Whites Aren’t Hated for Slavery but for Making America and the West

In “Why the Jews?” my book on anti-Semitism, there is a chapter on anti-Americanism. My co-author, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, and I long ago understood that many of the reasons for Jew-hatred and America-hatred were the same.

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America-haters and Jew-haters resent the enormous influence both nations have had on the world, have contempt for their belief in being Chosen, and dismiss the Bible as irrelevant and even malevolent.

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The question for the America-hater, just as for the Jew-hater, has been: How do we destroy them? What has always rendered anti-Semitism unique among ethnic and religious hatreds was its goal of extermination. No other ethnic bigotry is exterminationist. Regarding America, the left does not seek to exterminate Americans; the idea is ludicrous since most of those on the left who loathe America are themselves American. What the left does very much seek is to destroy America as we have known it — the capitalist and Judeo-Christian enclave of personal freedom.

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The fact is that, just as did the ancient Jews, the Americans made something unique: the American experiment in freedom. And it succeeded beyond even its founders’ dreams. {snip}

And who created this unique place of liberty, opportunity, and unequaled, widespread affluence? More than any other group, it was the WASP, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I say this as neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant. Catholics, Jews, nonbelievers, and members of every faith, ethnicity, and race (blacks, in particular) made major contributions; but it was the WASP, more than any other group, who made America. And for that reason, America-hatred is WASP-hatred and, more broadly, white-hatred.

The idea that whites’ unique achievements — in making America, in music, art, literature, and the sciences — means that white people are intrinsically superior is absurd. Hitler was also white, as was Joseph Stalin, as are most American mass-murderers. Those facts are no more a commentary on whites than Johann Sebastian Bach or Leonardo da Vinci being white is a commentary on whites.

Whites made the country and the greatest civilization — not because they were white, but because of the values they held. Hatred of the white is ultimately hatred of those values.

Given what the WASP has achieved in the West and in America, it takes extraordinary levels of dishonesty and ingratitude to be anti-white. But neither truth nor gratitude is a left-wing value.