Just Hop Into the Cannibal's Pot, Bigot

Against Magnanimity

Welcome back, everyone! Some readers have indicated they’d like occassional shorter articles, so this one is a good bit shorter than some of my recent ones, such as the one on embodying Washingtonian excellence. However, I think you’ll find it interesting, as it stems from a debate I was having recently with a frequent reader of this publication about the applicability of ancient virtues in our race communism-afflicted world, and when adherence to certain supposed virtues in the face of destruction is really a sin. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it! Listen to the audio version here:

[AUDIO] Just Hop Into the Cannibal's Pot, Bigot

Decay and decline are seemingly omnipresent in our world, which is why I write about them so much. There are a few glimmers. Reindustrialization, the space economy, and nuclear energy in particular. But on the whole, we have seen a great deal of decay set in as the problem of disorder has gotten worse and worse.

Cities are a particularly visible manifestation of this. Sure, most are not as bad as in the 1970s. But imagine telling a Westerner of the Belle Epoque that the average city in the wealthiest nation on Earth would be more dangerous for civilians than most active war zones. They’d laugh in your face—crime was a solved problem in their day. Yet it is nevertheless the case; fewer civilians are killed in Ukraine, on a per-capita basis, than are murdered in Charlotte, NC, every year.

And, what’s true of crime is true of much else, from aesthetics to competence. It would be unfair to call America as a whole a society of homicide suspects and victims clad in track suits…but such could at least be used to describe the Spirit Airlines terminals in the airport.

Why did that happen? How did we go from the bold and dynamic world of men like Sir James Brooke and Cecil Rhodes to the stagnant present?

There are many answers one could give, depending on the specific time and place. I find egalitarian-minded death taxes and free trade particularly convincing in the case of the Great War-era United Kingdom, for example. However, one of the best general answers is that the West’s virtues were weaponized against it during the middle of the twentieth century, and so we were taught to not just tolerate but gracefully accept the murder of our world.

Magnanimity and John Brown

Take magnanimity, the idea that one ought avoid being petty or unforgiving and instead act selflessly and forgive the undeserving to preserve social and inner peace. When dealing with one’s fellows, this is what stops every minor dispute from escalating into a murderous brawl or deadly duel.

Thus, if all are guided by the same cultural precepts and so can be generally assumed to be acting in good faith, which was probably the case in the early 1800s, it makes sense to teach as a virtue and as a practice to be generally observed. In fact, it even makes sense that Aristotle would refer to it as the crowning virtue—society works much better when all are not constantly harboring grudges or settling scores over petty slights.

That said, it works less well when those behind the slights want to kill you and are actively working to replace and destroy you. For example, Hasan Kwame Jeffries—brother of the House Minority Leader—recently took to X to post about how much he loves John Brown because John Brown tried to spark a white genocide to punish “white supremacy,” with the obvious implication that “white supremacy” (having a functional society) should be punished by white genocide now.

When the brother of one of the most influential men in America is calling for white genocide, it’s probably time to rethink broadly applied magnanimity. The same is true when people like him are working to ensure the jury system no longer delivers justice, crime is legal so long as it is committed against whites, and so on.

While perhaps still relevant as a virtue when dealing with members of one’s in-group that one knows to be of like mind and worldview, to be magnanimous in the face of those who want to kill you, particularly when they are actively trying to do so, is to allow yourself to be murdered for ridiculous philosophical reasons. Such comments, slights, diatribes, and the like should be fuel for a counterrevolution, not ignored in the name of social graces.

Yet magnanimity is nevertheless taught, particularly by “conservatives”. How often have you been told not to do, think, or say something because magnanimity precludes it? How often did that mean staying silent or inactive in the face of those who wish to destroy your people and culture, or “letting bygones be bygones” with those who tolerated them—such as those who collaborated with the DEI regime?

Quite frequently, probably. They, their ideological allies, and useful idiots who know not what they do continue preaching magnanimity because it gives them the social cover necessary to try to destroy our world, and face no consequences for it.

