What image comes into your mind when you hear the phrase “white supremacy”? If you are a modern American, well-socialized into the current reigning ideology, the image is probably an old monochrome news picture from the Civil Rights era featuring leering white cops assaulting helpless blacks with billy clubs, attack dogs, or fire hoses.

For non-Americans of the modern West the image might be from some different event—the Sharpeville massacre, perhaps—but the content is essentially the same: white people being beastly to blacks.

If your cognitive reflexes come with audio accompaniment, you might hear the strains of some ditty from that same era: Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Town” (1963), maybe:

He went down to Oxford Town

Guns and clubs followed him down

All because his face was brown …

Or it might be Neil Young apostrophizing the ultimate badwhite in “Southern Man” (1970):

I heard screamin’

And bullwhips crackin’ …

If you’re not well-socialized, or if you believe that understanding what is happening in the present, and what is likely to happen in the near future, are as important as knowing what happened fifty years ago, then the phrase “white supremacy” may trigger some different image.

That’s the case with me. The image that pops into my mind when I hear “white supremacy” is that unforgettable one of the Mediterranean boat people looking up at the helicopter:

That picture is emblematic of our age. It is destined, I am sure, to be as familiar to future generations as those of the Hindenburg disaster or the Saigon evacuation. Hundreds of black and brown faces look up at the chopper, expressing … what? Relief! Gladness! Hope!

The people in that picture are middle-class black Africans and Middle Easterners who have paid large sums of money—sometimes all their families could raise—to be trucked across great deserts in tremendous heat, kept waiting for weeks in stuffy cargo sheds with inadequate sanitation, crammed into barely-seaworthy boats, and pushed out into an unforgiving sea; all in the hope—which seems about to be fulfilled—of living at last under the blessings of white supremacy.

To these boat people, life under white supremacy is a radiant vision, a golden dream, to attain which they are prepared to risk their lives. Their dearest hope is to make it to one of the north-European nation-states where the native language is of the Germanic family: Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Ireland, …

Most of the people who live in those target nation-states are white, as are most of the people who govern them. (Here are current or recent cabinets of the U.K., Sweden, and the Netherlands.) Those nation-states were established and built by white people, for white people, across many centuries of social and constitutional development.

They are nation-states in which white people are supreme (“highest in rank or authority … holding or exercising power that cannot be exceeded or overruled … dominant”—Webster’s Third). By any reasonable interpretation of the phrase “white supremacy,” therefor, those target nation-states are white supremacist. Indeed, the complaint made against them by nonwhite race activists is precisely that they are white supremacist.

Presumably the boat people know this. For sure they know about nonwhite supremacy. They have lived their lives under it and had their fill of it, to the degree they are willing to gamble all they have to escape from it.

Back in Cold War days the British opinion journalist Bernard Levin found himself watching a BBC-TV program about Germany—one of those moral-equivalency pieces the media used to put out, arguing that both West and East Germany were militarized societies under foreign domination.

Levin wrote a fine angry piece pointing out that to the best of his knowledge, the many brave souls who had risked—and in many cases, lost—their lives crossing the Berlin Wall were all headed in the same direction.

Just so with the boat people. (And their antipodean equivalents. To the best of my knowledge, there have been zero instances of boats full of white Australians hoping to make it to safety in South Asia.) Like the East German escapees, they are expressing a revealed preference—for white supremacy.

Speaking of communism: I notice with interest that communist China is now the lead country for new immigrants to the U.S.:

Move over, Mexico. When it comes to sending immigrants to the U.S., China and India have taken the lead.

China was the country of origin for 147,000 recent U.S. immigrants in 2013, while Mexico sent just 125,000, according to a Census Bureau study by researcher Eric Jensen and others. India, with 129,000 immigrants, also topped Mexico, though the two countries’ results weren’t statistically different from each other.[Immigrants to U.S. From China Top Those From Mexico by Neil Shah; Wall Street Journal, May 3rd 2015.]

(That needs some parsing. “Researchers counted as an ‘immigrant’ any foreign-born person in the U.S. who said they previously lived abroad, without asking about legal status.” So the numbers there include guest workers and illegals.)

Far more Chinese would come if they could: I know a few such personally.

To be sure, the comparison with boat people is not altogether fair. Very few of the Chinese coming to the U.S.A. exhibit the hopeless despair that drives “asylum seekers” into Mediterranean waters from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

In most parts of metropolitan China—the colonized territories of Tibet and the far West are different cases—it is today possible to live a reasonably normal life, provided your interests do not extend into “sensitive” areas, and your property or land is not coveted by powerful officials.

Communist China remains a lawless despotism, though. So far as ordinary civic rights are concerned, in fact, China under the verkrampte President Xi Jinping is now not only lawless but lawyer-less:

In December 2005 Asia Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine in Hong Kong, put 14 Chinese civil-rights advocates on its cover. It hailed them and their brethren in the cause of weiquan, or rights protection, as “men of the year” for their brave efforts to advance the rule of law in China. The cover might as well have been a “most wanted” poster. Since then authorities have turned the lawyers into a gang of “criminals” and fugitives.

All of the activists pictured on the magazine’s cover have since been imprisoned, detained, beaten or threatened, except for one lawyer who had already fled the country into exile in Canada. The most vocal among them were, as their sympathisers like to put it, “disappeared” by party-hired thugs in extralegal abductions.

[And the Law Won, The Economist, May 23rd 2015.]

So long as you don’t care much about law, rights, and liberty, China’s not bad. But white supremacy is better.

If you are a Chinese person with a lot of money, the white supremacist nations of the West also offer a safer place to put it:

“In terms of Chinese investors, I’m not kidding if I say it’s unlimited,” said attorney Min Chan, whose New York City-based Chan Law Associates advises clients participating in the wildly popular EB-5 visa program, which grants visas to foreigners who invest $500,000 in the U.S. economy in exchange for creating at least 10 jobs. More than 80 percent of the 10,000 visas went to Chinese nationals last year. [How Chinese investors are taking over the New York real estate market by E.B. Solomont; Business Insider, March 5, 2015.]

Thoughtful readers might spot a flaw in my logic here. The name of the flaw is “Mexico.”

If any country justifies the description “white supremacist,” surely Mexico does. Here is a recent Mexican cabinet.

Here is the Mexican Supreme Court.

As Jared Taylor might say in a quite different context: “They look white to me.”

Here by contrast are some Mexican illegal immigrants in the U.S.A.

(And for more on the point I was making at that link, see hbd-chick’s long follow-up post “Who are our Mexicans?”)

So you could say that here we have nonwhites fleeing from a strong form of white supremacy, i.e. Mexico, to a weaker one—the U.S.A.

Since the U.S. population is at least 70 percent white (including white Hispanics) while the breakdown for Mexico is usually given as indio-mestizo-white 30-60-10, there may be a general principle here.

Something like this, perhaps: White supremacy works best, its blessings are most widespread. And it is most worth fleeing to, when practiced in nations that maintain a white supermajority.

John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

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