Diagnosing “Passover Syndrome” Among White Liberals

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^[1]Editor’s Note:

Don’t tell Richard Spencer, but I have been stopping by TakiMag every day since I discovered that Jim Goad is one of their regular columnists.

Goad is the author of The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats ^[2], which is brilliant, as well as Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt ^[3], which is just what it sounds like.

I had written Goad off a long time ago, but his work at TakiMag definitely has him off my shit list. As always, Goad is funny. He understands one of the fundamental truths of psychological warfare: stupidity should be mocked, not analyzed. And he does so brilliantly, even when he just rehearses the old racial double standard stuff, which has its uses. (The reason that I do not write much commentary on current events is that I just don’t have the talent to rubbish them like they deserve.) But beyond the laughs, there are always new and insightful twists to Goad’s commentary. I highly recommend that you sign up for his RSS feed ^[4] so you can follow his work.

There’s something to be said for the almost universal leftist tendency to ignore unpleasant facts in favor of smearing their opponents as mentally ill. Not only is it far easier than constructing a coherent argument, it often works marvelously as a propaganda technique.

Therefore, I can’t see these well-meaning Left Bank humanists complaining if I were to borrow their time-tested methods to describe a prominent mental disorder that currently runs rampant—although undiagnosed and untreated—among their own kind.

I call this disorder “Passover Syndrome.” Almost exclusively, it afflicts relatively affluent Caucasians and is characterized by an array of cognitive delusions that ultimately may prove dangerous for its sufferers and those around them.

Passover Syndrome’s most prominent behavioral feature consists of whites projecting historical blame onto other whites and hoping that nonwhites will see them as not-so-white for doing so. Just as the ancient Israelites smeared sacrificial lamb’s blood over their doorways in order to escape the Angel of God’s vengeance, these delusional Caucasians smear bright red anti-racist graffiti—or, in extreme cases, the literal blood of “rednecks” and any “right-wing white” who refuses to get with the program—over their doorways in the hope that when the Dark Angels finally come en masse seeking “justice,” they won’t accidentally notice that the people with the bright red anti-racist paint over their doorways also happen to be white.

What drives this syndrome is the delusion that collective historical ethnic guilt is a real thing rather than a pseudo-religious abstraction. Passover Syndrome’s sufferers tend to believe that all whites, by dint of skin color alone, are indelibly stained with guilt for unsurpassed historical atrocities and that their debt to nonwhites won’t be repaid until the very concept of “whiteness” ceases to exist—if not white people themselves.

What’s most curious about this syndrome is the delusion that by merely acknowledging this imagined historical debt, they are able to somehow transfer it onto other whites—the “unenlightened” ones who don’t acknowledge it—without having to make any sacrifices or installment payments of their own. A consistent feature of Passover Syndrome is an eagerness to offer up a whole other group of whites as sacrificial collateral for their own perceived debt. . . . Read the whole article here: http://takimag.com/article/diagnosing_passover_syndrome_among_white_liberals ^[5]