Majorityrights News > Category: White Genocide: Europe

Noel Ignatiev, scholar who called for abolishing whiteness, dies at 78

Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book “How the Irish Became White” was influential and controversial, touching off a firestorm of debate.

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By SEWELL CHANDEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR, NEWS

NOV. 11, 2019 4:51 PM

Noel Ignatiev, a former steelworker who became a historian known for his work on race and class and his call to abolish “whiteness,” died at Banner-University Medical Center Tucson on Saturday. He was 78. The cause was an intestinal infarction, according to Kingsley Clarke, a longtime friend.

Ignatiev’s best-known book, “How the Irish Became White,” was immediately influential and controversial upon its publication in 1995. It touched off a firestorm of debate at the time at academic conferences and in the pages of newspapers. In time his view that whiteness is a social and political construction — and not a phenomenon with a biological basis — has become mainstream. The resurgence of white identity politics and white nationalism in recent years made Ignatiev’s arguments relevant to a new generation of readers who argued the notion that race is more about power and privilege rather than about ancestry, or even identity.

The book detailed how the Irish, who had first come to North America as indentured servants and were reviled by the more settled populations of English and Dutch Americans, became, by the mid-19th century, accepted as white. Sadly, Ignatiev argued, the Irish became incorporated into whiteness just before the Civil War, through support for slavery and violence against free African Americans. To become white, Ignatiev wrote, did not mean to be middle class, much less rich, but rather to be accepted as equal citizens and to have access to the same neighborhoods, schools and jobs as others.

“To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres instead of being confined to certain work; to Irish entrepreneurs, it meant that they could function outside of a segregated market,” Ignatiev wrote.

“To both of these groups it meant that they were citizens of a democratic republic, with the right to elect and be elected, to be tried by a jury of their peers, to live wherever they could afford, and to spend, without racially imposed restrictions, whatever money they managed to acquire. In becoming white, the Irish ceased to be Green.”

Ignatiev’s argument touched off fierce debates; critics argued that he went too far in conflating racial and class privilege. He went on to found and co-edit a journal, known as Race Traitor, whose motto was “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” His ideas seemed extreme for the time; critics called Ignatiev — who was Jewish — divisive, even self-hating.

At a 1997 conference at UC Berkeley, on “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness,” Ignatiev argued that “whiteness is not a culture but a privilege and exists for no reason other than to defend it.”

“You’re white,” a New York Times interviewer asked Ignatiev in 1997. “Do you hate your own hide?”

Ignatiev replied; “No, but I want to abolish the privileges of the white skin. The white race is like a private club based on one huge assumption: that all those who look white are, whatever their complaints or reservations, fundamentally loyal to the race. We want to dissolve the club, to explode it.”

Ignatiev urged white people: “Be reverse Oreos. Defy the rules of whiteness — flagrantly, publicly. When someone makes a racial slur in your presence, say, ‘You probably think I’m white because I look white.’ Challenge behaviors that reproduce race distinctions.”

The interviewer continued: “You’d do this in a bar full of rednecks?”

Ignatiev replied: “That depends a lot on the situation. Challenging people on their whiteness can lead to harsh confrontations, even blows. Sometimes that can’t be helped. But since we don’t accept labeling people, I’d ask you: What’s a redneck?”

At a 1997 conference at UC Berkeley, on “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness,” Noel Ignatiev argued that “whiteness is not a culture but a privilege and exists for no reason other than to defend it.”

Heavily influenced by Marxism, Ignatiev said the journal’s purpose was to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking and unmaking of whiteness. “My book on the Irish was the story of how people for whom whiteness had no meaning learned its rules and adapted their behavior to take advantage of them,” he told Harvard Magazine. “Race Traitor was an attempt to run the film backwards, to explore how people who had been brought up as white might become unwhite.”

Ignatiev’s ideas have continued to be controversial, particularly as race has returned to the center of American politics.

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Another Misunderstander Of Islam strikes

4 Oct., by Irish Savant

Where’s Inspector Clouseau when you need him? Because the famous bumbling French detective could hardly do worse than the Paris police investigating the recent mass killing at their HQ. They’re totally baffled as to the killer’s motive.

INVESTIGATORS ARE COMBING an IT staffer’s computer today for clues as to why he stabbed four colleagues to death at police headquarters in Paris. The 45-year-old man killed three men and a woman in a frenzied 30-minute attack that ended when he was shot in the head. A search of the couple’s house found no evidence that the man, who converted to Islam about 18 months ago, had been driven to his criminal deed by radical religious ideology. Shortly after the killings, Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz said anti-terror investigators were not involved in the murder probe. All possible motives were being examined, sources have said, including the scenario of a personal conflict at work.

