“Our Women” and the Real Meaning of “White Genocide”

Among the most laughable notions disgorged from the jabbering mouths of white nationalists – and the alt-right in general – is that of “white genocide,” a phantom threat of extermination that haunts their waking nightmares.

Like many of the theoretical concepts generated by worldviews shaped solely by Reddit and InfoWars, “white genocide” eludes a concrete basis in reality. There are no white concentration camps, no great pogroms sweeping through Madison, Wisconsin. No disease or poison has been spread in the water supply to defeat white virility, nor is anyone dumping defoliants on predominantly white neighborhoods to deform their newborns.

Rather, white genocide is a multi-layered mythology, cobbled together from the feigned victimhood and sexual insecurities of the fascists prowling our cities. Like the rumors of poisoned wells and infant kidnappings which fed white supremacist paranoia in days past, white genocide is a figment of a secretly terrified mind, fabricated from quivering self-doubt to justify inhuman rhetoric and violence.

But it is also a useful prism through which white nationalism can be viewed as a stratification of interplaying fears of the reactionary white population. White nationalism is that revolting pit where sexual vulnerability, fear of the future, and shame dribble down and coagulate into something irredeemably ugly.

But to combat it, we must understand it. And so we must hold our breath, and dissect it thoroughly.

“A MINORITY IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY”

In March, Reddit was the stage for yet another unveiling of a popular gamer celebrity as a crypto-racist. Jonathan Jafari, better known as JonTron, was a guest on Sargon of Akkad’s livestream, when he defended the statements of Iowa representative Steve King [1]. King, as you may recall, had tweeted in support of far-right demagogue Geert Wilders, saying “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Jafari, mirroring this vileness, expressed grief that white people are called racists for wanting to remain a majority demographic. In his words, “Nobody wants to become a minority in their own country.” [2]

To say nothing of the fact that Jafari’s statement echoes the racist assumptions of noted invertebrate Richard Spencer (“America belongs to white men”), this belief — that becoming a minority demographic is a kind of cultural demotion — is the first pillar of white nationalism. Implicit in this hand-wringing is the idea that minorities are inherently shameful populations, and that their position in society is one to be avoided by the dominant race.

The reasons behind this position are foggy, but certain elements can be extracted immediately: minorities are “somebody else,” set apart from the social order; the majority race is fundamentally threatened by the introduction of foreign ethnicities and races; that a country de-facto belongs to the most prevalent sociological categories, as though by legal writ.

Collectively, this belief structures demographic mixing not as a natural result of an increasingly mobile species (and one which has been in motion since our inception), but as a constant state of warfare. As the population breakdown swings away from the majority race, ground is lost to “invaders,” and so the racial ownership of the nation in question is threatened. The rightful owner of the land is shamed by being defeated and overrun.

For the purposes of this article, we can call this first pillar “racial warfare,” the concept that race and culture are one in the same, and that conflict is necessary to preserve one by removing the other.

WOMEN ARE PROPERTY; REPRODUCTION IS A WEAPON

On April 18th, at the University of Southern Mississippi, the campus chapter of the YAF (Young Americans for Freedom) invited governor of Maine, Paul LePage, to speak at a town hall. Some students attempted to disrupt the event, rightly outraged by the presence of this aberrant racist in their midst [3].

LePage, you may recall, was roundly criticized when, in August of 2016, he uttered this unforgivable confession of white male anxiety:

“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty – these types of guys – they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.” [4]

This is the second pillar upon which white nationalism is built. Implicit in LePage’s comment is a fear of “infiltration” by non-whites. It bundles up the garden-variety racist sentiments of white America; black drug dealers with unorthodox names sneaking into your home state from elsewhere, with the nervousness that white women are being seduced or forced-upon by these same invaders. And while the racist and misogynistic elements of this statement should are plainly visible, LePage may not realize he is partaking in the oldest tradition of white supremacists: fearmongering against the rapacious “swarthy horde.”

Ida B. Wells, as part of her journalistic investigation into the cultural bedrock of Southern lynchings in America, discovered that the murder of black men was often justified with ephemeral claims of white women being raped [5]. Though evidence was almost always absent, and shaky when present, this overwhelming phantasm of sexual infiltration was first and foremost on the minds of Southern lynch mobs. So too was Emmett Till accused of overstepping the barriers of sexual property [6], trespassing on the assumed ownership of white women, as a whole, by white men. Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent for Slate, cut to the core of this cultural dynamic when he wrote “[make] any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape.” [7]

In that article, he was speaking of the hideous and bleak words of Dylann Roof on the day he murdered nine black parishioners without provocation, stating plainly that he was in the church that day to punish black folk as a group: “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

Mike Cernovich gives the “Pepe the Frog” sign popular among the Alt-Right before doing an interview on 60 Minutes that made him looking like a fucking moron

And so we arrive at the heart of this second pillar, which we might call “reproductive ownership.” When a white nationalist like Roof, or Spencer, or Damigo, uses the phrase “our women,” they are not simply lumping themselves in with white women on the basis of racial lineage. They are claiming ownership of the reproductive labor of “their” women, a cultural touchstone of patriarchal culture that Gerda Lerner described as the earliest form of class structure. Women, in the archaic state, became property once their reproductive abilities were no longer mutually beneficial to males of the species, and instead became a resource and commodity which men could use to barter, enslave, punish, or enrich themselves or others. When this primitive institution of misogyny meets with racial warfare, it becomes something even more horrid.

