The Inverted World

“The white race is the cancer of human history.”1 Susan Sontag’s words of 1967 express the central idea of the age that we live in. In the contemporary view, which I will dub the “whites as cancer” myth in honor of Sontag, whites are a destructive and malign force that is the major source of the world’s suffering. Fifty years ago, the West saw its history as the gradual ascent from barbarism to civilization and from dogmatism to Enlightenment. Today, the West sees its history as the gradual, but still imperfect, conquest of racism. Racism has, in sum, become the defining feature of the West.

This website is dedicated to the proposition that what the “whites as cancer” myth turns reality on its head, or is a sort of lens that shows us an inverted world. In reality, whites are the great benefactors of humanity, and have shown throughout their history a charity, generosity, and capacity for accomplishment that do not have any parallel among the other races of man. The “whites as cancer” myth causes a pervasive distortion of reality that prevents us from understanding and dealing with the problems the West faces.

To be more precise, the myth posits that:

1. Whites are the only “racist” race. That is, they are the only race that has believed itself superior to other races, and this belief has led them to treat other races in a uniquely cruel manner.

2. White racism and imperialism are the primary explanation for the failings of non-whites.

3. Whites deserve no credit for their superior cultural achievement. Indeed, they deserve to be blamed for it, as whites only achieved cultural superiority by keeping non-whites down and by stealing cultural innovations from them.

The “whites as cancer” myth does not affect merely how we view whites. Since it posits that whites are uniquely evil, the myth causes us not only to exaggerate the evil of whites, but also minimize, hide, and apologize for evil committed by other races.

When stated as flatly as this, the myth looks like an absurdity that could never compel any credence whatsoever. Anyone who pays attention to world news knows that races other than whites do show enormous cruelty to people of other races: think of the genocide committed by Arabs on blacks in Sudan, for example. And yet, the myth persists because we so rarely bring ourselves to reflect on it: our belief in the evil of whites is so powerful that it does not occur to us to defend them from slander. Defending the white race seems like defending pure evil.

The Inverted World will be devoted to explaining the nature, causes, and consequences of this myth and to inculcating a more accurate understanding of the nature of the races, which we will call race realism. Following thinkers like J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Arthur Jensen, we believe that most of the differences in cultural achievement among the races are rooted in innate differences in intelligence and psychology. We also believe, with Tatu Vanhanen, that racial diversity leads to conflict because the races normally seek to achieve dominance over each other. Race realism has political consequences. Since many non-white groups are not suited for the type of society whites have created, and since non-whites will naturally try to achieve dominance over whites, we believe we should work to maintain white majorities in nations that currently have them. As such, we are white activists.

History Textbooks as an Example of the Myth

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One look at the Arab slave trade reveals the bias. First of all, historians believe Arabs took more Africans as slaves than whites did — from the 10th to the 19th centuries, Arabs took 14 million Africans as slaves; whites only took 11 million.7 While it is true that slaves did have certain rights in Islamic countries that they did not have in the Americas, the Muslim slave trade was just as brutal as that practiced by whites, and could also be portrayed in lurid terms. Muslims captured slaves in raids against African tribes during which captives were brutally treated. If the slave-traders decided they couldn’t use the Africans they had captured because of age or infirmity, they were put to death. So intense was the Muslim need for slaves that it frequently resulted in full-scale warfare against African tribes, with all the death and destruction that is in the nature of war.8 After being captured, the slaves were chained together and taken on long marches across the Sahara desert to markets. Due to thirst, malnutrition, disease, exhaustion, and the attacks of bandits, most of the captives did not survive the march. Indeed, for every slave who finished the march, three or four died along the way. The route the slave-drivers took was strewn with skeletons.9 Once they reached the markets, the traders practiced a form of cruelty against many male slaves unknown in the West: castrating them to make them eunuchs.

