The Origins of White Guilt

by Tom Sunic, Ph.D.

Vincent Van Gogh, “Sorrowing old Man,” 1890

There are several different approaches to the study of the pathology of White guilt, including linguistic, historical and religious. One needs, however, to critically look at this faulty verbal construct first, a construct which first appeared in America several decades ago, and which has been championed in the media and academia ever since.

At first look, the expression “White guilt” defies lexical rules of Standard English. Should one accept this expression as a valid tool in social and political communication, one might just as well substitute the adjective “white” with the adjectives “brown,” “yellow,” or “black.” So far, however, no scholar, no journalist has ever ventured to use the expressions Black Guilt or Brown Guilt,

for the simple reason that from the semantic point of view these colorful expressions sound silly in the standard English language. The same lexical rule, however, does not apply to White guilt, an expression that has become by now part of the everyday language. In addition, seen from the educational perspective, the expression “White Guilt” is designed to serve as a guidebook for reeducating and reprograming Whites, or short of that for having Whites expiate their real or alleged sins of racism. Conversely, all other non-White racial categories are automatically exonerated from any guilt feelings and thusly from any need for political penitence.

The difficulty in dealing with the concept of “White guilt” is further exacerbated by the impossibility of having it properly translated into non-English languages in Europe. Over the last eighty years US college social science departments, mostly controlled by crypto-communist scholars, have been in the forefront of crafting outlandish political terms and creating new political concepts which, when translated and transposed into the European media and school curricula sound odd. Moreover, ill-defined American verbal constructs, such as “hate speech,” “ethnic sensitivity training,”” diversity,” “white supremacists,” “affirmative action,” have by now become a linchpin in the US education and legislation. These expressions, when used in other European languages often produce unintelligible verbal and legal equivalents.

Of course Europe has concocted its own bizarre expressions, especially when used during legal proceedings against nationalist dissidents at local courts of justice. A case in point is the German highly obtrusive, abstract compound noun that figures prominently in the German Criminal code, e.g., Paragraph # 130, bearing the demonizing subtitle “Volksverhetzung.” This heavy-handed German compound noun is a clear-cut case of linguistic barbarism, having given birth by now to dozens of faulty English translations (popular incitement, sedition, etc.). It is also a word that during court hearings never ever explicitly denotes the defendant’s ethnicity. This word, which German prosecuting attorneys have been tossing around since the early 1990s when pressing charges against social undesirables, has thus far dispatched thousands of Germans to prison for varying durations.

The sticky issue for many citizens in the US and Europe, regardless of their political beliefs is that they often take these expressions as a sign of erudite learning, never bothering to examine their etymology. Or worse, never scrutinizing those individuals who first put those words in circulation. The expression “White guilt,” along with hundreds of similarly ill-defined terms that have sprung up in the USA over the last fifty years, is just an embellished follow-up term of the now defunct Soviet-Speak, which likewise contained a myriad of similar surreal nouns and convoluted phrases, such as “democratization,” “domestic fascist terrorists,” “antifascist struggle,” “socialist fight against counterrevolutionary bourgeois tendencies,” “economic self-management,” “peaceful coexistence,” “interethnic tolerance,” etc. The Liberal System in the US and EU, along with its legal and academic apparatchiks, is now in the belated process of updating this old Bolshevik language.

Historical Framework of White Guilt

TOO has previously documented the timespan and major architects of this new verbal overhaul whose final objective is the dispossession of White peoples. One must look firstly at the period starting with 1945 and after, a period which brought about not just a new political order, but also marked the beginning of the use of a new sanitized, demonizing political vocabulary. Defeated Germany bore the brunt of the new notion of the political, although citizens in the victorious US and the UK swiftly followed suit with their own self-flagellating rhetoric. Words such as “colonialism,” “segregation,” “racial distancing,” “apartheid,” and “fascism,” soon became the metaphors for the absolute evil, with “fascism” now denoting pretty much anything to the right of center. Over the last seventy-five years, the West has embarked on a penitential passion play whose effects can be observed today in most media outlets. Incidentally, the System’s removal of president Donald Trump from office was in large part due to the fact that Trump’s rhetoric on “fake news” was incompatible with the media’s message of universal love that has inspired the post-World War II narrative as preached by the System.

