Now for something completely different. A blogger has claimed it was outrageous of me to belittle Glenn Beck’s brain power without the attendant detailed textual exegesis and footnotes—just about. I had mistakenly surmised that among those with a modicum of intelligence certain things are manifestly true. Alas, the culture has deteriorated to such an extent that no a priori agreement exists about intelligence and its manifestations.
Since Beck, mercifully, doesn’t write (he will, he will; the dreaded book will appear in the fullness of time), there are vaults of TV-time evidence to prove he is not too bright. For anyone who possesses a smidgen of intelligence, who lives in America, has watched a lot of TV, and listens to the radio; let us establish a couple of a priori truths:
Beck is a bit of a simpleton. Rush Limbaugh isn’t the brightest. Hannity is not too smart. Nor was poor Anna Nicole Smith, RIP. If civilization means anything, some things in this world must simply be accepted as axiomatic. But standards mean squat, I know, I know!
And while we’re at it, the economic laws of supply and demand do not need empirical proof for their validation; they are a priori true. Or, as Gene Callahan puts it in this excellent essay, “they are logically prior to any empirical study of economic phenomena.”

I just read your fine and frightening piece on South Africa. The following may not be original, but it needs saying again. No one is more racist and condescending than white socialist intellectuals, strangely called “liberals” in the United States, perhaps because they are so liberal with other people’s money. White conservatives sometimes dislike black people and Asians, though this is a less and less common thing among young conservatives. Such dislike even when it occurs does not work in conjunction with hatred and a desire to hurt people. Socialist intellectuals, of the kind who in Britain control most Broadcasting—and many university departments across a whole range of disciplines—regard black people as virtually subhuman, without souls or conscience or any moral sensibilities. In Britain, Apartheid South Africa was never out of the news. Today the horrors of South Africa never hit the headlines. The point is that the white intelligentsia care only about offences committed by white people. They are seen as the only ones capable of autonomous immorality.

This kind of reasoning explains why Nazism is taken by so many Western thinkers as the surest standard of evil. It is because an unambiguously and self-consciously white race performed the Nazi horrors. The crimes of Communism, in which the numbers murdered were far greater, are dismissed because they were carried out by the semi-Asiatic Russians or by the unambiguously Asiatic and comic Chinese.

Until the world learns to impose the same moral requirements at all people’s doors, regardless of their various racial compositions, we will never get out of this habit of murderous condescension.

—Dennis

I just read your fine and frightening piece on South Africa. The following may not be original, but it needs saying again. No one is more racist and condescending than white socialist intellectuals, strangely called “liberals” in the United States, perhaps because they are so liberal with other people’s money. White conservatives sometimes dislike black people and Asians, though this is a less and less common thing among young conservatives. Such dislike even when it occurs does not work in conjunction with hatred and a desire to hurt people. Socialist intellectuals, of the kind who in Britain control most Broadcasting—and many university departments across a whole range of disciplines—regard black people as virtually subhuman, without souls or conscience or any moral sensibilities. In Britain, Apartheid South Africa was never out of the news. Today the horrors of South Africa never hit the headlines. The point is that the white intelligentsia care only about offences committed by white people. They are seen as the only ones capable of autonomous immorality.

This kind of reasoning explains why Nazism is taken by so many Western thinkers as the surest standard of evil. It is because an unambiguously and self-consciously white race performed the Nazi horrors. The crimes of Communism, in which the numbers murdered were far greater, are dismissed because they were carried out by the semi-Asiatic Russians or by the unambiguously Asiatic and comic Chinese.

Until the world learns to impose the same moral requirements at all people’s doors, regardless of their various racial compositions, we will never get out of this habit of murderous condescension.

—Dennis

Professor Paul Gottfried offers this insight as to why, “When speaking about crime and culpability (punishment is not an option), left-liberals like Jolie use the passive voice. Crimes are caused, not committed.”

I think Ilana’s observation about the widespread tendency to blame all non-white and non-Western atrocities on abstract causes such as “violence,” “poverty,” and “white racism” serves a necessary function within the context of (non-neoconservative) leftist thinking. This ascription allows the user to blame morally revolting actions on neither the perpetrator nor any specific person or group of persons belonging to the white Western world. It goes without saying that blacks, who form a martyr people within leftist victimology, cannot be called to account by white Westerners because they rape and murder each other. To do so would undermine the reigning anti-fascist, anti-racist ideology. But neither is it wise to lay the blame for Third World atrocities at the door of one’s parents and associates, assuming they are white, if one intends to maintain civil relations. Therefore the problem becomes “structural” or “economic” rather than personal. And this also suggests that everything can be set right by adopting the right socialist, redistributionist policies.

—Paul Gottfried