"Your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea"

Per pool: Trump called the terror attack a "horrible, horrible thing" and said he called the PM to convey US "sorrow," then turned to “crimes of all kinds coming through our southern border.” He added, "People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 15, 2019

Compassion is a subversive act.  And is the problem really a problem?

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he does not see a rise in white nationalism but it may be an issue in New Zealand, where a gunman who is believed to espouse those views killed 49 people at two mosques.

Asked by a reporter if he sees an increase in white nationalism, Trump said: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people.”

Trump also said he had not seen a manifesto in which the suspected gunman denounced immigrants and praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

The manifesto also reportedly cites the potential loss of absolute gun rights under the 2nd Amendment.  The killer was inspired internationally (figures from Sweden and France have been mentioned in news coverage), but he also wanted to incorporate as many people as he could, in hopes of sparking the "race war" that people like Dylann Roof were looking for, as well.  Is this the point where we point out Hitler was inspired, in part, by a book from America published in 1916:  "The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe."

Yes, kiddies, we did all this long before electronic communications were widespread or even global.  Now pardon me while I run a bulldozer over Godwin's Law; because this is the start of the conversation, not the ending of it:

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him. Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day). In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Grant.

How we came to forget this chapter in American history (rather like we forget the true evils of slavery, or genocide of the natives here) is described in the very next paragraph, with its own dollop of that elision of our sins included in the passage itself:

Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form seems to imply the vision was not grotesque already, and only became so because Nazis were monsters, not us.  Nice work, if you can get it; and we get it so very easily, and so very often.  I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free to deny any of our national, historical sins.

The language of Richard Spencer described as "vintage Grant" is, of course, also vintage Trump.  Problems of evil are problems for other people; never for Trump and "his" people.  Problems of evil are always "over there," even if "there" is only the other side of the street; or the tracks; or the opposite river bank.  This is not a uniquely American sin, as another quote from Serwer provides (indeed, this article is almost Nostrodamic in its prescience, given what has happened in the last 24 hours):

Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

Everything old really is new again; ideas really are bulletproof.  As another example (it's hard not to turn this post over to this article), consider this if you think the courts are bad today:

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship. 

Serwer gives an example of that:

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:

"What we now hold is that the words 'free white persons' are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word 'Caucasian' only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is. 

We need, finally, to return to Hitler, especially in light of the President's comments today:

It was america that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission. 

So here we are, back again at the beginning, and in our end is our beginning.  I said this article by Serwer was eerily prescient.  It is so in the way the Hebrew prophets (though under very different inspiration following a wholly different purpose) could seem prescient:  because when you see what is right in front of you, it suddenly appears.  Consider these concluding words from Serwer, and how frightfully true they turned out to be:

When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows. 

The only response now is subversive acts, like compassion; like Lent.