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European colonialism, according to world history textbook orthodoxy, is the source of all African woes. Patterns of Interaction states, for example: “The main reason for Africa’s difficulties was the negative impact of colonial rule. European powers did little to prepare African colonies for independence. In fact, the lingering effects of colonialism undermined efforts to build stable, democratic states.” Blasted African economies, ethnic warfare, genocide, and developmental barriers … may be mentioned in a brief and cryptic way; these conditions are neither explained nor cast in dire language.14

Textbooks also fail to give whites credit for their unique cultural achievements. First, as we have already seen, they state that it is colonialism and racism that have prevented non-whites from achieving economic and social parity with whites. Another way of minimizing white achievement is simply ignoring it. While giving glowing, and often fallacious, accounts of the achievements of non-whites, textbooks simply do not discuss what whites have accomplished. Reviewing a world history textbook, William J. Bennetta of the Textbook League, an organization that criticizes bias in textbooks, asks,

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Finally, textbooks hide the uniqueness of white cultural achievement by exaggerating the achievements of other races. Ravitch gives as an example a passage from the American history textbook American Odyssey on the Anasazi Indians of the Southwest. The book presents the tribe as a Utopian society of egalitarianism and technological genius. Without kings, chiefs, or other authority figures, these Indians built not only four hundred miles of “roads and broad avenues,” but also multistoried “apartment complexes,” which were the tallest buildings in the world until larger apartment buildings went up in New York City in 1882. These claims are not sourced, and Ravitch found them impossible to confirm. She points out their improbability, however. The Anasazi left no historic records: how do the authors of the textbook know they had no chiefs? If the buildings really were taller than any others in the world, why can you find no mention of that fact anywhere outside the textbook? Ravitch found one fact that the textbook leaves out, however: many scholars have found evidence that the Anasazi practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism.17

Although the teachings of American textbooks are a particularly striking example of the “whites as cancer” myth, I could have used many other examples. As The Inverted World will document, the entertainment industry focuses obsessively on slavery, racial discrimination, and imperialism in the West, and, with a few exceptions, the message is the same: whites are the only racist race and are responsible for the sufferings of non-whites. The myth also pervades the news media: our next feature will examine the effect of the “whites as cancer” myth on the coverage of the Iraq war.

What Really Makes Whites Unique

As my title implies, the “whites as cancer” myth turns reality upside-down. Whites are indeed unique, but they are unique for their accomplishments and compassion, not for their cruelty.

To grasp the enormity of the textbooks’ distortions, we turn to Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, which measures the contribution of various cultures to science and art empirically. A full 97 percent of significant scientific figures between 800BC and 1950 have come from the West.18 Murray’s list of major discoveries in astronomy, for example, starts with Pythagoras’s discovery that the morning and evening stars are the same, continues through Copernicus’s statement of the heliocentric theory and Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe is expanding in 1918, and concludes with Fred Whipple’s work on the composition of comets in 1949. Not a single non-Western figure is included in this glorious parade. The list of central events in the history of technology shows us that the equipment of modern life is almost wholly Western in origin as well. In fact, between the 11th century and 1950, all major technological innovations, from the watch to the steam engine to the computer, came from Europe and the United States.19

Perhaps even more striking is Murray’s list of what he calls “meta-inventions” in the sciences and arts, that is, the basic ideas without which the modern nations would have been impossible. Europeans are responsible for almost all of these. Logic, the systematic study of human reasoning, is a Greek invention. The Greeks also invented the mathematical proof, upon which the whole of mathematics is founded. These two Greek inventions gave rise to the scientific method in the European Middle Ages and Enlightenment. It was Europeans who created the very concept of science: they were the first to clearly articulate the method of hypothesis and experiment and to grasp that the world had a structure that was comprehensible by mathematics. It was Europeans who first mathematically formalized the idea of probability, resulting in the science of statistics. In the arts, Europeans were responsible for the invention of artistic realism. It was the Greeks who first thought of depicting the human form as it actually appeared rather than according to stylized conventions, and Europeans of the Renaissance and Enlightenment first created the realist novel. Perspective, which adds a third dimension to painting, was a creation of the European Middle Ages. Musical polyphony, or music that has two or more melodic lines, is another; before this invention, music consisted simply of a single melody without harmony.20

