The New Nazis
The rhetoric of the Durban.

September 4, 2001 2:30 p.m.

he Nuremberg Rally at Durban, South Africa, could hardly be more perfect, because it marvelously dramatizes the rot that has taken hold of the Western world. Back in the 80's, when the Lebanese Christians were under armed assault from their Muslim compatriots, their leader — whose name escapes me — stood up in his foxhole and said, "the Western world should either defend us, or change its name." It didn't defend them (indeed, in recent weeks the Syrians and their puppets in Beirut have been rounding up Christians in the latest round of religious purges), it didn't change its name, and it hasn't learned a thing.

The diminishing number of people who seriously study human history know, as Machiavelli put it so neatly, that man is more inclined to do evil than to do good. Precisely because some great leaders fully understood our malevolent impulses, the Western world has established a set of rules to protect mankind from the unfettered fulfillment of our darkest desires. We call that civilization, and it is a thin veneer atop the explosive forces of human nature, which constantly threaten to destroy it. The rules of civility are not widely accepted, and they require constant vigilance, and not a little brute force, to survive. That is why, in one of the little paradoxes that make the study of history so fascinating, those who talk "peace and love" all the time invariably open the door to war and hate, far more than those who, recognizing our evil inclinations, insist on rigorously imposing virtue.

Durban was to have been a celebration of goodness, a condemnation of our worst practices (from racism to xenophobia), and a call to arms to the entire world. In practice, it is the very opposite: a celebration of hatred, an embrace of racism, an orgy of xenophobia, with the Western world as the prime object of xenophobic and racist hatred. And the Western world, in Durban as in Beirut, dithers and apologizes, and finally the United States and Israel took their marbles and went home.

This is what happens to the Western world after years of political correctness and idiotic revisionism, blaming us for all the sins of the others. Indeed, in the rhetoric of the Durban rally, it is only the West that bears responsibility for evil in the world. Slavery, which for centuries was a universal human practice, and which endures today only outside the West, is blamed on the West and on no one else, even though it was the West that first abolished slavery. The ultimate absurdity of the Durban rhetoric is that the Jews — the first people on earth to condemn slavery and to proclaim that all men were children of God — have been singled out for the harshest condemnation, and it was a pleasure to hear the Israeli delegate remind the racists of Durban of this fact.

To be sure, not all the delegates are totally ignorant of human history. The president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, is a descendant of African kings, and he dryly observed that his ancestors owned slaves. Who, then, should pay reparations to the Senegalese? And there was hardly a dry eye in the house when they heard the life story of Mariama Oumarou, from the village of Tambeye in Nigeria. There, in keeping with a tradition that has endured through the centuries, the "white Tuaregs," that is, the rich traders, enslave the "black Tuaregs" from the poor villages. Mariama Oumarou is the descendant of slaves, and is herself a slave, in a country governed by black people in which slavery is formally forbidden. Who will save her from slavery? And who should pay reparations to the black Tuaregs of Nigeria?

You will not hear these questions — real questions about the real world — from the organizers and the spokesmen at Durban, because their agenda is quite different. They are on the attack against the Western world, because our success, based on egalitarian values (no matter how imperfectly practiced) and free enterprise, threaten their cozy arrangements. If Mr. Thabo Mbeki, the Qosa ruler of South Africa, were an honest man, he would have dropped to his knees in gratitude to the West for having forced the end of the apartheid regime in his country, and enabling a great Qosa prince, Nelson Mandela, to become its president. Instead, Mbeki has given the prestige and the wealth of his country to the racist predations of Robert Mugabe, the vicious and corrupt president of Zimbabwe. Perhaps Mbeki does not want to hear Western delegates ask why members of other South African tribes rarely rise to high positions in the South African Government.

He need not worry. Jesse Jackson has not one harsh word for the Durban xenophobic anti-Semites. The misnamed American Leadership Conference on Civil Rights regrets some of the expressions of anti-Semitism, but condemns the United States for walking out, fatuously claiming that we deprived ourselves of the chance to get the language toned down (not mentioning that we had already tried, but failed). The NAACP website has not a single word of condemnation of Durban racism. Entire gaggles of self-proclaimed black "leaders" embrace Durban, and insist on reparations for American slavery.

Their aggressive self-confidence reflects the timorous self-doubt of the West, brainwashed by a generation of cultural relativism, multiculturism, structural deconstructionism, and simple hatred of whitey, into paying hush money and hoping the whole bad dream will go away. Israel went through a similar phase, and much of the Durban rhetoric can be found in the essays and textbooks produced by the State of Israel itself during the dark years of self-doubt that brought the Israelis to the brink of national suicide. On the steps to the scaffold, they seem to have realized their error, acknowledged that their enemies would not be content with words or even limited quantities of land and lucre, and have begun to fight for their survival and their noble traditions.

We must do the same. Congress should applaud the president for having the courage to give the back of our national hand to the Durban thugs and fools, and should condemn those Americans who refused to stand up for our national honor and our civilized values. And the president should take the opportunity to remind the American people of our uniqueness, which is the wonder of the world, and which drives the enemies of freedom to such grotesque excesses as we are witnessing on the shores of the Indian Ocean.