This belief lies behind the facade of concern white nationalists use to paint their bigotry. Claims of “rape gangs” emerging from the Middle East to brutalize white women, the insistence that Muslim culture should be destroyed because veiling women is misogynistic; these are categorically fraudulent attempts to reframe white nationalists as feminists in their own right. And so when Ivan Throne both condemns Muslims for their mistreatment of women, while simultaneously encouraging the commodification and subordinance of women, his readers nod their heads in agreement, shamefully unaware of their own hypocrisy and naivety.

Taken to its logical conclusion in Nazi Germany, this mentality resulted in the Lebensborn Program [8], an attempt by Heinrich Himmler to increase German birth rates through regimented breeding. His intention, mirrored by the white nationalists of the alt-right, was to weaponize the birth-giving process, shoring up thousands of pureblooded Aryan children in order to prevent German whites from being outnumbered. The program measured the physical attractiveness of candidates, ensuring only the blond and blue-eyed would benefit.

This ideology causes the white nationalist to obsess over birth rates, control of female sexuality, and the virility of non-white men. To their corrupted minds, population growth charts look like a wartime body count, and they’re losing.

NON-CISHET BEHAVIOR IS TREASONOUS

Lastly, the apparition of “white genocide” includes an element of “deviant” sexualities. Look again to Himmler when he speaks about the insidious nature of homosexuality in German society:

“… if you take into consideration the fact, which I have not yet mentioned, that, with the number of women remaining constant, we have around two million men too few (that many having died in the war), then you can imagine how the enormity of two million homosexuals and two million dead, therefore altogether of around four million missing from the number of men capable of having sex, upsets the balance of the sexes in Germany and is leading to catastrophe.”

The SS commander goes on to explain how this weakening of the race, this draining of masculinity from the cultural pool, is a result of urbanization, and threatens the downfall of Aryan society. In the villages of old Germany, he claims, “blood laws” were adhered to strictly, and women were available to men of the same ancestral stock. He stresses marital fidelity, invoking the penalty of death against those women who allow “foreign blood” to be incubated by their actions.

And this is the final pillar of the white genocide myth: the idea that by removing potential blood stock from one’s race, in any way, one is made guilty of treason against their entire culture. Himmler’s vision of a rigidly structured system of sexuality was just as militaristic as his Lebensborn project, and its continuation is seen everywhere across the alt-right.

We shouldn’t forget that many of those now openly championing white nationalism got their start with Gamergate’s wretched choir of anti-feminists, whose loathing for female agency rapidly spiraled into sweeping outcries against LGBTQ+ identities, diversity in pop culture, and the often-invoked “feminization” of men. This birthed the Men’s Rights Movement, a grotesque display of male fragility, but also an integral part of the alt-right coterie to this day.

This is why trans identity and feminism are so anathema to the white nationalist. They represent a future where sexuality and reproduction are out of the hands of white men, and thereby is the dream of a pure blooded Aryan ethno-state jeopardized. Is there any mystery why white nationalists of all stripes will specifically target “rebellious women” when given the chance?

This third pillar, we could call “heterosexual loyalty.” To break from reproductively-oriented sexuality, in any way, or to challenge traditional gender roles and definitions, is tantamount to being a race traitor.

THE REAL FACE OF GENOCIDE

Fortunately for the quivering morlocks who identify with white nationalism, they have never had to face a real genocidal attack. Rather, they have benefited from them.

The genocide of indigenous folk through forced marches, massacres, and biological warfare cleared the way for the nation upon which white supremacists stand. The genocide of enslaved Africans enabled the development of racial chattel slavery, the foundation of white capitalist expansion for the next four centuries. Even American warfare has included an element of racial cleansing, against the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Haitians [9] to name a few, solidifying imperialist intentions, all to the betterment of landed white society.

The disgrace of comparing these horrors to a mere lack of breeding, the insolence of elevating minor inconvenience to ancestral suffering, are to the ears of the liberationist a hundredfold more wretched than nails on a chalkboard. In this unforgivable charade, the impudence, arrogance, and faint-heartedness of white nationalists cannot be overstated, nor can it be punished too severely.

To the outsider, “white genocide” is lunacy; we know that we are more likely to be killed by one of these seig heil-ing zealots than by a Syrian-born refugee [10]. We already acknowledge that race is a construct, born from the invention of whiteness, to arrange and justify the oppression of others. We know that patriarchy, reactionary politics, white supremacy and misogyny are born from delusions, not critical analysis.

But understand “white genocide” as a linguistic signifier of this shared belief in ethno-cultural warfare, and the deeper meaning becomes clear: every step forward for human liberation, no matter how distant or tangential, is a threat to the fraudulent superiority of white nationalists. No slight is too small to be ignored, no attack too cowardly or vulgar, no claim too absurd to be uttered, in order to bring about that thing they call “RaHoWa.”

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/03/13/iowa-rep-steve-king-defends-controversial-tweet/99128384/
[2] http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14942624/jontron-youtube-child-celebrity-racism
[3] http://usmfreepress.org/2017/04/22/lepages-town-hall-meeting-disrupted-by-protesters/
[4] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37204837
[5] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm
[6] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-emmett-till-accuser-false-testimony-20170128-story.html
[7]http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/the_deadly_history_of_they_re_raping_our_women_racists_have_long_defended.html
[8] http://www.spiegel.de/international/nazi-program-to-breed-master-race-lebensborn-children-break-silence-a-446978.html
[9] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/haiti-us-occupation-hundred-year-anniversary
[10] https://www.splcenter.org/20140401/white-homicide-worldwide

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