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On Vikings and Victims: White-Guilt in Context
By Raymond Ibrahim

All-permeating "white-guilt" did not appear out of thin air. It has
taken a sustained propaganda effort, a wide-ranging mobilization of
education and culture, to inculcate and sustain self-loathing among
American Caucasians. Like the Coca-Cola TM brand, white-guilt needs
endless repetition to remain struck in the thought and behavioral
processes of the masses.

The movie Pathfinder, which I saw on cable, offers a vivid example of
the sort of brainwashing intended to refresh the white-guilt TM brand
in the thinking habits of young people in particular.

Set around 900 AD, the film deals with Viking incursions into North
America. The Vikings are portrayed as ironclad giants -- more monster
than human -- mounted atop massive Clydesdales, barking and grunting
obscenities in some strange tongue; the natives, as expected, gentle,
innocent, and peace-loving. This theme, of course, is not new.

Subtleties playing on white-guilt, however, are spread throughout.
Consider the usage of language. The Vikings speak only Norse, with
English subtitles (though the viewer could do without, since
apparently the north-men had naught to utter but barbarities and
cruelties). Conversely, the natives rattle off in 21st century
colloquial English. If the movie was primarily interested in
authenticity (let alone objectivity), both languages -- Native and
Norse -- should have been used (as in The Passion, where Latin,
Hebrew, and Aramaic are maintained throughout). Moreover, if either
of the two languages should have been rendered into English, logically
it should have been Norse, which is at least etymologically related to
English and in the same linguistic group.

Of course, philological fidelity is not the movie-makers' primary
interest; empathy by association is. Violent Vikings are left to
babble unintelligently about fire, war, and iron, while Natives talk
of love, peace, and courage -- all in very smooth English. Americans
are supposed to identify with the natives, not their Norse co-
linguists, nor, for millions of American viewers tracing their lineage
to Scandinavia, their ancestors.

Language manipulation aside, the depiction of Vikings as brutal
warriors and plunderers is at least plausible and historic. The
Native presentation, on the other hand, is neither. Indeed, the
cultural anachronisms of Pathfinder suggest that 10th century natives
were akin to modern-day liberals, easily "traumatized" and constantly
in need of "therapy" and "reaffirmation" -- concepts wholly non-
existent in the 10th century.

From the start, a native woman encounters dead bodies and starts
shrieking (she is "traumatized") and running madly -- as if living in
900 AD North America (or anywhere else at the time, for that matter)
men, women, and children would not find the sight of rotting corpses
banal. In the midst of this carnage, she happens upon a Viking boy
who brandishes a sword at her. Instead of reacting instinctively --
fight-or-flight -- she casts a loving look at him as if to say "You
poor boy; what have they done to you?" and embraces him.

In fact, the main reasons that make the hero of the story, this same
young Viking grown into manhood, agreeable, are his "liberal-
therapeutic" tendencies. He has "daddy-issues" (his father beat and
abandoned him for not being "man" enough) and is "confused" about his
"identity," finally sloughing off his violent Viking (read: "white")
heritage in favor of a sort of "multi-culti" native identity, thus
making him the triumphant hero we can all support and identify with.

Of course none of this should be surprising; neither presenting dead
white men as the personification of evil nor presenting non-whites as
the personification of good -- especially Native Americans, who have
all but come to be the paradigmatic "noble other" who suffer countless
and untold depredations at the hands of the white man. This theme is
well rooted in popular culture, thanks to academia. Indeed, this
motif is so ubiquitous that none other than Osama bin Laden exploits
it to make white Americans feel shame and guilt.

This "noble-victimized-non-white" paradigm has further come to be
applied to almost all non-whites. For example, early sub-Saharans are
always portrayed as a peaceful people who simply wanted to live and
let live-until warlike white man came along. (Pointing out that it was
fellow Africans who sold their kinsmen into slavery is unpopular in
polite -- that is, white-guilt laden-conversation).

The most recent rehashing of the "noble-other vs. evil white-man"
paradigm is based on the U.S. response to the Islamic world post
9/11. Following al-Qaeda's lead, academia and the media have been
quick to portray George Bush as a ravenous brute (like the Vikings,
also speaking an unintelligible tongue) who mindlessly attacks the
peaceful others -- this time Muslims -- in places like Iraq and
Afghanistan.

What seems to be missed by all, however, is the simple fact that, if
whites have been traditionally aggressive or exploitative of non-
whites, that is not because the former are intrinsically violent (a
racist point, incidentally) but simply because they were able to. And
that's the bottom line of all history: Capability. Did whites defeat
and uproot Native Americans, enslave Africans, and colonize the rest
because they lived according to some sort of unprecedented bellicose
creed alien to non-whites? Quite the contrary; they did so because
they -- as opposed to natives, blacks, et. al. -- were able to do so.

Had 10th century Native Americans developed galleys for transoceanic
travel, or advanced fire arms, or compasses, or organized military
structures and stratagems -- or any of those other things that have
made the Western way of war supreme -- and had they arrived on the
shores of Dark Age Europe, is there any doubt that they would have
done the same exact thing?

Would they have conquered and subjugated in the name of empire, or
would they have looked at the inferior pale savages and "respected"
them, in the name of "diversity," leaving them wholly unmolested?
What if 18th century sub-Saharan blacks were technologically or
militarily more advanced than their northern neighbors and could have
easily subjugated and enslaved them? Would they have done so, or
would they have left them in peace in the name of "multiculturalism"?
These are the hypotheticals that no one seems interested in asking,
since the answer is not only clear as day but immediately places
whites and the rest of humanity on the same moral grounding.

Nor can the argument be made that non-whites did not reach such a
militarily advanced state because they were a peaceful and content
people. If so, why then did they also constantly war, kill, rape,
plunder, and sell each other into slavery -- as history so
unambiguously records? If this is how they treated, and often still
treat, their own kin, what would they have done to the "other," such
as the white man? As for Muslims, history attests that whenever there
has been a caliphate on the ascendancy, it had no compunctions
whatsoever about launching devastating wars of conquest.
Approximately 85% of the "Islamic world" today was subjugated during
the Islamic conquests (or, according to the white-guilt lexicon,
Islamic "expansions").

None of this is meant to exonerate the crimes of the white-man, but
rather to put them in context by indicating that all people -- white,
black, yellow, red, whatever -- are the same; they war, and, when
capable -- keyword -- go on the offensive in search of conquest and
hegemony. Depending on scope, it could be either tribal or
international hegemony. Some religions incite these innate
"passions," others mollify them. Yet these passions-which, according
to that astute philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, "carry us to partiality,
pride, revenge and the like [e.g., war and conquest] -- apply to all
of humanity. To say otherwise is to be racist.

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