Hail the Pastor-Race!

There is neither Greek nor Jew in Christ Jesus, but there is in The Age of Propaganda, an interesting study of persuasion in politics and commerce written by the Greek-American Anthony Pratkanis and the Jewish-American Elliot Aronson. One of the ways it’s interesting is that it uses some of trickery it warns its readers against:

The roots of American persuasion go back to the founding of the nation. The United States, then as today, was a diverse society populated by native Americans and people from England, Spain, Africa, Holland and France, among other places. Each possessed his or her own beliefs. Although violence and threats of violence were frequently used to secure compliance, the bulk of the work of forging a new consensus from this diversity of opinion and perspective fell to persuasion. (Loc. cit., W.H Freeman and Company, New York, 1991, “Our Age of Propaganda”, pg. 6)

That’s classic liberal propaganda, mendaciously pretending that the mild diversity of the past justifies the extreme diversity of the present. And why include “Native Americans” and “people from Africa”? Why the “his or her”? Native Americans, Africans and women didn’t need to be persuaded, because they had no political voice. Liberals like Pratkanis and Aronson are perfectly well aware of this, but dishonestly include these groups to make that early “diversity” look greater than it was. Physicians, heal yourselves! A little later, the book gets interesting again when its authors talk about their home town of Santa Cruz, California. In 1983, after an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 badly damaged Colinga, the state ordered all its cities and towns to assess how well-prepared they were for their own ’quake. A civil engineer called David Steeves looked at Santa Cruz and delivered a stark warning to its city council: many buildings were very vulnerable, particularly in the Pacific Garden Mall area. Work was urgently needed to prepare Santa Cruz for the inevitable day when a big earthquake struck.

How did the city council react? It dismissed his report and called him an “alarmist” who was “threatening the town with financial ruin.” It also voted unanimously for bureaucratic delay. The council waited for state law to be “clarified.” Meanwhile, it convened a committee to look into the matter. That was in 1987.

On October 17, 1989, an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 hit Loma Prieta, a mountain area just outside of Santa Cruz. Five people were killed and about 2,000 injured in Santa Cruz county; 300 homes were destroyed and 5,000 more were seriously damaged. The Pacific Garden Mall lay in ruins. If anything, Steeves’s report had erred on the side of optimism. As further testimonial to the powerful need to reduce dissonance, one city official blamed Steeves for the lack of earthquake preparedness because his report “succeeded in having the whole issue put off by scaring people.” (Loc. cit., “This Rationalizing Animal”, pp. 35-6)

When I read that story, I was instantly reminded of Enoch Powell and his “Rivers of Blood” speech. The parallels are compelling. When Powell made his speech, its conclusions were dismissed and he was attacked as an alarmist threatening Britain with societal ruin. Four non-white Muslims slaughtered dozens of people in London with suicide bombs in July 2005. This is the reponse of Boris Johnson, the present Conservative candidate for London Mayor, to the gang that went bang:

The disaster is that we no longer make any real demands of loyalty upon those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are many culprits, and foremost among them is Enoch Powell. The problem was not so much his catastrophic 1968 tirade against immigration, but the way he made it impossible for any serious politician to discuss the consequences of immigration, and how a multiracial society ought to work. (The Daily Telegraph, 14th July 2005)

No, Powell didn’t make it impossible: lying liberals and cowardly conservatives made it impossible. Liberals lied about Powell being a bigot who was too full of hate to embrace the joys of mass immigration; conservatives were too cowardly to challenge their lies. Johnson, like that city councillor in Santa Cruz, decided to blame the messenger rather than admit his own fault. But the suicide bombings in London were only warning tremors: the big ’quake is still on its way. Johnson and every other major British politician are ensuring that we won’t be prepared for it, because they are still denying the truth. Multiracial societies do not work: either they break apart or they turn into tyrannies and then break apart. Johnson’s article contrasted the shame-faced British attitude to the Union Jack with the enthusiastic American attitude to the Stars and Stripes:

The Americans would be mystified by our approach to a national symbol. For them the flag is a vital agent of integration, a way of asserting that, in that vast immigrant country, each person is not only American but equally American, and has an equal stake in society. That is why American children still begin their day at school by pledging allegiance to the flag, and that is why the Americans show a patriotism and a simple enthusiasm for their own country that our jaded British sensibilities find childish. (Loc. cit.)

So America gets it right, eh? No, America gets it Wright, as in Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s religious mentor. In other words, America gets it disastrously wrong too. The charming, charismatic Barack Obama has offered white America racial healing – and it turns out that his pastor hates white and hates America. Now Obama is trying to weasel his way out of the controversy. He doesn’t agree with Wright’s fiery rhetoric, it appears. Hatred of whites and America is central to Wright’s theology, but Obama somehow managed to swallow his distaste for twenty years, attending service after service at which other blacks whooped and hollered in support of the Wright stuff. Wright is more than a firebrand: he’s a tirebrand. One of the weapons of South African blacks as they fought for freedom from apartheid was the “necklace.” A gasoline-filled tire would be hung around around the neck of a political oponent or suspected informer and set on fire. That’s where Wright’s ideology will lead America. Liberalism is a coalition united only by hate – hate of whites, of men, of heterosexuals, of Christians. If the coalition succeeds in smashing the West, its strongest members will turn on its weakest. Barack Obama is well aware of that and is playing white liberals for suckers as he seeks personal power. The white feminists and homosexuals who fight “racism” and support mass immigration are helping to destroy their own future, but ignorance of reality and failure to foresee the obvious are characteristic of liberalism. When Enoch Powell pointed out reality and foresaw the obvious in 1968, he was attacked for his pains. After forty more years of liberalism, the race-quake he predicted isn’t far off.

LUKE O’FARRELL

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