The New Revisionism: Michelle Malkin’s Legitimisation of American Racialism

By Rev. Sequoyah Ade
August 2004

“That the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilised races which have not lost their fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace in the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.”

-- Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, 1901

Once successfully established as an independent republic, the United States of America has zealously sought to define itself as a socio-political archetype of human freedom and intellectual liberty.

The fact that the whole of U.S. history from front to back is literally riddled with racialist driven physical and economic dispossessions, socio-political marginalisation and state sponsored genocide in one form or another is ostensibly beside the point. Not unlike conjectures supporting the existence of angels, flat-Earth theory and Creationist science, the aggressively chauvinistic philosophy of American Exceptionalism purports to provide a theoretical explanation for why the United States is exempt from any criticism that made shed light on it’s internal as well as external contradictions.

Enter Michelle Malkin. A syndicated columnist and former editorial writer for the GOP-leaning Seattle Times, Ms. Malkin, (or is Ms. too politically correct for conservatives?) has raised a considerable storm of controversy recently within the Asian community by proposing in her new book, “In Defence of Internment” that the concentration-camp imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two was justified on the grounds of immediate national security concerns and reasonable suspicions in light of the ethnicity of the suspected internees. Conservative historians, David Duke and the FOX News Republican propaganda goon squad have redundantly raised the exact same security excuses before, so there is really nothing in Ms. Malkin book that is particularly refreshing. What is novel however is that in writing it she has like other non-White American archconservatives actively ignored the American racial question by denouncing the reality of the issue itself. Ms. Malkin’s book is merely the latest philosophical manifestation of a Dubya-era non-European American racial apologist expressly dedicated to explaining why such ethnic marginalisations are necessary and constructive to U.S. and global society.

With her frequent cable media appearances and nationally syndicated columns, Ms. Malkin appears to be making an earnest bid to eclipse former GOP darling and incessant flibbertigibbet Ann Coulter as the most prominent female propagandist of the Conservative right. Like Dinesh D’Souza, Ward Connelly and Dicky Wilson before her, Ms. Malkin is building a career on perpetuating and legitimising institutional arguments for what used to be called in more honest days White Power. “In Defence of Internment” ideologically ranks alongside D’Souza’s “The End of Racism”, Murray and Herrenstein’s “The Bell Curve”, Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” and the works of Alfred Rosenburg. More significantly it is perhaps one of the most racialist tomes ever authored by a person of colour.

As a political and social commentator Ms. Malkin goes to great lengths to appear objective and scholarly unbiased. By projecting herself as an arbiter of reason sincerely attracted to the common sense of ultra conservative ideals, she attempts to illustrate the logic of far-right racial arguments in a way no White person could undertake without risking the ubiquitous charge of racism. With pats to the head from the likes of the Bradley Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute and the Bush administration, Ms. Malkin and the rest of her internally colonialised self-serving flock represent a bewildering phenomenon within modern conservative discourse, non-Whites willing to cast their lot exclusively with the more racialist elements of the White power structure.

Racialist Obfuscation

Short of directly attributing inferior non-Caucasian biology as the root cause of minority social disappointment in American society, Ms. Malkin chooses to take an utterly classical American racist train of thought: institutional racism in the U.S. is not and has never been the root of the race problem. She maintains like other aversive racialists that America’s race problem is primarily a creation of Liberalist fiction. She denies the claim that race has had any viable connection to past or present social, political or economic ills and asserts that minorities do a great disservice to America by complaining about something that does not exist. This perception relentlessly stresses that “victimisation culture” and White Liberal anti-racism policies are primarily responsible for minority social failures, not institutionalised White bigotries. According to this view, the biases that do exist against minorities were, and are still, prudent and entirely valid on the grounds that minorities are statistically prone to social mediocrity. She submits such evidence as high crime rates, low educational achievement, dysfunctional family units and general anti-social behaviour to support this thesis. By focusing on the results of racism rather than the causes, she fraudulently purports to offer an impartial analysis that explains the White dominated status quo. Through reductionist sociological oversimplification, Ms. Malkin provides a de-facto validation for institutional White racism. The fact that all of this gibberish smells of Social Darwinist nonsense peddled about as sound sociology doesn’t seem to matter. On a strictly academic level the whole of such arguments would be regarded as the pseudo-scientific agenda of an extremist fringe were in not for the fact that such ideas are otherwise sanctioned in the public consciousness as practical actuality. The key push behind her commentary is the manufacturing of convenient answers to ethnic marginalisation, not factual analysis. Ms. Malkin is in essence articulating a long held and widespread set of beliefs concerning presumed non-European inadequacies that challenge the assumed virtues of White exceptionalism. Her complete and total personal acquiescence to pro-Euro-centric social constructions is overwhelming and it is clearly visible in all of her work. In contrast to the clear and unambiguous racialist policies of South African Apartheid or Southern American Jim Crow laws, Malkin represents a Nuevo racism, a more logical and enlightened bigotry. By utilising broad generalisation, stereotypical assumption and liberal misinterpretation of historical data she gives effectual license to the continuation of a racialised social order.

