George Orwell showed in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm that totalitarians and "movements" usually need a real or even an imaginary enemy against which to rally their followers, lest their leaders otherwise become irrelevant.  The rulers of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in Nineteen Eighty-Four needed one another as enemies to convince their people that "increasing" the weekly chocolate ration from 25 to 20 grams was necessary for the war effort.  David Duke and Richard Spencer would be relative nobodies were it not for leftist extremists who engage in looting, arson, rioting, and vandalism.  This is, in fact, a strong incentive for white supremacists to infiltrate nominally peaceful Black Lives Matter events to incite violence.  The leaders of Antifa and the BLM movement would similarly be relative nobodies were it not for swastika-waving white supremacists chanting, "You will not replace us" and engaging in violence on their own behalf.

The famous educator Booker T. Washington said of this, "There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.  Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.  Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."  White supremacist demagogues manipulate their Caucasian followers similarly, and it is past time for the country to tell both groups that we want none of what they are selling.

The "Woke" Left Promotes Racism by "Othering" Black People

The BLM movement needs racism the same way medieval witch-hunters needed witches (whether real or imaginary).  This is not to say there are no white racists — rallies with swastika flags, burning crosses, and the dregs of Caucasian society in sheets and hoods exemplify the concept — but rather that the problems are far less pervasive than the manipulators claim.  This makes it absolutely vital for BLM to aggravate the very problems it claims to fight, much as a quack "doctor" might infest a water supply with a disease so he can then peddle what he calls the cure.

Proposals for reparations to be paid by people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves serves no purpose other than to set black Americans apart from other Americans and evoke resentment against them.  This nurtures rather than starves the very racism and animosity that the BLM movement and white supremacist organizations need to prosper or even survive.

BLM Global Network often uses the word "allies" to depict Caucasians who support black Americans, as do many "woke" universities.  Rutgers, for example, has the "Black Graduate Students and Allies," while Harvard's "Fighting Anti-Blackness Resource List" includes a link to "'Acknowledging Your Privilege and Becoming an Ally': a Guide to Resources for White Folks."  The linked material adds, "This reflection has led me to reach out to my loved ones to engage and discuss how we can be better allies to Black and Brown people[.]"

This is commonly known as "othering," or defining a given racial, religious, or ethnic group as outsiders.  Othering has traditionally come in the form of explicit hate speech as levied by Nazis against Jews, but BLM and the "woke" left have repackaged the same trash in boxes labeled with nice-sounding but patronizing words like "support" and "allies."  They impute some kind of privilege to all Caucasians, an inherently racist assumption by definition, and then segregate Caucasians from non-white people by defining them as "allies."  All that's missing are the "White" and "Colored" signs that we relegated to the (tr)ash heap of history long ago.

An alliance is an association of convenience, and often one between people or entities that do not even like one another.  In Sharpe's Challenge starring Sean Bean, an Indian commander named Mohan Singh explains why he is fighting on the British side.  "[T]hat makes you my enemy's enemy, and therefore, a necessary evil."  The British took over most of India by becoming a "necessary evil" to various local rulers, as in "divide and conquer."  The Soviet Union, as ruled by the genocidal dictator Joseph Stalin, was similarly a necessary evil during the Second World War and a Cold War adversary shortly afterward.  Make no mistake: an ally is an "other" regardless of how convenient he might be at the moment.

If Theodore Roosevelt was still around, he would explain, and perhaps with the aid of his Big Stick upside the heads (figuratively speaking) of the "woke" left, that a black American is not our ally and therefore some kind of outsider who is alien, different, or otherwise not really "one of us."  He is a fellow American citizen and therefore interchangeable with any of us.

Theodore Roosevelt on Inclusion and Diversity

Roosevelt's essay on Americanism said of immigrants who have adopted our nation's values, "An immense number of them have become completely Americanized, and these stand on exactly the same plane as the descendants of any Puritan, Cavalier, or Knickerbocker among us, and do their full and honorable share of the nation's work."  It doesn't matter if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower as free people or indentured servants, or in the hold of a slave ship, or you yourself took the naturalization oath today.  You are an American who is interchangeable with any other American — end of story.

Roosevelt added, "To bear the name of American is to bear the most honorable titles; and whoever does not so believe has no business to bear the name at all, and, if he comes from Europe, the sooner he goes back there the better."  We do not have a white nation, a black nation, a Nation of Islam, or anything other than the American nation between Mexico and Canada.  This applies equally to Rashida Tlaib and her "Palestinian people," and also white nationalists.

Roosevelt also had no use for "othering" Americans of any race, religion, or ethnicity.  "Americanism is a question of spirit, conviction, and purpose, not of creed or birthplace. ... It is a base outrage to oppose a man because of his religion or birthplace, and all good citizens will hold any such effort in abhorrence.  A Scandinavian, a German, or an Irishman who has really become an American has the right to stand on exactly the same footing as any native-born citizen in the land, and is just as much entitled to the friendship and support, social and political, of his neighbors."  We hope that, with the aid of the president whom Rudyard Kipling called "Great-Heart," Americans now see through the manipulation and fraud being perpetrated on our country by white supremacists and "woke" leftists alike and reject both groups now and forever in the future.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way.  The author is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to "cancel culture" for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.

Image: Johnny Silvercloud via Flickr (cropped).