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Samizdata quote of the day – identity politics bollox

What is this “global majority” thing? The term has been promoted as an alternative to “ethnic minority”, which is seen as marginalising people from immigrant backgrounds. Westminster Council announced last year that it would adopt “Global Majority” rather than “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic).

Yet if “ethnic minority” marginalises people who have immigrant backgrounds — arguable in itself — “global majority” ends up marginalising people who don’t. Indeed, it does it in a far more explicit manner. “Ethnic minority” is a relative term. If a white British person moves to Indonesia, he or she has joined an ethnic minority. “Global majority”, on the other hand, has been defined as referring to black, Asian and “brown” people. I suppose it’s possible that progressives would accept that in Africa, white, Asian and “brown” people represent the “global majority”, but I can’t see it happening.

Ben Sixsmith

18 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – identity politics bollox

  • Steven R

    I wish they would just get to the end game and say “in an effort to fix the Earth and heal from colonialism and capitalism and some other -isms, we have decided who will live and who will die and we will start by cleansing whites from the planet.”

  • bobby b

    It’s only a global majority if the defining characteristic is “not white.”

    At least “black” or “asian” or “brown” speaks to some characteristic that someone actually personally has.

    “Global majority” doesn’t really define – it only excludes, in a very jealous manner. Who knew that the true White Supremacists were the non-white?

  • Kirk

    It’s an interesting strategy, and I can only wonder at how well it will all work out.

    My take on it? They win? The whole thing will dissolve in acrimony, once the hated white race is gone, and they’ll turn on each other like the rabid animals they are.

    One of the things I note about the various “activists” is that they’re typically cowards; I guarantee you that if they’d been alive in the days of Clive, they’d have likely been the first to line up and work for the East India Company as willing servants screwing the rest of their fellow Indians over.

    What the idjit class forgets is that the thing which enabled European colonialism the most wasn’t that the colonialists were a bunch of assholes, but that the colonized were so poorly organized and corrupt. There is precisely zero reason that the Indians couldn’t have put together a decent resistance to the Raj; it was just that they were so selfish and self-centered that they preferred to make it easy for the Brits to come in. And, not coincidentally, the British did a rather better job of administering things for India than the Indian elites were. There were lots and lots of Indians who thought that the British were offering a better deal, which they indeed were.

    This reactionary BS is a blight upon the world, especially going forward. It needs to be left in the past, with the people who did it. There are no “blood crimes”, or we’ll be slaughtering each other forever over things our ancestors did to each other centuries ago.

    It’s like with the so-called “genocide” of the so-called “Native Americans”: Look, you show me where there were any saints among the tribes, any enlightened types that weren’t locked into stone-age primitivism. Good grief, the litany of horrors they inflicted on themselves and others… Everywhere. People forget the details… Sacajawea, sainted guide for Lewis and Clark? Slave. Freed by the “evil white man”. I could go on, but you get the point…

    The whole thing is agitprop, and it won’t end well. The idjit class ought to remember something: If there’s one thing whitey is really, really good at? It’s killing people in job lots. You put their backs up against the wall for “retribution”, and it will be very unlikely to end the way you imagine.

  • Fred the Fourth

    Similar to the replacement for “minority”. A new term I’ve seen is “historically minoritized groups”.

    A blatantly preemptive move forseeing the time when ” whites” are a numerical minority somewhere.

  • Other JJM

    I’ve always thought it obvious that ‘white’ is being used as a disphemism for being an reason-loving person who values objectivity. THAT explains why many good people who happen not to be white are accused of ‘white supremacy’ and related things.

    It is the discipline of reason that is the real target.

    Reference to skin colour and historical crimes is nothing more than rationalisation.

  • Kirk

    It’s an interesting cultural ju-jitsu move; very much like the one that the Democrats here in the US pulled to convince everyone that the Republicans were the racists that came up with slavery, the Civil War, and fighting civil rights.

    Remains to be seen whether they can really pull it off, but given the alacrity that the credulous white idjit class has taken this up, I fully expect that they’ll manage far more inroads than they deserve to.