Which probably means that the sleuths failed to find a statement from the killer (a black immigrant from Martinique) explicitly stating ‘in the Name of the all-merciful Allah I will go in to work in the morning and and stab everyone I can find’. Therefore nothing to do with the Religion Of Peace. Just another Misunderstander Of Islam. He must have thought that when the Koran enjoined him to ‘Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them’ (Qur’an 2:191) the ‘sacred’ text meant, well, kill the unbelievers wherever you find them. And like most misunderstanders he seemed, apart from the mass murdering bit, to have been a swell guy. According to a fellow worshipper “he was a very quiet person. I used to see him going to the mosque but he practised (his religion) in a normal way” . Well he sure did, didn’t he? And remember Jihadi John, the notorious ‘English’ head-chopper for ISIS? He’d been described by his imam as ‘a gentle, spiritual boy’. Indeed.

So what’s to be done? Well I believe I have a solution. Reinterpret the sacred texts in the light of latest thinking and research. You know the way Pope Francis reinterpreted the Bible to mean that homosexuality and all kinds of degeneracy are fully in accord with that book’s teachings. I’ve been working hard and this is the result to date. I seriously believe that when complete it has the potential to eliminate mass murders stemming from misunderstanding the Religion Of Peace.

My initial attempt.

Quotation: “Make war on the infidels living in your neighborhood.” Qur’an 9:123

Scholastic reinterpretation: “Make friends with your infidel neighbours”.

Quotation: “Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam” Qur’an 5:33

Scholastic reinterpretation: “All discussion on religion should be open and tolerant.”

Quotation: “Punish the unbelievers with garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water;melt their skin and bellies.” Qur’an22:19

Scholastic reinterpretation: We’re working on that one. But meanwhile lads lay off the hooks and rods and melting bellies and all that stuff.

So gentle reader, do you think it’ll work?

Sea Watch captain Carola Rackete brought murderers, rapists and torturers to Italy

By ARTHUR LYONS 30 September 2019

Carola Rackete, the infamous captain of the NGO migrant transport vessel Sea-Watch 3, brought three men who ran a migrant detention center in Libya where migrants were raped, tortured, and murdered.

According to a report by Il Giornale, three of the 40 migrants who were picked up by Rackete’s boat are men who’ve been accused of raping, torturing, and murdering people in Libya. The suspects are said to have been arrested in the reception center in Messina, Italy.

Police had originally concealed the arrests which reportedly occurred on the same day that the migrants disembarked from the ship. “The captain transported three immigrants accused of torture on the Sea Watch,” Franco Grilli of Il Giornale writes.

“We cannot rule it out, but we have no precise information,” Sea Watch spokesman Ruben Neugebauer told German news agency DPA about the report.

The three men have been formally accused of ‘a criminal association dedicated to the management of an illegal prison center’, complete with torture, rape, kidnapping and even murder.

In response to the news, Italy’s most trusted politician and leader of the national populist Lega party, Matteo Salvini, wrote: “Not only did she violate the law and ram a Guardia di Finanza patrol boat; on June 29th Carola Rackete of the Sea Watch 3 unloaded into Italy three violent migrants accused of rape, kidnapping and murder. Democratic Party (PD) parliamentarians had demanded the landing of all immigrants, including those now suspected of being ferocious criminals.”

According to Chiara Giannini, who cites ‘reliable sources’, the new interior minister Luciana Lamorgese had asked for the embarrassing news not to be published. But instead, members of the real press made the arrests public, along with the names of the three suspects – Mohammed Condè, 27, Hameda Ahmed, 26 and Mahmoud Ashuia, 24.

Condé is from Guinea, whereas Ahmed and Ashuia are Egyptian.

Statue of Bandera in Western Ukraine.

Ukrainian Nationalism and its Demons from the Past

By Sébastien Meuwissen at Visigrad Post

Poland/Ukraine – On January 1st, 2019, several thousands of Ukrainians marched in the streets of Kiev, Lviv and Khmelnytskyï (Western Ukraine) to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Stepan Bandera. These past years, there were plenty of similar processions in Ukraine, in particular in the Western part. Thousands of young Ukrainians take part in these nationalists marches, where they wave flags picturing Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Even though they contributed to the creation of an independent Ukraine, the two men have been guilty of many war crimes in their collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Nowadays Bandera and Shukhevych remain controversial historical figures. For some they are national heroes and for others they are criminals.

A territory coveted by its powerful neighbours

In a matter of territorial size, Ukraine is the third biggest country in Europe (behind Russia and France). The name “Ukraine” (in Ukrainian: Україна [ukrɑˈjinɑ]) was used for the first time in reference to the territory of Kievian Rus in the XIIth century. Throughout its history this huge territory was targeted by many invasions and was annexed by some European powers.