For racialists, the detail that ethnic minorities in America have had to contend with colonialisation, race-specific separatist legislation, social mortification and the White Citizen’s Council is of no applicable significance. As many Conservative apologists have expressed openly, minorities enable a race problem by making reference to it. Anti-minority discrimination and violence they contend are the direct results of Whites being told they are oppressors. This “abuse” as they describe it necessitates resistance and sometimes that resistance expresses itself in a volatile fashion. To paraphrase the old fable, the king has no clothes and does not want to be told that he has no clothes. Lynchings, fire bombings and other random acts of terror in the North as well as the South are attributed to “Nigger, Chink or Injun trouble”, rather than White apprehensions of actually having to share the nation’s resources. So in the final estimation, White Power terrorist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and solitary racists like Timothy McVeigh cannot be viewed as exclusively iniquitous since they are merely reacting to anti-White minority and Liberal maltreatment. This is the type syllogistic logic that forms the straw man basis of Ms. Malkin’s philosophy.

Ms. Malkin strongly empathizes with D’Souza’s supposedly objective theoretical conclusions on race, class and gender hierarchies. Unlike Malkin, D’Souza makes a weak, but noticeable effort to at least appear fair, but the overriding effect of his work is exactly the opposite. Take for example his oversimplified rationalizations of American African social inequities by way of eugenic pseudo-sociology. Pointing out what he describes as “Black cultural pathologies” inherent within the group, D’Souza blames American and continental Africans for their retarded social positions rather than the overwhelmingly powerful political structures that put them there. The only non-European invited to participate in the 1994 White Preservation Conference in Atlanta, D’Souza promotes himself as a living example of the benefits of Euro-centric hegemony. He contends unflinchingly as he did publicly on the PBS chat show Charlie Rose that minorities who actively reject White cultural values are in effect, insufferable non-entities that prefer victimization rather than individually responsible social participation. In other words, by resisting the assumed enlightenment of White cultural ideals and incorporation, minorities and American Africans in particular, should accept sole responsibility for their misfortunes. The nonsensicality of his argument goes on to legitimise (according to his adherents) what he terms “rational discrimination” by the White dominated establishment as the natural result of a superior civilization coming into contact with culturally inferior populations. As he glibly observes in his work, “Illiberal Education”, “Racial division is the natural consequence of principles that exalt group equality above individual justice.”

By Any Other Name

To cite such beliefs as precariously analogous to classic Hitlerian eugenics is on one hand overtly simplistic but on the other, quite accurate in light of the evidence. A cursory examination of “Mein Kampf” reveals the very same racialist presumptions Ms. Malkin addresses in her own treatises, only the principle targets and motivations are different. She cites inferior “cultures” rather than substandard “races” as barometers for estimating the inherent value of individuals and populations. The litmus test that measures these values is of course entirely European in nature and conceptually White in its scope. By arguing that non-European cultures are inherently and utterly deficient, European values inevitably take immediate precedence. This distinction is very important in comprehending how non-European ethnic personalities can so strongly align themselves with such overtly malicious racist ideologies. For many of these non-White neo-segregationists, the issues of race and ethnic stratification are passé concerns in the modern geopolitical capitalist era. As mentioned earlier in discussing the speciously discriminatory assumptions of Mr. D’Souza, Conservative social and political evaluators blame the subjects of discrimination, not the unjust biases present within the system. It is entirely fair to equate such minds with defence attorneys that persist in faulting victims of rape for their predicament rather than the aggressor or aggressors that violated them. Again, this is a significant factor also observed in Nazism and unmistakably documented in their stated philosophy. If Jews left Germany under their own steam in the 1930’s as Herman Goering suggested while sitting in the dock in Nuremburg, the Final Solution would never have manifested. He added to this by further insisting that he and his fellow defendants were at heart Zionists, and faulted “Jewish Bolshevism” for Germany’s ruin rather than the racialist policies that bankrupted haughty Germanic claims of a superior European ethno-cultural ideal.

For racialist apologists and their revisionist philosophers, German Fascism represented an example of undisciplined state sponsored xenophobia, not an enlightened rational racism. They fault not so much the historical European anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant sentiments that made Nazism possible as much as the suggestion that the Party allowed itself little flexibility in deciding how best to address the issue. The distinctive approach that contemporaneously links these racialist ideologies is the belief in the inherent right of ethnic and cultural superiors to compartmentalize themselves from the infidel menaces that they fear exist within their mists. This revised version of classical racialism is unique in that it allows for non-Whites to exist within the White infrastructure provided they recognize and accept their less-than-equal status and assertively toil to sustain that very same system’s racial quandary.

