I have to be extremely careful about this post, because it’ll be easy for someone to pick out some words here and there and conclude that I’m a white supremacist racist bigot kitten killer.
I think “white nationalist” is one of the most insidious negative propaganda labels I’ve heard in a while. It dawned on me one day that you can use that label to describe basically any white person who expresses any positive sentiment about their country. (America, in this case.)
“I had fun on the Fourth of July,” says the white person. “White nationalist!” cries the propagandists.
“I’m glad I called my Congressman,” says the white person. “White nationalist!” cries the propagandists.
“I’m glad I live in America,” says the white person. “White nationalist!” cries the propagandists.
“I hang an American flag outside my house on Memorial Day,” says the white person. “White nationalist!” cries the propagandist.
See? Pretty insidious. Especially because the propagandist can respond, “Oh no, we don’t mean that kind of nationalism, we mean the bad kind of nationalism, we mean the “America first” kind of nationalism that can better be described with a different word such as xenophobia.”
So when people say, “white nationalist,” they really mean “white xenophobic.” Unfortunately since the nationalist terminology is so broad, it’ll catch a huge amount of innocent white people in the propaganda net. And, that, of course, is exactly the purpose of good propaganda labels: To marginalize huge swaths of people, and to make it impossible to push back without self-harm.
When I say self-harm, I mean that since I’m a white guy it’s not politically correct for me to say any of this. I’m under the influence of white privilege which renders all my opinions invalid. (Unless they are the “correct” opinions, of course.)
This has been another random thought about politics and propaganda that will probably make everyone mad. Now to sit and think about whether I should post this and risk the consequences of saying something thoughtful and reasonable on the Internet.
Spoiler alert: I did post it. But not before it sat in my Drafts folder for seven months and I completely forgot that I wrote it in the first place.
