“But I’m innocent!” cried the man. “I’m not a hater! I’m not a bigot. I haven’t hurt anyone!”

“Not true,” said the official. “You’re classified as harmful.”

He looked at his clipboard. “Yes, it says it right here. All the boxes are checked. The worst of the worst. Heterosexual. White. Christian. American. Conservative. Male. — Scum.”

He motioned toward a door. “Go on now. You’ve been parsed and defined. That’s the door for you. Leave your clothes on the table. You won’t need them.”

The guard ignored the slam of the door and the acrid smell of the room beyond. Bored, he glanced at the line in front of him.

“Next!”

               *     *     *

(click on image to see larger version)
The Blind Leading the Blind (De parabel der blinden) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
 

Some might respond to this scenario and say, “So? It’s all true. The racist, fascist, misogynist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, hateful bigot was guilty as charged. Irredeemably. No loss at all. Next!”

Some might respond and say, “Well, we don’t have to kill them. Reeducation camps are a better option. Besides, slave labor will help the economy.”

Some might respond and say, “No, camps aren’t necessary for most of them. Just lower their social credit scores to zero and take away all of their power and position. Let them live as common laborers with no social privileges at all. We just have to stop them from influencing society ever again.”

Every one of these responses is realistic and could happen in America and the West much sooner than anyone might expect.

If you think they can’t happen, read the histories of totalitarian countries and empires, including countries today that are punishing citizens in a very similar manner. Current examples include North Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the tiny country of Brunei which recently called for the stoning to death of gays.

If you think it can’t happen in America and the West, consider the reality that countries are simply made up of people. When enough people relinquish the principles of freedom, or when a country is dominated by totalitarian forces, freedom dies. Sometimes freedom is eliminated slowly, attacked by what I call creeping totalitarianism.

In 2016, actor Will Smith suggested that the views of Trump supporters should be “cleansed” from America, as reported by FoxNews in the segment: “Will Smith: ‘Cleanse’ America of Trump supporters.”

Bit by bit, starting with restrictions on free speech, totalitarianism is eating away at Western freedoms. A 2017 Breitbart.com article titled “British Police Arrest At Least 3,395 People for ‘Offensive’ Online Comments in One Year” stated:

Figures obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that 3,395 people across 29 forces were arrested last [year] under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”, in 2016.

The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, as thirteen police forces refused to provide the requested information and two did not provide usable data.

The UK policy on offensive speech is especially disturbing because it is one-sided. As the Breitbart article reports, the police ignored offensive speech that was anti-Semitic or anti-white.

You might be thinking, “I’m not a straight, white, conservative, Christian, American male, so what do I care?”

This is why you should care: No one is safe under totalitarianism.

The bad news for you and for everyone is that the type of thinking that can produce any flavor of totalitarianism will eventually be equally dreadful for all classes and categories of people. Totalitarian systems are blind to virtue. Only power matters to totalitarians—and power betrays its own.

The bad news in 2019 is that history has seen it all before, over and over again.

One of the most disturbing tragedies of the twenty-first century—the century that has lifted most of the world out of extreme poverty and has brought mind-boggling advances in technology to the entire world—is that a majority of young people around the world know almost nothing of the real history of humankind’s suffering under the heavy boot of tyranny.

Because of that knowledge deficit, many children and young adults (frequently influenced by people with ill intent) blithely divide humanity into groups of oppressors and the oppressed, defined by ever-changing rules of identity politics and intersectionality. They condemn whole swaths of society to hell without any connection to reality and without any awareness that history has repeatedly proven that their course of action will only produce more misery.

Identity politics is a Leftist system of thought that ignores the unique attributes of an individual and instead categorizes him according to his membership in various groups that often intersect with one another. Straight, white, conservative, Christian, American males are defined as the most oppressive categories of human beings.

Thus, a male is an oppressor, unless he’s a gay male, or a gay male of color, or a leftist, gay, male of color. Unless he’s opposed to the transgender ideology of gender. Then he’s an oppressor. A gay, African American male who is conservative is also an oppressor, because his conservative views remove the validity of his other “oppressed” categories.

Identity politics ruthlessly eats its own, as was demonstrated when lesbian Martina Navratilova objected to trans females in sports, recounted by The Daily Wire in the March 5, 2019 article “Tennis Legend Martina Navratilova Called A Nazi For Arguing Against Trans Athletes. She's Not Backing Down.”

A majority of universities, K-12 schools, media outlets, and Hollywood studios have adopted identity politics as their new “religious” creed and are driving American society away from its historical motto of “E Pluribus Unum: Out of many, one.” The melting pot of America, where multiple cultures united together as Americans living in the land of the free is becoming a vision of the past. It is painfully ironic and tragic that millions of immigrants still come to America expecting it to be the land of the free, but then find that their freedoms are curtailed by the tyranny of identity politics.

