THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WAY TO GO! | 2007-03-03

One of our commenters is downloading all the WOL stuff all the way back to 1998. Then he'll get on the blog. He is going to make it possible for me to do what David Irving does, allow anyone who wants to download it ALL.

I personally need this more than Irving does. At this moment ALL my internet work on WOL is dependent on the fragile connection I have with my bandwidth, and I have to call Kelso to straighten it out even when the blog goes down. That has caused me great worry each time it goes down. It would be an enormous comfort to me if some of you had the whole thing.

There is a story here that is worth keeping. If you will LOOK AT THE COMMENTS, especially today and yesterday, you will see commenters doing the work only I could have done. More important, they are discussing these things at a level I was only beginning to scratch at in 1998. My thinking has developed to an extent I can hardly recognize the superficial things I was writing, as he says, "in the last century."

I have picked your brains so much I could be a neurosurgeon. Like any good teacher, I have learned far, far more than you by having to explain everything over and over, from ground zero. That process alone will be a major contribution to the whole field of intellectual development.

Looking at thinkers my age who lived in earlier times, and not THAT much earlier, I see the process of intellectual calcification setting in in their late fifties, the exact time I started WOL. No matter how many admirers and former students they had, their thinking had formed, and each conversation became a restatement of what they had already said.

This was inevitable. After forty years of nailing down what they thought, every conversation had to be mostly getting the person they were talking to up to speed. That is what we see in what are called "seminars" in graduate school today. The professor may not be lecturing, but he is mostly being sure his students have the tools – Political Correctness – which are necessary for TRADE of being a college professor. Intellectual curiosity or original thought is as unwelcome as political discussion in a high school shop class.

That des the student a lot of harm, but few consider, as I must, what that does to the PROFESSOR. Trying to talk with a person who calls himself – try not to laugh – an "intellectual." It is like trying to talk to a jack-in-the-box. You say something and he comes back with an answer that was old when Neanderthal Man was an endangered species.

Actually it's WORSE than talking to a jack-in-the-box. That toy is not under the impression that he THOUGHT of the tired old reply. That is what makes it really painful, that is what takes it from silly to pathetic.

It destroys the students, it destroys the professors, but we can take it a step farther. It destroys the minds of the OPPOSITION. If you try to read conservative books you find they are the same thing. A person is being programmed to pop up with a standard jack-in-box reply to each standard liberal statement. Listening to a "debate" on television is like watching a bunch of statues with tape recorders in them.

If you look at WOL back at the turn of the century (Gee, that's GOOD!) you can see signs of the same thing happening to me. I had some excellent new ideas for the time, but if you read my 1976 A Plague on Both Your Houses! You will have EXTREME difficulty believing that it contains one new idea. You would have to do dissertation's worth of research to find that everything I said then was not already common thought. One of my original ideas began to appear in commentary at the 1976 political conventions. Another became the basis of a bet between the two top party staffers on Capitol Hill that same year.

You might have some trouble seeing that the twentieth-century ideas at the turn of this century in WOL were NEW. They are part of routine political discourse. As for me, starting in my late fifties, I have outgrown them. For that I have you to thank.

Do it for the Gipper!

POLITICALLY CORRECT DISCRIMINATION | 2000-06-24

If a white man commits a crime against a black man, he should be more severely punished for it because it is a "hate crime." If a black man commits a crime against a white man, it should not be punished more severely because that would be discrimination.

Everybody got that?

A SECRET OF REAL POWER IS NOT GETTING "CREDIT" | 2006-06-19

1) At the Council of Conservative Citizens, one speaker did a truly brilliant piece on how today's system is run by sociopaths.

A sociopath is a person who is incapable of true feelings of guilt. He has no loyalties.

Later this speaker told me he had read about that somewhere and it had gotten him to thinking on this point.

I remember that he was reading whitakeronline almost from the day I started it in 1998.

If you will look at Whitakeronline, I talked about this at enormous length starting about 1999, and every year I spoke about it at length in different contexts.

But the speech he made, the thinking he had done about this, taught me an enormous amount. He gave an example about an employer he knew whose business was going through a hard time. But that employee is NOT a sociopath. He says that he simply cannot fire his friends, workers who have made the business what it is on=ver the eyars.

This employer, like so many before him, will eventually be destroyed by his conscience. A sociopath will outcompete him by simply throwing out all his old employees and ovging his company to Mexico or bringing the Mexicans here.

