The end of "Racism"?
12/05/2005
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Congratulations to the astonishingly industrious Glenn Greenwald who has posted a polished and effective 1,440 word essay Yelling 'racist' as an argument in the immigration debate on his Unclaimed Territory blog. Glenn has a firm grasp of the issues and the history, and the piece is well worth reading:

Snidely spitting out the "racist" insult as part of the illegal immigration debate is nothing more than a cheap and lazy way to irrationally smear people who espouse a certain view for the purpose of shutting down debate....it is simply indisputable that a nation cannot survive if its population lacks any common foundation, is characterized by scattered allegiances, has nothing culturally in common, and is separated by an inability to communicate with one another Thomas Jefferson frequently lauded the virtues of immigration....But despite his positive view towards immigration, Jefferson stressed that immigration would be a virtue for the nation only if it were managed in a way consistent with assimilating the immigrants in order to preserve a cohesive national identity...if the approach of pro-illegal-immigration advocates is going to be to...simply scream "racist" at anyone who expresses concerns about the impact of the vast numbers of illegal immigrants pouring into the United States, then their loss in this debate will be as inevitable as it will be well-deserved.

One of Peter Brimelow's most famous lines is that

The modern definitionof 'racist" is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal

Unfortunately it is a fact that many Americans under 40 have been brainwashed into assuming that establishing "racism" in an argument is a sort of polemical equivalent of a geometrical proof of error. Ultimately this mistake will ultimately lead to what happened in 17th Century England. When their opponents smeared political movements with the insult Tory (Irish Bandit) and Whig (Scottish Rustler), those so termed eventually simply stopped caring about the phrases and got on with making their arguments.

Thanks, Todd Stevenson.

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