’s own experience with the historic patterns formed in the past by those who devoted their whole lives to achieving and expressing values. If we are to express love in our own hearts, we must understand what love meant to Socrates and Saint Francis, to Dante and Shakespeare, to Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, to the explorer Shackleton and to the intrepid physicians who deliberately exposed themselves to yellow fever. …Virtue is not a chemical product… it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key. “
Sources:
https://www.irishmirror.ie/tv/new-rte-documentary-finds-evidence-23092963
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-famine
https://www.thought.com/great-irish-famine-1773826
https://library.Missouri.edu/special collections/exhibits/show/controlling-heredity/america/immigration
https://www3.nd.edu/~ehalton/mumfordbio.html
https://library.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/controlling-heredity/america/immigration
https://www.libertarianism.org/podcasts/free-thoughts/eugenics-origin-anti-immigration
https://www.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Jewish-Problem---From-anti-Judaism-to-anti-Semitism/Foundations-of-Holocaust-1924-Congress-decides-No-More-Jews-364924
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