THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

CONNECTIONS AND THE WEST | 2002-02-16

I would guess that about every Whitaker Online reader has seen every episode of the television series "Connections." It is the sort of thing we would enjoy.

Last week, I talked about how everybody always has to tell you, again and again and again, that the Chinese invented paper, gunpowder, and printing before it appeared in the West. I also pointed out that the population of China has consistently, for millennia, been equal to or greater than the total white population of the earth, so the idea that at one time or another they came up with things does not shock me out of my seat.

In other words, this constant parroting of a very limited list of Chinese inventions, which is considered the height of anti-racism here, could not be more patronizing to what anti-racists clearly consider to be the poor little yellow people.

But I believe that "Connections" had the most patronizing moment for the poor little yellow people that I have ever seen -- and that's saying a LOT.

James Burke had just breathlessly informed us, for the hundredth time I'd heard it that year, that the Chinese invented printing before the West did.

He then got that constipated look on his face, the look of Sincerity and Seriousness all Brits get when they are about to intone something from the Gospel of Political Correctness.

Burke then went into the fact that, while China came up with a lot of stuff, what happened next was the very opposite of "Connections." In the East, things got invented and then died out. In China, printing was invented and forgotten. In the West it made revolution after revolution. In China, gunpowder was, so to speak, a flash in the pan, but again it uprooted the old order in Europe. The mechanical clock was invented in China long before it appeared in the West, but it disappeared, too.

I was astonished he brought this up, as it is the basis of the assumption, by both racists and anti-racists in the West, of Oriental inferiority.

So Burke, the expert on "Connections" which makes the West so revolutionary, got that Politically Correct constipated look on his face and explained the entire history of the Far East from a PC point of view.

Burke took an old Chinese stamp, which represented -- guess what? -- the invention of printing by the Chinese before the West had it. By the way, did you know the Chinese had printing before we did?

Anyway, Burke took this stamp which showed the Chinese invention of printing, and stamped a single word, "Tao."

He explained that the only reason the entire Orient had stagnated, including Korea, Japan, Mongolia and all the rest, was because one Chinese philosopher had written one book. This book, Burke announced with that constipated frown, told Chinese that they must forever follow Nature. Tao means "the way," Burke explained, and that one book totally got rid of the whole idea of connections in the East and caused the stagnation of everybody who has epicanthric eyefolds and lives in Asia.

As far as I can tell, I am the only person who was completely shocked by the fact that a grown man would say that.

THE GREATEST GENERATIONS ANTI-AMERICAN ACTIVITY | 2010-12-05

In the 50s I was reading one of those popular paperback books about a macho tough detective like Mike Hammer that was so popular at the time. The first pages were always about how touch the guy was.

The Macho Man described himself as having an unset broken nose Like a Real man, his broken nose was "From the War, not the police action." Korea was a police action, not a declared war, and no member of the Greatest Generation ever let you forget it.

I had a suspicion that the Veteran's Hospital had separate places for wheelchairs of the Real Men who had gotten crippled in the Real War and the wimps who got that way in Korea.

Those who are used to magazine stands today would not recognize the ones we had in the 1950's. There were some with titles like Argosy, but they were all carbon copies of one called Men, which featured a scantily-clothed, bound woman on the cover and usually it was Nazis torturing her.

Half the magazine stand at least consisted of those magazines, which one of my buddies labeled Meaty Men's Magazines. Today a label like that would apply to queer stuff.

This genre is not even remembered today, but BBG will remember when they constituted the bulk of the section where you now find everything from stereo mags to news mags.

The generation that demanded those publications liked photos of The War that showed dirty, exhausted soldiers in the War with beards on their faces and cigarettes in their mouths.

Today's young soldiers with their neatness and cleanliness are often looked on by the GG as kids playing soldier.

In fact, now that Basic has to do something besides beating every last atom of moral courage out of every recruit, those young guys really are soldiers. I have known people who fought for all sides in World War II, and I have never heard a good word said about Americans as soldiers other than by Americans.

In fact, if he Italians had not become the joke of the War, American soldier jokes would have dominated.

Yes, today's army has women in it. But their training is TRAINING. Instead of weeks dedicated to knocking every ounce of actual manhood out of recruits by humiliating and exhausting them, they must fill that time with real training.

My guess is that five of today's soldiers could clear out a platoon of the rabbits the old sadistic training put out.

It has been estimated that about 20% of the soldiers in the average big WWII battle did 80% of the shooting. You won't find that sort of disproportion in today's army.

Those newsstands were just another way the WWII generation tried to convince itself it was Macho Man.

But what I am criticizing is not those soldiers. What I am attacking is the lesson they brought from it, the idea that being humiliated and beaten down makes one Macho Man.

As H.L. Mencken said, Americans are generally lousy soldiers. You don't have to give a European Obedience Training. His whole life, his whole outlook, is Obedience. Those who cease to obey their Uppah Clahss instantly begin to obey the Intellectuals and become socialists.

This is where our problems have their basis. Those who bitch about the Boomer Generation and so forth are concentrating on Americans who were raised with the World War II Disease.

A whole generation of Americans was fanatically dedicated to the idea that groveling was what a Real Man did.

You can't get more un-American than THAT.

RUSH LIMBAUGH, BEEN THERE, DONE THAT | 2003-10-11

Rush is right. There is nothing heroic about being hooked on drugs.

Yes, Virginia, I did THAT wrong, too! I went through recovery and "the program" for a long time.

It can't be just a matter of Will Power and Courage. The death rate in recovery is enormous, and a lot better men than I am died trying to dig their way back from addiction.

You might think that people with a low level of natural drive would get hooked on stimulants, "uppers." You might think that people who are too "up" would take calming drugs to get "down." It's just the opposite.

In my high-pressure occupation I used stimulants to keep working day and night. In high-pressure places like Hollywood and Capitol Hill it is the stimulant cocaine that is popular. Over a century ago Conan Doyle had his wildly aggressive Sherlock Holmes using cocaine, not opium or morphine.

So I tend to think that Rush fell into his drug overuse by accident. I don't think he would naturally choose the drugs he did because they are "downers." He could not stop using them after they were prescribed.

This "uppers" and "downers" business is not an absolute rule.

Anybody who states an absolute rule about addiction is a self-righteous moron or he is somebody who gets paid for his opinions.

And he probably lies about other things, too.

IF YOU NEED ANY MOLEHILLS YOU NEED TO MAKE MOUNTAINS OF, I'M YOUR MAN! | 2016-10-02

The establishment hates Trump because he is questioning the whole set of assumptions the establishment has sneaked into American thinking.

Trump says we must question immigration. The establishment says that we owe the world immigration for the immigrants' sake.

The establishment says we were immigrants so we have no right to enforce immigration law.

The establishment says that we must find any place that has "too many White people"  and use immigration and "diversity" to make them less White.

The establishment knows that if we even DISCUSS these insane ideas, they will collapse.

This insanity cannot survive ANY open discussion.