What is frequently overlooked, however, is that guilt-tripping Whites in the realm of politics has been unfolding hand in hand with a gradual criminalization of the White cultural heritage. The destructive role of the Frankfurt school and its mostly Jewish-Marxist scholars in instilling the concept of White guilt has been amply demonstrated (here), although the postwar brainwashing of Whites can by no means be attributed to Jewish scholars and activists only. I tried, quite some time ago, to summarize the history of intellectual purges in Europe, starting immediately after the end of World War, which gradually resulted in the growth of the language of guilt, leading subsequently to suicidal self-denial of millions of White students and politicians in Europe and the US. As I noted in Homo Americanus,

Likewise, French intellectual life from 1944–1950 was similarly depleted of hundreds of anticommunist and nationalist intellectuals suspected of fascist collaboration, with many becoming objects of public shaming. Dominique Venner:

Ironically, it was thanks to the threat of Soviet communism during the Cold War that many previously banned European thinkers and academics managed to resurrect their career. It didn’t last long. From 1950–1990, Western intelligence agencies, with the USA at the helm, had to rely heavily on skills of prominent anticommunist and White nationalist academics and scientists in an effort to contain the perceived Soviet threat. With the Cold War over, with the Soviet Union dead by 1990, the System, i.e., the Deep State, began to recuperate again its own crypto-communist repressive, albeit Covid-covered face, the grand finale of which was seen on January 20, 2021, during the System’s staged palace coup in Washington DC.

The religious framework of White guilt

Putting solely the blame on the liberal media and crypto-communist college professors for generating the culture of White guilt is only partially correct. In order to tentatively elicit a convincing answer regarding the pathology of White guilt one needs to raise some rhetorical questions about Christian teachings. Why are White Christian peoples, in contrast to other peoples of other races and other religions on Earth, more prone to excessive altruism toward non-White out-groups? Why are guilt feelings practically nonexistent among non-White peoples? One answer to these questions may be found in Christian teachings that have made up an important pillar of Western civilization over the centuries. Over the last one hundred years, modern Liberal and Communist elites have aggressively promoted those same feeling of White guilt, albeit in their own atheistic, secular and “multicultural” modalities. One must rightfully reject the Liberal or Antifa palaver about White guilt, yet the fact remains that the Vatican, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the German Bishops’ conference, along with all other Christian denominations in Europe and the US today are the loudest sponsors of non-White immigration to Europe and America, as well as the strongest advocates of White guilt (here). The Church’s ecumenical preaching about a global city under one god with all of humanity is fully in accordance with the early Christian dogma on man’s fall and his eventual redemption.

It must be pointed out that early Christian apostles, evangelists and theologians who foisted the dogma of man’s guilt were all by birth and without any exception non-Europeans (St. Augustine, Tertullian, St. Paul, Cyprian, etc.) from North Africa, Syria, Asia Minor and Judea. Having this in mind, lambasting Islam or Judaism in the present as the sole carriers of aggressive non-European anti-White ideology, as many White nationalists do, while downplaying the Middle-Eastern birthplace of Christianity, cannot be a sign of neither moral nor intellectual consistency. The Roman poet Juvenal, describes graphically in his satires the Rome of the late first century, a time when the city was swarming with multitudes of Syrian lowlifes, Chaldean star worshippers, Jewish conmen, and Ethiopian hustlers, all of them offering a quick ride to eternal salvation for some and eternal damnation for others (here). Similar messianic, redemptive beliefs about the shining future, under the guidance of prominent early Bolshevik agitators, most of them of Jewish origin, have found their new location, two millennia later, among credulous intellectuals and equality-hungry masses. After the fall of Communism, the same messianic drive to punish the guilty ones who defy modern Liberal and multicultural scholasticism found its loudest mouthpiece among US neocons and antifa inquisitors.

This is not the place to rehash Friedrich Nietzsche’s own emotional ravings at Christians, nor quote dozens of thinkers and scholars who had earlier described the psychological link between early Jewish and Christian zealots of first-century Rome and communist commissars of the early twentieth century. Times have changed but the obsession as to how extirpate or reeducate those who doubt the myths of the System haven’t changed a bit. The psychological profile of US modern-day Antifa zealots and their college professor supporters bears a close resemblance with early uprooted, largely miscegenated, effeminate Christian masses in the late Roman empire. The Jew St. Paul and later on the North African St. Augustin — judging by their own convulsive contrition — suggest that they suffered from bipolar disorder. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (7:18) may be the key to grasping the modern version of neurotic White self-haters put on display by prominent news anchors and humanities professors today: “And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.”

Walter F. Otto, a renowned author on ancient Greek gods [iii] and one of the most quoted Hellenistic scholars, describes the differences between the ancient Greek vs. Christian notion of the sacred. He notes that ancient pagan Greeks laid emphasis on the feelings of shame, unaware of the meaning of feelings of guilt. In his still untranslated book dealing with Christian vs ancient Greek spirituality, he writes:

At some point Whites will need to realize that a successful healing of their feelings of guilt presupposes a critical reassessment of their Judeo-Christian-inspired origins. If Whites in Europe and the US were once upon a time all eager to embrace the Semitic notion of original sin, no wonder that two thousand years later they could likewise be well programmed to put up with a variety of World War II necrophiliac victimhoods, as well as tune in to fake news delivered by their politicians. Eventually Whites will need to make a decision about where to choose the location of their identity. In Athens or in Jerusalem.

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