One such immigrant is Ridvan Aydemir, “The Apostate Prophet,” an ex-Muslim from Turkey who has experienced censorship and banning by platforms like Twitter for pointing out that Islam promotes violence. In his video “Twitter Bans Criticism of Islam,” Aydemir stated:

. . . whenever I see something like this I lose hope, I lose hope, I lose my love for the Western culture. I lose my love for this culture of freedom that seems to be dying. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised considering that a major Saudi prince is a big shareholder at Twitter, bigger than Jack Dorsey, who is a co-founder of Twitter. . . . Maybe this is the reason why Twitter acts so un-Western [sic], so un-American, so embarrassingly stupid.

The purpose behind identity politics is to create anger and resentment toward the “oppressors,” with the ultimate goal of removing those oppressors from all positions of power. Identity politics is a primary weapon employed by the Marxist Left to divide America into warring camps. “Divide and conquer” is a time-tested strategy that works. Since America has never been perfect, even though it has valiantly worked to become the freest country in world history, the Left has been able to multiply historical resentments for malicious purposes.

Racial conflict has been the keystone of the Left’s attempts to divide America. The Washington Times wrote the following in a 2016 article titled “Shakespeare portrait at Univ. of Pennsylvania removed for image of black lesbian poet: Report”:

Students at the University of Pennsylvania removed an iconic portrait of William Shakespeare located at the entryway to the English Department and replaced it with one of Audre Lorde . . .

In place of the stunning sketch of Shakespeare, students taped together 24 pieces of printer paper to produce a picture of Lorde. . . .

Lorde was a self-described “black lesbian, mother, warrior, [and] poet.” Themes such as race, gender and lesbian relationships are common throughout her work.

So yes, William Shakespeare was at one point “an old, white man” and is now a “dead, white, male”—among the worst types of white men, according to the views of racist Leftists. Was he an oppressor simply because he was white? Who did he oppress? Conversely, has he instead illuminated the hearts and minds of countless men, women, and children of every race in the world with his brilliant literary works? Of course he has.

Leftism ignores all of that and works to drive nails into the wounds of racial resentment in order to make the resentment worse. The goals of leftism are chaos, destruction, and finally totalitarianism. Leftism never builds up—it only destroys. Some of the most critical elements of human life that are missing from Leftism are love, humor, beauty, humility, gentleness, integrity, and respect.

Reparations

Leading up to the 2020 elections, many in the Democratic Party are calling for reparations for slavery. Their arguments are countered by both white and black conservative leaders who contend that reparations are not practical and are in fact impossible to adjudicate fairly.

My belief is this:

Reparations for one demands reparations for all, because all humans have ancestors who were victimized by someone. All humans also have one or more ancestors who harmed someone else. Thus, the call for reparations must be replaced by the much higher commitment of love and forgiveness in all directions. That is a path toward peace.

Let’s review the history of resentment and pain. It’s not as simple as it may seem.

Here’s a challenge: pick up almost any history book that has true scholarly accuracy and start reading. I think it’s quite reasonable to say that history is a book in which virtually every page is drenched with suffering and blood.

History is not a fun read. If one goes back far enough, it’s a pretty safe bet that every person in the world has ancestors who were killed, raped, enslaved, tortured, beheaded, and persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political views, or other factors.

It’s also a safe bet that every person in the world has ancestors who committed the above misdeeds. At least one and probably many.

Blacks were enslaved. Asians were enslaved. Hispanics and Indigenous peoples were enslaved. Whites were enslaved too, by other whites and by other races as well.

“Trade negotiations in the country of Eastern Slavs,” by Sergey Ivanov Click on image to see larger view.

Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims were enslaved. Slavery was the norm for most of human history and is still practiced today by criminal human traffickers and some orthodox Islamic groups.

Every race was victimized. Every race included victimizers.

How then should the human race proceed to dissolve the historical pains of racism, slavery, and murder?

We could discuss reparations, but shouldn’t reparations be truthful and accurate? Who is guilty? If a living person today has never harmed a person from another race or religion, are they guilty for the crimes of their ancestors? If so, which ancestors? How far does the investigation go back? Five thousand years? Is this a global process in which every country has to take stock, or does this only apply to America?

Will a white person in America who immigrated after slavery ended be held responsible for the crime of black American slavery if his or her ancestors had nothing to do with it?

Reparations for American slavery have already been offered on a massive scale, by the 320,000 white, Union soldiers who died in the Civil War (joined by 40,000 black Union soldiers), a sacrifice that freed the slaves, only seventy-seven years after the ratification of the US Constitution. Most of those white soldiers had probably never owned or even seen a slave. Yes, they fought to preserve the Union, but many fought with the conviction that slavery was evil. Were their deaths meaningless, or instead the highest reparation that a person could give?

