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.