He made a number of excellent observations and deductions about sociopathy which I will be telling you about later.

2) But let me proceed to the points that will be of use to you in this sequence.

Another person there is having his first experience in being a staffer. That is, the ideas be had been talking about to his chief went straightinto his chief's speeches. When you are new to that, you have an experience which is so normal, and happened to me so long ago, that it was quite an experience to hear it about to fresh from a person who has just had it.

By nature, staffing is an invisible business and unromantic. You will hear endless talk from The Greatest Generation about their first combat experience or from people about their first love affair, but everybody I talk to who is staff has been a professional staffer for a long time, so I believe this is the first time I ever heard anyone who made me nostalgic about staff work.

He said that when his boss hit on HIS points, he was very happy,but he wanted to jump up and say, "That's MY point!"

Now back to point 1), this truly brilliant speech on the fact that racial treason is part and partial of the whole disease of a sociopathic society. Was I upset that the speaker got started with my ideas, which I had repeated and analyzed so many times so long ago?

The fact is that if I worried about people "stealing" my ideas I would have been sitting and drooling in a rubber room before many of you were born.

3) one of our Blog commenters was talking about my discuussion of the drawback our present system of selecting political "commentators."

The search for professional political commenters makes sure none of them are interesting. We have a professional political discussion comunity which is made up of liberals talking to each other and only allowing in conservatives who are "respectable."

In other words, one cannot get PUBLIC exposure unless his every word can be predicted beforehand. They have no ideas, none at all. That is how you beomc a liberal or a respectable cosnervative.

But they have to find SOMETHING to say. So they have to "exploit" ideas from those of us outside the circle.

Which, with people like me around, can be made to destroy the whole PURPOSE for which this tight little circle was created in the first place.

I realized point 3) before 1960. But whereas the usual reaction to this is to bemoan it, I was not analyzing reality in order to complain about it.

In my teens I already had plenty of foreknowledge of how bad things would be.

I needed no new moaning material.

So I looked at this reality and decided to USE it. So I became an expert at reducing ideas down to the level where even conservatives could use them. My ideas had to be "stolen" to be used and made mainstream.

In other words I was a political staffer before I ever saw a professional staffer.

What I found was not the road to fame. This is the road to POWER.

Almost by definition, a political commentator has no power at all. If he isn't saying the predictable there is a line waiting around the block to say it. He is famous because he has no power.

By the same token, the president has lots of fame but almost no power. If that particular man does not get his political position right to win office, someone else will. But the position has long since been mapped out.

By people like me.

People are always using political positioning as Moaning Material.

But where does this "positioning" come from? Ther is one "position" and another "position," both too extreme for him to take. So he navigates in the exact right place between these "positions" before somebody else does.

That is the key to election. But there is no POWER in it at all.

Obviously no famous politician or political writer ever MAKES the political positions he is navigtating between.

The Professional Moaners act as if this "positioning" was done between "positions" that came from nowhere. Like everything else, these positions were created.

By people like me.

If I become tracable I become famous.

AND powerless.

BLACK AND WHITE SOUTH CAROLINIANS SHOULD UNITE ON FLAG ISSUE | 1999-10-02

When President Clinton gives a speech, look to his right. There is a flag there. It is the flag of the President of the United States. In the District of Columbia, it is not just the president who has his own flag.

Each AGENCY has its own flag. When I worked for the Office of Personnel Management, the flag of OPM flew right below the United States flag.

In South Carolina, we are told that only SOVEREIGN flags are allowed on flagpoles. But in the very city which represents True Righteousness to Confederate flag opponents, mere AGENCIES have their own standards right out there on the flagpole.

There is only the US flag and the agency flag on the OPM flagpole. Though OPM is in Washington, DC, there is no DC flag. Why? For the same reason there are no state flags on the flagpoles of Federal buildings in South Carolina. The buildings don't belong to the STATE. They are FEDERAL buildings. So why should they have state flags flying over them?

In Washington, DC, you have a Federal flag and an OPM flag. The flagpole says, "This building belongs to the United States Government, Office of Personnel Management." The South Carolina capitol building has a Federal flag and a state flag. The message is, "This building belongs to the United States Government, Division of South Carolina."

For those who support such a statement, there is obviously no room for any flags which express any special state identity. South Carolina is a division of the government in Washington. Period.