What about the descendants of those fallen Union soldiers? Are they exempt from additional reparations? If not, why not? The United States as a whole has demonstrated—with the sacrificial blood of hundreds of thousands of white men—that as a country it has grown and matured and does indeed honor all people as sacred individuals. The sacrifices of the Civil War were finally fulfilled a hundred years later with the arrival of full civil rights, and race relations have continued to dramatically improve since the 1960s.

What about African blacks who have African ancestors who sold their neighbors into slavery? Are they guilty of supporting slavery even though they didn’t do it themselves?

Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat, black candidate for President in 2020, is a textbook example of why reparations for slavery cannot be accurate, fair, or sustainable. She’s a strong proponent of reparations, but her Irish ancestor was slave owner Hamilton Brown, whose overseer’s whipping of a slave in Jamaica was described in a 2019 article in a news website called The Federalist Papers in this way:

The sufferer, writhing like a wounded worm, every time the lash cut across his body, cried out, ‘Lord! Lord! Lord!’

What shall Senator Harris do? Her proposal of reparations for slavery would place her in the position of both giving and receiving reparations. She might say: “I had nothing to do with Hamilton Brown’s ownership of slaves!” She is correct, of course. It might also be true that her genealogical relationship with Brown came about because Brown had an unwelcome relationship with a slave—further evidence that Kamala Harris is not responsible for the sins or crimes of her ancestors. This is an example of why reparations for actions committed by one’s ancestors is an unworkable concept.

Looking toward Africa, we can ask about a young Hutu man whose family left Rwanda before the Hutus started slaughtering Tutsis. Is he responsible for the crimes of other Hutus?

If ancestral and collective guilt is a valid reality then it must be defined as a global reality. If anyone is guilty for the crimes of their ancestors and their groups, then everyone is guilty because no one can state that their ancestors never did anything that was harmful to others. This applies across all groups, including the two major groups of humans: men and women. Not every man was an evil patriarch and not every woman was innocent. At the level of the individual, harm and pain exist on both sides. This is not a popular view, and some women will be outraged that I might suggest this—as a man. But bear with me . . .

Revenge for ancestral and group crimes is a zero-sum gain. An eye for an eye really does make the whole world blind. What then can we do about the reality of the suffering in human history that has been inflicted upon the innocent by aggressors?

Unless we all want to end up blind and dead, the best way to proceed is to support the healing and harmony of the entire human race. How can that healing take place?

It is clear that we are not our ancestors. We have our own thoughts and beliefs. We’re responsible for our own actions. We cannot control or be responsible for the actions of others. However, if we admire the virtues of love and kindness, we should all be able to say that historical crimes against others should never have happened. Thus, we can feel compassion for the historical pain felt by everyone.

We can and should learn from history—from the mistakes of our ancestors as well as their good, loving, and creative actions. It is entirely appropriate to feel sadness that our bad ancestors harmed others. It is perfectly fine to express sympathy and apology to the descendants of the victims harmed by our ancestors or by our groups. It is also vital to remember that many of our ancestors were admirable and virtuous people. The goodness that we see in the world today has developed based on the efforts of our ancestors.

It is incredibly important for everyone to accept the truth that all of us have complex and very problematic ancestral histories. Essentially, we all have to apologize to each other for the long and bloody history of the human race. With the global acknowledgment that we all have faulty histories, humility can begin to flower, and with humility, forgiveness and love can grow.

The only way to untangle the pain of history is for all of us to acknowledge that all of us have historical pain and all of us need to forgive and love everyone.

It is also profoundly obvious that all humans, of every race and both genders, need to mature in their capacity to love others, to understand and feel sensitive to others, and to respect the sacred, individual rights of others.

I believe that the defining questions of the twenty-first century will include these:

What is a person? Who are we? Are we bound to historical and group identities, or are we unique in the universe, birthed as sacred and irreplaceable masterpieces? Have we randomly evolved or have we been created by a divine and loving intelligent source?

If we are defined only by the sins of our historical and group identities, the game is over, and our century will inevitably be soaked in blood, much like the twentieth century and all the centuries that went before.

I choose to believe instead that every individual was birthed by God as a sacred masterpiece who has a choice now to turn away from hatred, strife, and violence and support the healing of the human race.

If we remember that every person was once a newborn infant who grasped his or her mother’s bosom with an innate desire for comfort, love, security, and peace, we may be able to look at each person with the long-range view and the higher view of the Divine.

In Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s book Strength to Love, he wrote:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

The healing of the human race requires an adjustment in the values of humanity. When love becomes the most valuable thing of all, then we do indeed have hope to abandon the revenge-driven tragedy of identity politics. We should not forget these timeless words by Dr. King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

We owe it to each other and we owe it to ourselves to fulfill that very real and very practical dream.