They can spark and fund riots, make good work impossible for white men to get, chase white men out of prestigious institutions, unleash criminals on cities, tax away wealth in the name of redistribution, and encourage the destruction of our heritage and culture…and expect to face no consequences because we are supposed to treat them as fellow gentlemen and remain polite and amenable to their foibles.

They have weaponized our virtue against us, and delight in taking advantage of this fact. This is particularly true of older whites who long collaborated with the DEI regime in an effort to get ahead in their career, and now react with horror when called out on it.

So, one who instead believes "Do unto others as they would do unto you—and do it first" is unlikely to be magnanimous, but much more likely to preserve his civilization in the face of race communism. Is that not in itself a virtue? He who saves his nation violates no law, after all…

Such is an uncomfortable question. We’re taught that certain virtues, magnanimity chief among them, are always in themselves good. I find that unconvincing. It is good that our young men are no longer shooting each other in the streets over petty slights, as was the case in the heyday of dueling.

But letting bygones be bygones when latter-day John Browns hold knives to our throats is significantly less virtuous, and indeed reeks of cowardice. Perhaps, then, magnanimity should be taught as a conditional virtue, rather than an absolute one.

The Cannibal’s Pot

Such is on my mind after reading The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James. Up until the post-World War I era, the story of the British Empire is one of noble deeds and exciting expansion. It is a constant tale of great men like Sir James Brooke, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Wellington, and others vanquishing vast hordes of enemies by using their wits and cunning against mere biomass, and doing so with the certainty that the civilization they represented was the superior one.

And then that all fell apart, not because it couldn’t have been held onto or because the wonderful riches of Malaya, Sarawak, the Raj, Hong Kong, Rhodesia, and so on were no longer extant, but because those whose task and duty it was to maintain the empire lost their certainty that to hold onto it was the right thing.

They instead came to believe that all rights really are inherent to everyone, and so subjects of the Raj who had been burning widows a few years previously and Gambians who liked to eat each other should have the same opportunities at self-government as Englishmen who had been building high civilization for centuries.

What’s more, this equality delusion appears to have been a widely held one. A few remnants of better days, such as the Duke of Montrose, tried to hold onto and rhetorically defend the empire and the concept of ruling over those who deserved to be ruled. But most Englishmen didn’t. Even Enoch Powell, today remembered as quite the rightist, responded to rumors of harsh tactics being used against the evil and bloodthirsty Mau Mau rebels by saying:

“We cannot say, ‘We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home.’ We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility”.

Apparently, the idea that law-abiding Englishmen should be policed by one standard, and blood-drinking rebels who engaged in ritualistic human sacrifice by another was a bridge too far…for the supposed arch-rightist of the period. The more liberal members of Parliament were delighted to hand the Dark Continent back to the enemies of civilization in the name of equality, for they too believed in universal rights and so saw consent as the only moral thing, and abiding by it the only way to be virtuous. That and they hated hierarchy.

And so an empire that had been built with centuries of blood was handed off to a murderous rabble of communists, kleptocrats, and dimwitted thugs without even a whimper. Indeed, they often celebrated the end of the empire and precipitously rushed it along!

What had been gained through centuries of blood and toil was folded on the table like a lost hand of cards, and given up with showy “good feeling” on both sides. And their response to those like the Rhodesians who did not want to see their civilization die for no reason other than the demented belief in equity possessed by the new ruling class? “Just hop in the cannibal’s pot, bigot! It wouldn’t do to insult their culture!”

Naturally, this was claimed to have been a show of virtue on the part of the British. Unlike those nasty Frenchmen, who played dirty to try to keep Algeria after having fought the CIA and communists for years in a desperate battle to hold onto Indochina, they just gave it up out of a sense of right and magnanimity. The same is supposedly true of the British Aristocracy, which David Cannadine praises in Aspects of Aristocracy for genteely letting its destruction role on mostly unopposed rather than fighting to the bitter end for their prestige, honors, and privileges.

In each case, allowing the destruction of hierarchy—and indeed civilization itself—in the name of equality is treated as a virtue because “equality” was furthered by it. Such is the sort of propaganda under which our civilization lies buried. And so all that was built with much blood and thunder faded with a disastrous whimper, and civilization itself perished in those lands blighted by a resurgence of the dire equality of the Stone Age.

