Billmon: Losing Ugly

Whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.

This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life -- absorbed as new history -- so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.

Shelby Steele
White Guilt and the Western Past
May 2, 2006

He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them in the nature of supernatural beings -- we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him . . . This was the unbounded power of eloquence -- of words -- of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
1899

Glenn Greenwald has been chewing over Shelby Steele's exceedingly bizarre op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in which the conservative scholar declares that Uncle Sam is losing the war in Iraq not because of bad planning or a lack of troops or bad intelligence or a total failure to grasp the social realities of a deeply divided Middle Eastern country, but rather because of white guilt.