I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “ethnocentric”, but I remember the context. I was in some history class and we were studying a primitive South American tribe. They lived essentially the exact same way their ancestors had thousands of years ago. Our teacher told us their civilization was equal to ours, and we should never think that any civilization was superior to any other. Doing so would be “ethnocentric”, which apparently was a belief that our society was superior to others.
The truth is, when we were first admonished about this I
remember thinking something wasn’t quite right about it, but as a kid in
school, who was I to argue with the teacher?
It was only years later that I would realize that teachers weren’t all
knowing and that that little piece of wisdom was anything but.
Of course almost no one uses the phrase ethnocentric
anymore. No, it’s been replaced by the ubiquitous and multifunctional moniker
“racist”. Different word, but it means
basically the same thing, everything white or western is bad and anything else,
whether color or culture, is good.
Whatever the name, the lesson was: Every society is equal.
But is that true? No. While common sense suggests it’s
wrong, how does one really know? Who decides?
Well, if we left it to academia and western elites to decide, we’d all
be wearing dashikis, praying towards Mecca five times a day, eating out of a
communal plate with our hands and then wiping our posteriors with those same
hands. Not that the elites themselves would be doing any of that, but they
coerce the unwashed masses into following such diverse practices.
As for deciding, the majority have already decided. Are
there millions of people risking their lives every year to illegally migrate to
Africa or South America or South Asia? No. Where do the millions of people
seeking to flee conflicts in Syria or Libya or anywhere else in the Muslim
world go? Do they go to any one of the 50 plus Muslim majority nations? Other than passing through Turkey on their
way to Greece, the answer is largely no. Where do those seeking to escape
economic malaise throughout much of the southern hemisphere go? Mexico City or Timbuktu? Unlikely. Where do
CCP or Hamas or banana republic leaders send their kids to be educated and
live? Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or Burkina
Faso or Vietnam? No, they send their
kids to Paris, London and New York.
But the history! For example, India has a history going back
thousands of years. We’re told that British
rule decimated the Indian GDP, taking it from 23%
of the world’s GDP in the mid-18th century to less than 4%
today. That’s obviously a story of western civilization destroying a
superior civilization, right? Not so
much. While the Brits did bring substantial and sometimes negative changes to
the Indian subcontinent, the reality is, India’s share of GDP shrank largely because
western
advances grew world GDP at an extraordinary rate never before seen. To put that in perspective, between
1750 – about the time Britain took control over India – and 1990 the GDP of
the entire 3rd world grew by about 15 times. During that same period, Britain and the
developed world grew GDP by 123 times. India didn’t lose it’s economic
powerhouse status because Britain destroyed its economy, it lost its status
because the west became an economic juggernaut, powered by the advances of the Industrial Revolution
building on those of the Scientific Revolution
and the Age of
Enlightenment, all of which were western.
So, why is it that for half a century elites have been telling us that westerners are not allowed to take pride in the advances of their civilizations or celebrate the forces that brought about unprecedented freedom and prosperity?
Because they are spoiled, entitled brats who are ashamed of
the prosperity their forebearers created.
P.J. O'Rourke perhaps put it best. “At the core of liberalism is the
spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding,
ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling
brats.”
Like the children of so many successful entrepreneurs, those
boomer elites (the
fount of today’s liberalism) found it hard to live up to the achievements
of their progenitors. In the century
before 1970 western civilization literally revolutionized the world. Automobiles. Telephony. Radio. Television.
Movies. The structure of DNA. Flight. Heart transplants. Microchips. Nuclear
power. The electric light bulb. And much more. They even put a man on the moon
and brought him back safely! Since then? Not so much a revolution as changing
the curtains. Sure, the PC, the Internet
the iPhone, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook have impacted our lives, but nothing
revolutionary on the scale of many of those from the previous century. No time travel. No teleportation. No cure for cancer. Not even roads without potholes!
Thus, America and the west have experienced a half century
of nepo leftists wanting to make their own mark by rebelling against the very
ideas that provided their prosperity in the first place. And the easiest way of
doing that? Celebrating anything and everything that is not part of western
success. A religion where women are second class citizens, where rape victims
are stoned to death for the crime of being raped and where freedom of speech
and religion are anathema? Absolutely!
Nations where Communist dictators kill and imprison political opponents while
delivering economic calamity to their citizens? More please. Countries where blood is the coin of the
realm and whoever is the least morally constrained is the tyrant in
charge? Nobody’s perfect… but at least
they don’t have billionaire capitalists killing the earth with their private
jets.
And it’s not just inter-civilizational it’s intra- civilizational
as well. Here in the United States we’re told that things like punctuality,
hard work and proper English – things that have been keys to success for
generations – are
white supremacy, while in Denmark advertisements
are encouraging whites to have kids with non-whites. For half a century the lesson has been: Western, European & white = bad while
anything and everything else = good.
That was wrong when they called it ethnocentrism and its
wrong today when they call it racism. After
decades of listening to elites tell us that every civilization is greater than
ours, westerners are finally pushing back as they see their countries and their
cultures shredded by hordes of third world invaders from decidedly inferior
cultures. Whether it’s the push for Sharia law or increased
crime or outsized
welfare spending, from the United States to Hungary to Italy, patriots are recognizing
that their way of life and their cultures are sufficiently elevated that they
are worth fighting for.
Finally, citizens of the civilized world are beginning to
say we’re no longer going to let you destroy that which has taken so much blood
and toil to build and has produced so much freedom and prosperity. Decades of a cancerous, elite imposed reverse
colonization is enough! We hear a collective “We like the countries our
ancestors built and we’ve decided we’d like to keep them, thank you.”
The only question is,
is it too little too late? Only time
will tell.

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