THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I am always bothered when someone says, "The only hope we have" or the like. When someone says something like that, I get the feeling they are simply in another world. Our "only hope" of WHAT?

The survival of our race is dependent on a biological revolution, on Russian nuclear potential, on a hundred things in political actions and reactions and the biological revolution we have no idea about.

A popular news magazine lately had quoted an editorial about how Americans do not understand that identity is serious business in this world. It was not specifically about race, but the emphasis in the article was that Americans expect that Iraqis, for example, will forget their little mullahs and so forth and think like melting pot Americans. Americans cannot understand the Russo-Georgia problem for the same reason.

It said that American foreign policy is fatally flawed because it cannot understand that what a melting-pot mentality sees as mere details, ethnic identity, is what other people DIE for.

It was such a simple devastating observation I thought it came from ME!

It bothers me when WE get provincial. Let the3 paid commentators talk about "the only hope" in some limited sense. This kind of limited thinking is all right for the robots who get paid to see the world in terms the average clown has been trained to think in, but it is not even excusable for a member of BUGS.

I find today's history books boring because they always obsess on proving that any character they are talking about was thinking in today's terms, in terms of Political Correctness, in terms of the Modern Truth. What is fascinating about history is that the people were thinking in entirely DIFFERENT terms, "no one is really talking about history. They are discussing other people's PRESENT DAY," and 1815 was as much a "present day" as 2008 is. So when a writer is trying to squeeze other people's present from the year 1800 into a modern Marxist or "conservative" frame of thinking, they miss all the adventure, all the mind-bending fun of putting themselves in that past that is "a foreign country."

Those who get paid for bending things that way miss the fascination of realizing that they, who see "reality" as what is going on right now, are actually just one more phase, one more part of the parade that keeps marching on.

It is actually funny to watch people in each age think that everything was leading to THEM It is puzzling to think that, after all those hundreds of "inevitables" and Modern Thinkings that we see in history, THIS ONE can think It is where everybody was headed, that IT represents Modern Thought. If there is one thing anybody who is acquainted with history knows that there is no magic to the word, "This is 1896" or "This is 2008." That is exactly like saying, "This is New York" or "This is FRANCE!" It is provincialism, not identity, but REAL provincialism.

There is no SINGLE battle TODAY. It is really true that "This too shall pass." The idea that something would upset the order of post-Napoleonic Royalist Europe was as alien in its day as the idea that anything will somehow "defeat" the melting pot mentality of today.

But the fact that it EXISTS means it is dated.

"Our only hope" means that you honestly think you know what will MATTER in a decade or two.

History says you don't.

Race is eternal. The "Year of Their Lord 2008" means no more than "This is the 1960s," which once meant EVERYTHING to a whole generation.

We know a precious few truths. For some reason, white places are consistently good. White "civilizations" do not go into the commode of history. Your manic depression and mine does not affect reality.

Tell the truth. Fight the fight. This sounds idealistic, but it is really the only approach that is not so silly it is hilarious.