George Henry Bought, Pilgrims going to Church

Lighten Up

Whiteness: The Original Sin, Jim Goad, Obnoxious Books, Stone Mountain, Georgia, 2018, paperback, 345pp. reviewed by Ed Dutton

The Puritans never had a sense of humour. These irony-deficient, extremist Protestants were too intensely focused on virtue signalling and questioning ever more traditions in order to advance in their virtue-signalling arms race. Immersed in what the American psychologist William James (1842-1910) termed ‘the religion of the sick soul,’ these Road to Damascus converts required a world of absolute certainty. Nobody should remind them of their fundamental psychological insecurities by questioning their self-righteous, contradictory, self-serving worldview which, on a certain level, they knew made no sense. Hence, they required everyone to accept and conform to it. The slightest questioning of their dogmas would send them into paroxysms of rage; it would induce ‘cognitive dissonance,’ leaving their ‘sick soul’ exposed even to themselves.

Humour and mockery were especially dangerous for such people, as they implied that their absolute correctness might be an illusion; for if it were not, then lampooning it would be unthinkable. Comedy was also very serious, they may on some level have realised, because it dissociates the listener, making them more receptive to whatever subversion the comedian is engaged in. It tends to involve, à la the Fool in Shakespeare plays, having the guts to fearlessly ‘go there’, to say the unsayable, albeit gently coated in a bizarre juxtaposition. This releases nervous tension, as we let go of the effortful control of our real opinions which we all hold to in order to fit in, so making people laugh. Additionally, the ability to make people laugh signifies intelligence, creativity and – in the case of political satire – bravery and open-mindedness. It also makes people feel good; so David-Lammy-forbid that one’s enemies should become associated with such traits and feelings in the minds of the populace. Laughing is also inherently a loss of physical control, under the spell of someone else. For anyone to be, in effect, hypnotised by agents of Satan himself is hardly conducive to the sound mental health of the righteous ones.

It should, therefore, be no surprise that the Puritans’ ideological successors – the Multiculturalists – get so upset about being mocked. Or that Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad’s joke about Labour MP Jess Philips being not worth raping – ‘I wouldn’t even rape you . . .  With enough pressure, I might cave’ – should evoke such a visceral reaction, including an investigation by the police. {Editorial note: see report by Rajeev Syal, The Guardian, 7th May 2019. The first remark was in a tweet in 2016, the second in a recent YouTube video}.

Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin is, likewise, a matter of extreme peril to such people because it is funny. It tears to shreds the dogmas of Multiculturalism – especially those prevalent in the USA – with its surreal, cutting, faux-confused and, most importantly, self-mocking humour. Goad, a colourful character, is a superb writer who somehow manages to take the destruction of Western civilization and the psychological breaking of European peoples by their own crazed leaders and make you laugh about it.

Whatever PC dogma you can think of – that non-whites can’t be racist, that there was never white slavery in the USA, that the Unionist army was anti-racist, that race differences in criminality have nothing to do with genes – Goad deftly, yet ruthlessly, subjects to his wit-laden, withering critique. Consider the following snippet:

So for those of you who are far more socially conscious than I am, please be patient with me, because I’m just trying to keep up here – at least as I’ve been led to understand it, according to the latest science from The Global Science Foundation or whatever it’s called, homosexuality is genetically hardwired, but race and gender are only ideas, right? Is that the latest science? Got it. Booked marked and filed. I will pick that, lick that, stick that, and flick that’ (pp.237-238).

In just a few pithy lines, Goad brilliantly encapsulates that world in which we now find ourselves, a world in which empirical Truth is dictated by the Woke Mob, which can contradict other Truth with impunity, which can contradict what our senses tell us is so, and the right-thinking person should merrily and gratefully accept it as unquestionably the Truth… until, that is, that something else becomes the unquestionable Truth.

Editorial note: views expressed in this article are not thereby endorsed by the editor

Dr Edward Dutton runs the YouTube channel The Jolly Heretic: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMRs0Ml8RF0cWVAOeQeBxTw His recent books include: Churchill’s Headmaster: The ‘Sadist’ Who Nearly Saved the British Empire and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers. Dutton can be found online at www.edwarddutton.wordpress.com