Four days after The Washington Post published Senator Scott’s piece, it published another column on Steve King entitled: “Steve King says he was just defending ‘Western Civilization.’ That’s racist too.”
In this piece, academics David Perry and Matthew Gabriele take apart the concept of “the West” and suggest it was created to “[explain] why white men ought to rule the world.” “Western Civilization, then, became the story of an unbroken genealogy that stretched from Greece to Rome to the Germanic tribes to the Renaissance to the contemporary, white world,” they write.
Instead, Dr. Perry and Dr. Gabriele argue that there is no real “West,” only “many different Wests.” “[T]he real story embedded in the history of Western Civilization,” they claim, “is a tale of permeability, of movement and change.” They even go on to claim that Congressman King is akin to “Anders Breivik, Jeremey Christian and other neo-Vikings, and the racists who marched in Charlottesville” who “deploy this nostalgia for a mythical ‘West’” to “dominate the future.” “King’s defense of ‘Western Civilization,’” they write, simply does “that work more politely.”
Their proposed solution is education: “Teaching the real story of the West — one that’s multiethnic, encompasses all genders, and takes account of both its horrors and its triumphs — will ensure that the Kings of the future will no longer be able to fall back on semantics to ensure their bigotry.” In other words, Western Civilization is now code for white supremacy.
Western Civilization is white civilization. No one can credibly claim to “defend Western Civilization” without defending the people that created it. “To read about your own culture is a revolutionary act,” said Jonathan Bowden in one of his speeches. In today’s world, there is no greater act of rebellion — for whites — than to defend their own identity. To be a white person is to be heir of a tradition and culture that stretches from the Greco-Roman and Germanic civilizations of the past into the limitless horizons of a potentially glorious future. Yet that future will be ours only if we have the moral courage to defend our right to exist. That battle starts by claiming ownership of our own history.
https://www.amren.com/commentary/201...-civilization/