Atlanta and South Africa

It is no virtue to allow your own destruction. To sit by and idly watch as those not fit to shine your ancestors’ shoes destroy all they built and accomplished is cowardice, not virtue. Sure, it might be clothed as any number of virtues. Prudence, discretion, temperance, magnanimity, etc. But it’s just cowardice to the core, often motivated by greed.

This is a point that great American novelist Tom Wolfe makes well in his best book, A Man in Full. Set in Atlanta in the 1990s, the book repeatedly and correctly notes that Atlanta’s white business elite 1) lives in fear of the black political class that it gradually allowed to take over and run the city in a highly corrupt and crime-promoting way, and 2) that the white business elite, nevertheless, goes out of its way to pat itself on the back for never seriously opposing the Civil Rights revolution and for avoiding riots of the sort that wreaked havoc in much of the rest of the South.

To such types, the fact that their actions and the actions of those empowered were turning their city into a crime-infested hellhole mattered much less than the fact that they hadn’t been rude when it happened, for that would be distasteful. Much like the British demanding that those settlers who had no wish to be eaten by cannibals hop into the cannibal’s pot regardless, they demanded that those Atlantans who preferred prosperity and good governance to the insane kleptocracy of black rule by the likes of Andy Young keep their mouths shut and go along with it. “Just toss your wallet into the kleptocrat’s pocket and let his favored thugs rape your daughter, bigot! It wouldn’t do to offend him!”

Pat Buchanan, describing this mindset—along with how it played out in the colonial context—in his fabulous The Death of the West, writes that such leftist “ideas have made Western elites apparently indifferent to the death of their civilization. They do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration. Now that all the Western empires are gone, Western Man, relieved of his duty to civilize and Christianize mankind, reveling in luxury in our age of self-indulgence, seems to have lost his will to live and reconciled himself to his impending death.”

Western man resigned himself to the cannibal’s post, for to avoid it would have been described as bigotry by those looking forward to the impending feast.

That resignation, a sort of willful abdication of duty under the cover of pretended and supposed virtue must be rejected, and those who engage in it ostracized.

Yes, there still remains a place for such virtues as discretion, prudence, and so on, as I’ve written about before. Those are virtues because they help rightists, in particular, avoid disastrous mistakes rooted in impulse rather than calculation. But I really doubt there is one for magnanimity, moving forward. Even more certainly, the false idols of universalism and equality must be defenestrated. That which gets in the way of a successful counterrevolution—most relevantly here acceptance of leftist history and ideas like equality, and that like magnanimity which allows such evils to fester—must be destroyed.

Our enemies want to destroy us. They want to turn our world into South Africa. That is their stated goal. It is what types like Hasan Kwame Jeffries openly admit they want to do to us. They must be defeated, and that evil ideology must be not just rejected but extirpated.

We can’t treat such people as mere political opponents with incorrect views, as fellow men of honor with the same rights, values, and sense of virtue we have. They are latter-day John Browns and Mau Mau—feral, demonic murderers—and must be crushed before they kill us. Similarly, those who aid and abet them must be treated in the same fashion. From the NGOs and NGO donors to the pro-crime judges and DAs, those who side with the enemies of civilization must be treated as the enemy, and the sorts of restraints applied when dealing with them that have long been in place—namely, the Atlanta-style refusal to treat them as enemies while hiding behind the curtain of “decency”—need to be rejected.

Virtue is not virtue when it leads to the death of one’s civilization. It is then a sin, and a dire one at that. Treachery, after all, is what sends one to the darkest corners and reaches of hell, according to Dante.

So, to reiterate a point I made in an article from a few months ago on the DEI collaborators: these people are evil, and must be treated like it. The preachers of magnanimity want us to ignore the slights, the insults, and so on in the name of societal peace and harmony. To avoid grudges or payback, and instead move forward. That is a mistake. It is what has rotted our civilization to its core in recent years, as most visibly seen by the destruction of every city of note in America. It’s time to do the opposite, and treat our enemies as the existential threats they are.

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Also, consider checking out my history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, such as this video on their legacy: