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More on Youth for Western Civilization

Posted April 15, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

[UPDATE 6/1/09 Youth for Western Civilization co-founder pleads guilty to hate crime]
I wrote yesterday about the new “rightwing youth movement” Youth for Western Civilization. I was googling around looking for more on this national organization and saw they had announced their founding on the American Renaissance web site. That site is one of the largest havens for the “educated racist” on the web. That strange site recently had a major article hailing the victory of neo-Fascists in Austria. Here is a sample of the jubilation in a seemingly rare electoral victory for the downtrodden White race: “Just a few weeks before Americans voted in a black socialist as president, Austrians rocked the European political establishment by handing a stunning victory to nationalists who openly oppose non-European immigration and the loss of sovereignty to the European Union. It was a breakthrough unthinkable in any English-speaking country, and again confirms that the brightest political hopes for our people are in the nationalist parties of small European countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, and Austria. “
The creation of the Youth for Western Civilization is being hailed by a number of far-right and racist organizations and web sites, but this new “movement” appears to have less than one hundred members who are actually students at the universities where chapters have been organized. And the local chapter spokemen don’t appear to have a message likely to appeal to the educated 19 year old.
Now it is usually fairly easy to poke fun at the sorts of small-minded bigots who join student race-pride groups, especially when they are trying to appear broad minded. So, when one of the group’s leaders says “We don’t care if you are red, yellow, black or white, if you love the West and appreciate the culture America as we know it was founded on (not the Native Indian one), you are a friend of ours. One of our 13 current members is racially Arabic, yet embraces America since she was born here”, you might be tempted to laugh. But when you remember that well-connected and powerful people like Bay Buchanan and Tom Tancredo are behind this group, you should consider the purpose to which they intend to put the young men in this group.
These older long-time activists prey on a misplaced sense of aggrievement that a small number of quite privileged young White men express. They have been told by their elders that they did not get into a “better school” because a non-White person took their place. They come to believe that the inclusion of women writers in the literature curriculum and African Americans in the history courses means that White men are being pushed aside. Without academic apartied, they fear, the non-White races will shoulder them out of any relevance.
A letter one of the “movement’s” founders wrote to a student newspaper accuses those who want to include the story of African Americans and Latinos in American history of seeking to ” to balkanize the campus; we [Youth for Western Civilization] seek to unite it behind the civilization that provided most everything we cherish (democracy, human rights, the notion of higher education, the majority of our curriculum, etc.).” Now of course, elsewhere, the same group has charged that Western culture has already been tossed out of the curriculum by the “multiculturalists”, and now its spokesman says that the “majority of our curriculum” continues to be sourced from Western civilization. Isn’t formal logic one of the legacies of the West?
I would note that the university was created by the Catholic Church as was the basic curriculum of a liberal education, so if the young man wants a true return to the past he might insist on celebacy among the students as well as the exclusion of women from mixed gender lectures. I’m sure he would recognize the dangers of a modern Abelard. And, while he is correct in noting that democracy was a product of the Greek West, although there was an eighteen hundred year hiatus in its practice, he might want to claim Communism and Fascism as his inheritance as both are equally Western as democracy, and in fact, as later post-Romantic developments, might claim to be even more refined expressions of Western culture. Modern democracy, of course, is practiced in many non-Western countries, with india being the world’s largest democracy. Whether it makes sense to call democracy or human rights “Western”, or if it makes more sense to simply call them “modern”, I am not sure.
But Tancredo clears things up for us in his speech to American University’s chapter of Youth for Western Civilization where he said that “Throughout history, people who are not white Anglo-Saxon have become American by adopting a white Anglo-Saxon culture.” So, anyone can become American so long as they become White!
The provocative goals of Youth for Western Civilization have drawn strong negative reactions on the campuses on which they have held events. Unfortunately, sometimes the reactions have been so strong that they have led to disruptive and even potentially violent behavior. For example, a speech by Tom Tancredo at the University of North Carolina was cut short this week when a rock was thrown through the window of the venue he was speaking at. News outlets that would have ignored the event or covered the large number of people there who disagreed with Tancredo, instead were handed a story about the “Western” right to free speech being violated by people who claim to endorse tolerance.
Student groups have every right to protest these White nationalist events and to closely question the speakers they bring in, but attempts to violently silence them are simply wrong, as well as being counterproductive.
What Youth for Western Civilization has to say for itself.
Youth for Western Civilization in the Northeast.