  • Ferox

    By the terms of the Left, if the global majority is brown, doesn’t that mean that whites can’t be racist?!?

  • Paul Marks.

    “Global Majority” part of the same thing as “Global Justice” – “redistribution” (read robbery – plundering) of income and wealth.

    If the rich individuals and corporations who back this stuff still have not worked out that it is Frankfurt School Marxism then they are incredibly stupid, and if they do know that it is Frankfurt School Marxism and back it anyway, then it is hard to care about about what happens to these rich individuals and corporations.

    Treating any of this as real concern for non white people is absurd – it is Frankfurt School Marxism using non white people (or women, or homosexuals, or …) as a “victim group” excuse for the plundering and tyranny the left want to do anyway.

    Again – if anyone does not, at this point, understand that this is Frankfurt School Critical Theory (“Woke”) Marxism then they are incredibly stupid, and if they do know and back it anyway – then they deserve what is going to happen to them. Just as the Duke of Orleans, who financed the French Revolution and supported the murder of his own cousin – the kindly, but terribly weak, Louis XVI, deserved to be robbed and murdered by his “friends” – which he was.

  • jgh

    You can’t have a “majority” that is a collection of subsets. It is a *sub*set that is/isn’t a majority, not the collection-of-subsets. It’s like saying the majority of school lessons are woodwork-and-physics-and-geography-and-french.

    The Global Majority is Chinese. Remember that when you next demand Global Government.

  • Kirk

    jgh said:

    The Global Majority is Chinese. Remember that when you next demand Global Government.

    Apparently, you don’t pay attention to demographics or their implications.

    The “Global Majority” is actually South Asian, which it will be for the foreseeable future. Unless China takes corrective actions and commits genocide on the subcontinent.

    My guess is that China will do the same sort of epic stupidity that the Russians have, and go on behaving as though there were inexhaustible human resources to call upon, whenever the regime needs someone to sacrifice for them. That’s not been the case since, oh… the late 1990s? But, the demographic wrecking ball hasn’t hit them in between their beady little eyes, just yet. Just like it hasn’t hit Putin with the reality that he’s not commanding either the Russia of the Tsar or the Soviet Union of Stalin.

    The elites are going to learn a hard lesson in decades and centuries to come: Those teeming masses they rely on for their ego-boos and ability to dominate? They mean Jack and sh*t when there ain’t no more “teeming” to go with the non-masses.

    I think that the only reasonable historical analog we have here is “Europe after the Black Death”, only it’s gonna get a lot, lot worse. Life is gonna suck for the WEF types when they don’t have markets for their vapid consumer BS, and people don’t want to be wage-slaves working for peanuts. “You’ll own nothing…” has an obverse side, and its one that they haven’t considered or taken up: If they own nothing, you have no levers to use in influencing them, either. Turn everyone into domesticated animals, and what you’ve effectively done is enslaved yourself to them, because if you stop taking care of them, the whole thing caves in.

    It’s quite the difference between being a nomadic hunter that kills the game they need, and becoming a settled pastoralist, who has to keep caring for the animals 24/7, no matter what. The “elite” don’t see what they’re doing to themselves, yet… But, they will. Oh, but they will.

    The irony of the slave/slaveowner situation is that, quite often, the slave has rather more free time, autonomy, and less work than the slavemaster, who has to keep feeding him year-round. When you make a slave of someone, you’re putting the yoke around your neck as well as theirs, which is a sad truism that the Klaus Schwab types don’t seem to comprehend.

    “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll like it…” basically means that “They’ll own nothing, and won’t care a bit for any of it, which means that whoever does own it, will go mad trying to keep ahead of them destroying it all…” Ya think “Mizzy the TikTok star” is a pain in the ass, now? LOL… Just you wait, until “nobody owns anything, and is happy…”

  • Snorri Godhi

    “Global majority”, like “ethnic minority” and “sexual minority” before it, are tenuous concepts introduced with the sole purpose of distracting from the true power relationships in Western societies.

