The Nations that Accept Nazism Today

Unz Review’s articles on race/ethnicity and ideology aren’t there to “stir up debate”; they’re there to promote a particular ideological position. The articles they post on these topics are almost invariably from a far-right, white supremacist stance, and often brazenly so.
We might as well be advocating for off-guardian to provide a link to Storm Front to “stir up debate”. But again, that’s a take that only a white person could advocate. For a black person, the “debate” becomes one about whether they have the right to even exist. Why should that be “up for debate”? The pathetic whiners at Unz, who post articles with subtitles such as “America is now an open-air prison for whites” would certainly love to have such a debate because they want their racist bile to become respectable and mainstream. If we play into their “debate” fetish, we play into their notion that they are “oppressed”.

Dear Mr. Engdahl, thank you for your good work and this article here. However you realise that the better the site the faster the trolls batten on – a perverse compliment to the sites & authors.

“The problem that I have with the notion of “white privilege” is that it minimizes and even discounts the real abuses and exploitation to which all Americans have been and are subjected, including the majority of WHITES.”
In fact, the notion of privilege has nothing whatsoever to do with whether whites suffer exploitation and abuse. A group can be extra-exploited and oppressed relative to other exploited and oppressed groups, and indeed an oppressed group can itself also inflict oppressions on other groups. Men can be exploited at work but still exploit women. Whites can be exploited at work but still discriminate against blacks. Black men can suffer from exploitation at work as well as discrimination from whites but still adopt chauvinist attitudes towards women. To paraphrase you: the problem I have with discounting the notion of white privilege is that it minimizes and even discounts the COMPOUNDED exploitation and oppression that people in marginalized groups face. In the US, white workers are exploited, but the most exploited and oppressed workers are not white male workers – they are black and Latina women, who are oppressed multiple times: from being workers, from being women, and from being non-white.
Possibly you’re misunderstanding what privilege actually means. It most emphatically does NOT mean, as many erroneously assume it does, that whites never suffer hardship. It means simply that whites, AS WHITES, do not have to worry about certain things that blacks, AS BLACKS, have to worry about. For example, if you’re a black male driving in many parts of the United States, you have to be wary of the possibility that you will be pulled over by police BECAUSE you’re black and thereby under more suspicion of carrying drugs or weapons. A white person might be pulled over by police on suspicion of possessing drugs or weapons, but they don’t have to worry about being pulled over simply BY VIRTUE of being white. A black person has to be wary of the possibility that they will be deemed “suspect” for being in a fancy neighborhood BECAUSE they are black. A white person may be deemed suspect for some OTHER reason, but not BECAUSE they are white. In other words, the white person, no matter how poor they are, has the privilege of being living with a burden that a black person does.
That’s all that privilege is: not having to live with the burden of something that someone else does. And that can go for any number of things, such as class, gender etc. It isn’t at all surprising that in the US, there is white privilege, especially given all the ways that the ruling class has actively FOSTERED this privilege.
“Oh, I know, a bitter pill to swallow: the notion that WHITES have ever and are ever abused by WHITE American capital.”
This isn’t at all a controversial notion (a “bitter pill”), and has never been denied by communists. It’s also quite irrelevant to the existence of white privilege, as I demonstrated above. Also, you suggest that the notion of whites being exploited is a bitter pill for me to accept (it isn’t), but the notion of blacks facing compounded oppression through the denial of privileges extended to whites seems to be a bitter pill for you to accept. This is bizarre.
“It just seems to me that political repression and poverty and hunger and destitution, whether experienced by WHITES or by BLACKS, is political repression and poverty and hunger and destitution.”
The logic here seems to be “Whites and blacks are BOTH exploited and repressed, therefore black workers are not extra-exploited and oppressed relative to white workers.” This is absurd, and demonstrably false. It also ignores who has faced disproportionate political repression and poverty and hunger and destitution. I’m sure you’re not someone who thinks that everything was rectified after the Civil Rights movement. Finally, it ignores that racialized oppression is itself a form of political repression. How does the presence of racism preclude the political. Racism is INTENSELY political.
Anti-racist efforts must be done with a class-conscious view of things that tie capitalism together with an understanding of how racism is sustained and utilized by the bourgeoisie. But this is not the same as airbrushing the compounded oppression faced by black workers through mechanisms such as structural racism and white privilege (and indeed of how white workers often partake in anti-black racism. Let’s be realistic about something: in vast swathes of the US today, a revolutionary communist message seeking to unite all workers irrespective of color is far less likely to be met with sympathy that a chauvinist one filled with racist dog-whistles and lurid expressions of American exceptionalism).

‘Isn’t the point, rather, that blacks should insist upon their right to exist as men and women, and not only or essentially in terms of the very racial identity that the structural racism to which they are constantly subjected foists upon them?”
Yes, but you drop the ball when you fail to see that in order to liberate oneself from racist oppression/structures/privilege, one must positively affirm one’s OWN attributes which had heretofore been degraded and dehumanized and used to demarcate you as an “other”. That’s why I say that black people should positively affirm their right to exist as black people, because the attributes that have been associated with their “blackness” have been subject to contempt by the broader society. This affirmation is in fact to insist upon one’s right to exist as a man or woman, but on ONE’S OWN TERMS, rather than what someone else wants to you to be.
“And then if blacks can insist on their right to exist as blacks, doesn’t that by implication mean that whites can insist on the same thing? If one group has the right to affirm its racial identity as an imperative, why can’t another claim as much?”
This is naive and a false equivalence. It is analogous to the notion that the nationalism of an oppressed nation (such as Palestine, say) is equivalent to the nationalism of an imperialist nation (such as the US, France or Britain). “But surely, if Palestinian nationalism is progressive, then so is American, French and British nationalism? Why are you being such a racist?” No, it doesn’t follow. And it doesn’t follow for racial identity, either. “Blackness” has been oppressed; “whiteness” has been a force FOR oppression. It is the duty of progressive white people to disown their privileged position wherein their whiteness is equated with everything “normal”.
I wanted to return to the following because it condenses much of what is wrong with your overall take:
“““Whites” who side with “blacks,” and vice versa, are no less racist than the “whites” who would war on “blacks,” and vice versa.””
By your logic, white people working within or cooperating with the ANC and the South African Communist Party to smuggle weapons and money to the armed struggle against apartheid were “just as racist” as the apartheid death squads and jailers because they consciously sided with blacks after recognizing that blacks, by virtue of being black, were an oppressed group. Note: blacks were being oppressed AS BLACKS in accordance to the racial doctrines of the apartheid state. Recognizing this, it was therefore the duty of every progressive white person in South Africa to side with black people to combat this explicitly racist oppression. That necessarily meant siding with those who faced that oppression, which in that case meant siding with blacks. It also meant siding against the whites who partook in racist oppression (but not those who supported the struggle against it. Siding with blacks did not mean siding against whites AS WHITES. It meant siding against whites who wanted to maintain a system of racialized oppression). It seems that you’re broadening (and in so doing, diluting) the definition of “racism” to such an extent that it engulfs wars of liberation fought against unequivocal racism.

Jeff, you throw around accusations that are either ignorant or irrelevant. What are you attacking by the phrase, “The idea that Ukraine is an artificial state and that chunks of it should be given to Russia”? Are you saying that there was no violent U.S. coup in Ukraine in February 2014 that installed racist fascists, ideological nazis, into power there and drove two regions (both of which had voted more than 75% for the President that Obama overthrew) to break away from Ukraine, on their own volition? Are you denying the right of self-determination of peoples? Are you denying this?: https://off-guardian.org/2017/03/24/what-americas-coup-in-ukraine-did/