And in this capacity Ms. Malkin excels remarkably. As a Philadelphia born child of Third World Philippine immigrants, Malkin represents like D’Souza, Alan Keyes, Justice Clarence Thomas and others, a non-White, pro-racialist model of post-Civil Rights era neo-segregationism. Her syndicated columns and media appearances are rife with disingenuous anti-immigration, anti-multicultural and anti-parity misinformation. Her work intentionally misrepresents the efforts of individuals and communities that make people like her possible to not only exist within White society, but to succeed. Without the liberalist, multicultural and progressive movements that preceded and surpassed 1960’s Civil Rights legislation, Ms. Malkin like many Philippinos and other minorities in America would still be living under anxiously oppressive, racially divisive conditions. The ludicrously simplistic defenses Ms. Malkin puts forward as “proof” that racism does not exist infrequently figure such empirical facts into her analysis. She simply ignores them as fictions of liberal propaganda. She doesn’t just diminish America’s racial history, she simply rewrites this history to suit her revisionist position. No less dishonest in her historical distortions than her contemporary David Irving across the pond, Malkin typifies the Reagan-era push to blur racial questions that contradict the American Exceptionalist myth of social equilibrium.

Exposing Conservative Newspeak

Ms. Malkin and other leading commissariat of the CONS, (Conservative Orators of Neo-Liberal Stupidity) routinely articulate such revisionist twaddle as sober scholarship and discourteously disparage any academically sound challenge to these ideas as leftist bitterness run amok. The only defence these pundits ever seem to employ is the oft-levelled charge of liberalism. I have yet to read one paper or hear one lecture from a neo-Conservative racialist that has ever honestly addressed a direct challenge to their viewpoints. Instead of participating in levelheaded intellectual discussion, Conservatives habitually lob personal insults, baseless charges of treason and schoolyard bullying tactics as a means to avoid such debates. Take Ms. Malkin’s condemnation of the reparations movement for one glaring example.

In her August 15th 2002 article for TownHome.com, “Get Out Your Reparations Calculator”, Ms. Malkin childes American African Reparations advocates as simply race-card baiting opportunists marketing slavery for a substantial monetary payoff. She then goes on to ridicule Defence attorney Sam Jordan for suggesting that Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Minister of Information for the Philadelphia Black Panther Party for Self-Defence should receive a fair trial, something even his court records and many international observers clearly concur he did not receive. Ms. Malkin then enters the realm of the ridiculous by insensitively parodying the reparations issue by highlighting her Philippine background and asserting that she too is due reparations from various sources, in particular Spain, and encourages her White readership to do the same. While Ms. Malkin spends considerable energy openly belittling the personalities behind the reparations movement, she totally sidesteps the causes behind the issue. Her self-indulgent ad hominem attacks only serve to elucidate her proclivity for stretching and twisting the truth. If truth can be summed up as virtue left entirely up to perception, then Ms. Malkin can be regarded as an expert fabricator. The inherent disingenuousness of her arguments and the self-serving posture she exhibits when she puts forward such inaccuracies as contemporary social realities by default negate any value she attempts to convey. In the long run, anything she proposes in the arena of racism let alone Japanese-American internment, is a waste of ink. In order to discuss an issue you must first admit that the issue exists and in this regard Ms. Malkin fails miserably. For Conservatives, truth is not as important a factor as being right. And cognitive dissonance goes a long way in the insular ethno-specific groupthink paradigm that serves as Conservative philosophical representation.

“In Defence of Internment” and in the entire scope of Ms. Malkin's work should be regarded precisely for what it is. An “enlightened” and objective Conservative defense for conventional racialism. If there is a distinction to be drawn between the instantly recognizable racism of the pre-Civil Rights era and the Nuevo racism of contemporary America, it is that the former reasoned no moralistic compulsion to appear fair and balanced. Indeed, the totality of Anglo cultural presumptions of superiority as they relate to social interaction and equal distribution of power necessitates that such obvious prejudice only be viewed through the narrow constraints of Euro-centric bias. The latter is much more dedicated to providing a psychological basis for social amnesia of the historical foundations of racism and the resulting inequities that account for the “race problem”. Ms. Malkin will no doubt take pride in my estimation that she has written a very dangerous book. Like the “Bell Curve”, she provides a means for White America to absolve themselves from any responsibility for creating and maintaining explicitly racialist systems, policies, and social constructions. And in her own personal example of minority assimilation and capitulation she subsequently provides a living model for the new neo-American, a non-White safety valve that will protect and serve the pro-Euro-centric ideals and traditions that represent American racism and political exceptionalism. Sieg Heil.