Recently the United States Supreme Court shocked everybody by announcing that the states actually have an existence separate from that of the Federal Government. The Columbia, SC, State newspaper, which is fanatically against the Confederate flag flying from the State House dome, had a cartoon showing a Confederate flag flying from the flagpole over the United States Supreme Court!

Why would a newspaper which says that a Confederate flag flying from the State House flagpole has no meaning turn right around and show one on the Supreme Court flagpole?

Obviously, because the Confederate flag HAS a meaning. It means STATE sovereignty. It means the opposite of "United States Government, Department of South Carolina."

For those who believe that the only purpose of a flag over the State House is to say, "United States Government, Department of South Carolina," there is room there for only one real flag, the FEDERAL flag. You only have a state flag below it to show which department of the Federal Government this building happens to belong to.

For the rest of us, the banners over the State House should show who WE are. And by "we," I do not mean the Federal Government. I mean that the purpose of flags on the dome of the South Carolina capitol building is to say who SOUTH CAROLINIANS are.

What heresy!

The latest South Carolina Patriot quoted state representative Robert Ford's statement that he no longer opposes the Confederate flag. Mr. Ford is a black man and an old-time liberal who worked with Martin Luther King. He now accepts the Confederate flag because WHITES see it as representing OUR white tradition in this state. He asks that the Black Liberation Flag be added, to represent the BLACK experience in our state. If we are going to quote statements of Mr. Ford of which we approve, we owe it to him to take a position on the issue that is so important to him.

I am a proud white man and a right winger, but I wrote a tribute to Stokeley Carmichael in these pages some time back (See June 26, "Stokeley Carmichael, RIP"). His politics were repugnant to me, but I was eulogizing the man, not his politics. For those of us who support the Confederate flag as a statement of our identity, the question is whether the black experience should also be represented. That is the only question we must answer.

What the symbol is is not our problem. What symbol black South Carolinians choose is their business, not mine. If we are asking black people to forget some of the uglier things that the Confederate flag flew over, then we should show the same flexibility. All we should demand is that the symbol chosen be picked by black South Carolinians.

There have been some attacks specifically on the Black Liberation Flag for what it is supposed to symbolize. That makes no difference to me. As a nationalist, I believe that black people should choose the symbol of the black experience. What they choose is none of my business. The sponsor of the Liberation Flag is Robert Ford, a black South Carolinian who was elected to represent black South Carolinians. That is what I am looking for.

Robert Ford is a representative elected by black South Carolinians. He shows the kind of courage I would be proud to be aligned with. As a black representative in South Carolina, Mr. Ford is in an excellent position to suck up to the fat cats. The big money group loves to have endorsements from genuine black leaders, and they are willing to pay for it. Ford gave all that up for the cause he supports. Mr. Ford is now one of the people whose contributor list the NAACP is looking into. There are already strong rumors of attempts by liberals to unseat Ford in the next election.

Contrast Ford's courage to the absolute wimpishness of South Carolina's so-called leaders on the right. When national Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce wanted the Confederate flag down, Governor Beasley switched sides. Every single statewide Republican leader lined up with him. I'll take Ford as my ally, thank you.

Lastly, what Mr. Ford wants represents something politics often ignores: the simple TRUTH.

In sober fact, the unique history of South Carolina would be represented by the Confederate flag and a flag to represent the black experience. That is who we are. That is the basis of South Carolina history. That is where we came from. The real history of the South is tied up in two landmark books, "Gone With the Wind" and "Roots."

Carol Rowan, a columnist who is black and very liberal, pointed out that, next to American blacks, the group that has gotten the rawest deal in the last century of this country were the Southern whites.

There are two titanic, almost unbearably bitter experiences that are at the basis of our Southern history. They are absolutely Southern. They are absolutely and exclusively American.

It is true that both these historical backgrounds are tragic. But it is also true that real history tends toward the tragic. These experiences made us what we are.

It would be my pleasure to be allied with blacks who are also proud of their heritage. I am proud of my own tradition, and I would like to be an ally of others who are. I believe in this kind of pride, and I am willing to put my money where my mouth is and support the Black Liberation Flag.

It is time to tell the world what the real history and tragedy of the Southern experience has been, all of it, black and white. We can do that if we stand together with black South Carolinians whom we respect. And if we stand together, both of our groups, nobody can ever tear our flags down.