Murray does not deal extensively with political philosophy, but he does mention some meta-inventions in that field as well. Among them is the Enlightenment idea that humans have certain inalienable rights, among them the right to dispose of their own persons and labor.21

Murray’s book reveals in startling clarity how high the achievements of whites tower over those of the other races of man. Certainly, other races played a role, but enlightened, modern, scientifically and technologically advanced societies are almost entirely the creation of whites. Anyone who can read Murray’s book without concluding that whites are a race with special gifts that set them apart from the rest of mankind simply isn’t being reasonable. Science, artistic realism, and polyphonic music are priceless gifts that the white race has given to the rest of the world, but when do textbooks or the movies ever make this point?

Murray’s list of meta-inventions shows whites are unique not merely in their scientific and cultural accomplishment, but also in their compassion and respect for human life and freedom. Through their creation of the concept of human rights, whites brought the world into moral modernity, just as they brought it into technological modernity through their scientific inventions.

Of course, it is true whites have engaged in their share of cruelty and slaughter. The slave trade, the Holocaust, the genocide of Indians in the New World — whites were responsible for all of these, and much else besides. And yet these atrocities hardly make whites unique — slavery and slaughter are human universals, and for every atrocity whites have committed, one can point to one just as bad in the non-white world. Was the Holocaust really worse than the Killing Fields of Cambodia? Was the slaughter of Indians in the New World really morally worse than the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda or that of the inhabitants of the Darfur region of the Sudan?

What is really unique about whites is the extent of their efforts to stop such atrocities by creating a moral philosophy that sets limits to the acceptable use of power and institutions that actualize that philosophy in the real world. Pre-modern texts like the Koran, the Old Testament, and the Homeric epics discuss slavery and slaughter in a tone that seems grotesquely matter-of-fact to us moderns, as though these were normal and unremarkable facts of human existence. Thanks to the work of white thinkers, activists, and politicians, the world can never see atrocities in this light again.

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Popularized in the English-speaking world by Thomas Paine, who argued in The Rights of Man that humans naturally have the right to liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression, the idea of the rights of man became central to abolitionism in Britain and America. For example, early 19th century Abolitionists in Britain declared slavery to be “utterly inconsistent with the inalienable rights of men.”24

Under this pressure, Britain abolished the slave trade in its territories in 1807, and the Americans, French, and Dutch soon followed suit. By 1842, all the maritime powers of Europe had outlawed the slave trade. In 1834, Britain freed all of the slaves within its territories. Not only that, but Britain took it upon itself to stop the slave trade in the rest of the world as well. British law declared all slaving ships, no matter what flag they flew under, guilty of piracy, and the British navy regularly captured them. Britain maintained a fleet of ships off the Western coast of Africa for the sole purpose of stopping the slave trade, and spent the enormous sum of £10 million between 1807 and 1837 to exterminate the traffic. Between 1810 and 1846, more than 100,000 slaves on ships captured by the British were set free.25

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The invention of abolitionism is as uniquely Western as the invention of astronomy or polyphonic music. While compassion towards members of your own ethnic group is a moral universal, abolitionism was rooted a compassion for the human race as a whole that had no parallel in any non-Western society.

Putting the World Right-Side-Up Again

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Although the “whites as cancer” myth is the fundamental belief of our time, there is no publication that makes this myth its central subject. The Inverted World will remedy this glaring gap. We will explore the many consequences of the myth; we will root out its causes; and we will show how it can be effectively combated. In furtherance of the last goal, we will show why previous attempts to express white racial interests have failed. Some of our harshest words will be reserved for white activists who have made a mockery of their cause by seeking to advance it through lies and scapegoating. The Inverted World will not spare any group just and well-founded criticism. But white activists who demonize Jews or any other group are the worst enemies of the race realist cause, and we will treat them as such.

We ask for a revolution in ideas, followed by a revolution in politics. Our ambitions are vast, but the truth requires no less. The forces arrayed against us are mighty, and the road ahead of us is terrifying, but we have reason on our side, and we can win!

References

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