During the XVIIth century almost the entire territory of what is now Ukraine fell under the control of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. Later during the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, the Austro-Hungarian (at the West) and Russian (in the Center and at the East) empires shared this Eastern European territory. After the First World War, Poland reappeared on European maps and took most of the Western parts while USSR took the rest of the territory under its control.

The Soviet context and the “Holodomor”

Ukraine suffered tremendously from soviet occupation. The most obvious example of this harsh time is certainly the Soviet caused famine of 1932-1933. The Ukrainian famine named “Holodomor” (in Ukrainian: голодомо́р, extermination by hunger) is seen by many people as a mass murder that can be related to a genocide (even though this event isn’t in a lot of history books).

In a period of just a year and a half, this starvation caused the death of six to eight million people, according to various sources, with two to five millions solely in Ukraine. Even though most of the victims were ethnically Ukrainians, they were not the only ones afflicted by the murderous policy of Stalin (hundreds of thousands of Russians, Tatars and Kazakhs also died).

A coveted multicultural area

During the first half of the XXth century, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions considerably grew in Western Ukraine. According to a population census from 1931 the Ukrainians (mostly Orthodox) constituted the major part of the local population (64%) in the Western region of Volhynia. Other ethnic and religious groups were the Poles (15,6%), the Jews (10%), Germans (2,3%) and other groups less numerous (Czech, Slovaks, Belorussians, …). (1) The already existent tensions between these various groups would considerably grow during the ’30s to evolve into a true hate during the Second World War.

At this time two Ukraines seemed to emerge. On one hand the Western Ukraine that was earlier under Polish and Austrian influence and on the other hand the russified Eastern Ukraine. To the eyes of Ukrainian independentists, Poland and the USSR were hereditary enemies of the Ukrainian nation and should be fought to allow for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. This was precisely this goal of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (or OUN), created in 1929.

The strategy of the OUN to reach the creation of an independent Ukraine included violence and terrorism against those who were seen as enemies of an independent Ukraine. Among those cited as the “external” enemies of Ukraine – Poland and USSR – and the “internal” enemies, so to say all people who weren’t ethnically Ukrainian or suspected to collaborate with the enemy. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UPA) was a paramilitary nationalist army engaged in a series of conflicts during the Second World War. It was composed by various fighter groups of the OUN. The OUN and the UPA had for leaders, respectively, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych.

Collaboration with Nazi Germany

A few years later, the Second World War began. In 1940, many Western Ukrainians saw Nazi Germany like a partner susceptible to help the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. Hitler was considered a symbol of hope in front of the soviet domination. The act of restoration of the Ukrainian state from the 30th of June, 1941, is very clear on this:

“3. The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Muscovite occupation.” (2)

On April 28 the division “SS Galizien” was created. It was a military formation mostly made up by Ukrainian volunteers from the region of Galicia (Western Ukraine). Under the initiative of the Wehrmacht, the SS Galizien division slaughtered practically the entirety of the Jewish population of this region.

The massacre of Volhynia

Once the Jewish population were eliminated, the Poles were targeted. It is principally in the Western region of Ukraine that the slaughter of the Polish minority took place. While the Second World War was raging, Ukrainian nationalist leaders commanded their supporters to slaughter the Polish population in the region. Here is a passage of the order given by the OUN on the 2nd of February 1944 to its members:

“Liquidate every inch of Polishness. Destroy the Catholic churches and other Polish cult places (…) Destroy the houses so there is no trace that someone lived there (…) Keep in mind that if something Polish remains, then Poles will come to claim our territories.” (3)

The groups of Ukrainian nationalists went to the towns of Galicia and Volhynia and killed between 40,000 and 60,000 people, mostly women and children. None were spared. On the 11th of July nearly 100 villages were plundered and the population was slaughtered in the most brutal way. Besides murdering the local population, the Banderas tortured with a rare atrocity. Despite the absence of resistance, civilians were killed in their houses, at school, in the churches, or in offices. As practiced later by the Soviet army, rape was largely used as a terror weapon.

The legacy and the demons from the past

The Polish writer Jan Zaleski said: “The Poles living in Volhynia were killed twice. The first time by a weapon and the second time by silence.” With these words he was referring to the way the history of the massacre of Volhynia is often avoided and to the Ukrainian denial of the atrocities that were committed. Besides the numerous crimes committed by the members of the OUN and the UPA, many Ukrainians consider the leaders of these organizations as national heroes. We can see as a proof the various monuments to the glory of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych in the Western part of the country, particularly in the city of Lviv where they are regularly maintained.

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