Två heta ämnen: Rättviseförmedlingen och Ryssland. En artikel: “Is the Former Soviet Bloc ‘White’?”, av Justin E. H. Smith.
I have begun to wonder whether this ‘white’ thing is not perhaps a symptom of a distinctly ‘Atlanticist’ world view, and whether it might not have somewhat less purchase when one instead looks at the world from a ‘Eurasianist’ perspective. These are of course the sinister Aleksandr Dugin’s terms, and when I invoke them I do not mean to endorse them as true, but rather to make some progress toward understanding why the Russians in particular and the citizens of the former Soviet bloc in general constitute such a peculiar tertium quid in relation to the schemes for carving up of the basic human subkinds that are general currency among American bloggers: they don’t see themselves in our Atlantic-centered racial categories, and that exclusion, that irrelevance of our grids, only makes them more estranged and hostile, less NATO-oid. [….]
Recently I found [Aaron Bady] bringing up the possibility that there is a ‘causative genetic link’ between whiteness and colonialist genocide: only to deny it, of course, but also, rhetorically, to suggest it, to get the possibility out there. I do not believe it is just so much whining about ‘reverse racism’ to suggest that this line of approach isn’t helping us to understand how the world works, and certainly is of no use in, say, interpreting what the Soviet tanks were doing in Prague in 1968, or why Stalin ethnically cleansed Volga Germans to Kazakhstan during the war. It’s a big world, I guess is all I’m saying, and some hypotheses look even less plausible in some parts of it than others.
Why, in other words, should that chunk of the world that extends roughly from Berlin to Beijing be analyzed in terms that were developed to make sense of the historical forces that gave rise to Baltimore?
Den slutklämmen känns relevant även i en svensk kontext. Jag ska inte låtsas vara inläst på den svenska antirasismen, men mitt intryck är att den verkar vara häpnansväckande amerikaniserad.
Björn Östbring 