    — Bobby says:

    At least “black” or “asian” or “brown” speaks to some characteristic that someone actually personally has.

    Assuming that “Asian” means East-Asian (which is not the case in the US), then “brown” is an artificial construct which includes everybody who is not Black, White, or (East) Asian.

    Hindus and Muslims do not seem to get along well.

  • Mark

    Nobody is a “global majority” nor likely to be.

    It’s the last few centuries which have been the extraordinary exception. The 19th century (the long 19th century) undoubtedly belonged to Britain. The 20th century to the US. The world we know and love (and everybody wants) was the result. Had, say, France won in the 18th century, or Spain in the 16th, what would the world look like today? Massively different I would posit.

    The US, of course, is still the global hegemon although whether it remains so we will find out in the next few decades.

    Looked at from a distance I suspect there will be little differentiation between them, and the transition between the two was remarkably smooth really. It could be argued that the British empire didn’t really end, the HQ just moved (I’m well aware of that streak of sneering anti-Americanism among some of the British so-called “elites”, just as there is that streak of visceral and vicious anti-Britishness among their US counterparts).

    @Kirk,

    Couldn’t agree more and all you have to do when considering any alternate “global hegemon” (21st century will belong to India, to China, “BRICS” blah, blah, blah) is to look at the sort of societies these people make when a majority.

    China? Same shit, different emperor. India? A caste ridden landfill, with Cliff knows how many million slaves. Brazil?

    Perhaps the US/west is falling, but there is nobody who is going to take its place.

    All I see here (like the US) uniting “minorities” is greed, grift and a monumental sense of entitlement (the first and last I think are intrinsic, the middle provided by self loathing white “liberals”).

    It can’t be too long before they turn on each other like rats in a dustbin. And they’ll ensure it will be a dustbin!

  • Paul Marks.

    The people who talk about the “Global Majority” and “Global Justice” do not give damn about non white people – non whites are just another “victim group” to supposedly justify Collectivism.

    They are, mostly white, Frankfurt School (“Woke”) Marxists – and that is all they are.

  • jgh

    Yes, it’s at a tipping point, but the 2023 data shows China at 1.425bn and India at 1.419bn.

  • Kirk

    @jgh,

    That’s assuming we can take the Chinese demographic stats at face value, which I don’t think we can afford to. Actually, I don’t think we can take anything coming out of China as trustworthy, unless it’s verified by outside agencies.

    I suspect that between China’s competing drives to falsify statistics from top to bottom, that their actual population may well be far below what everyone accepts as correct. It may be way, way worse than we know, what with all the incentives to lie upwards for the local governments.

    Regardless, I didn’t say India. I said “South Asian”, which includes everything from Vietnam westwards to Pakistan. China has a large population, but the reality is that there are rather more non-Chinese in Asia as a whole than there are Chinese, which is something they’d do very well to remember. I don’t think bullying the Philippines or Vietnam is going to work out for them, over the long haul of history. Long, long memories there, especially with Vietnam.

  • AFT

    @jgh

    To add to Kirk’s point, I wouldn’t include the South-East Asian countries but ‘South Asia’ as usually understood certainly includes India + Pakistan + Bangladesh + Sri Lanka, so you can add quite a bit to that 1.419 billion. And ‘China’ includes a lot of people who don’t consider themselves (and who aren’t – however much they may insist on the unity of China – really considered by the Chinese government to be) Chinese, so you can arguably knock a bit off that 1.425 billion, even assuming it’s the correct figure for the population of the Chinese state. But even if you don’t, we’re past the tipping point; the Desis already have the lead at this stage.

  • jgh

    Ah, if you say “South Asian”, then I’ll add in Taiwan, Singapore, and the overseas diaspora. That gets Chinese to about 1.55 billion.

  • Kirk

    @jgh,

    Yeah, that’ll end well… Not.

    A very healthy chunk of the Chinese diaspora defines itself as “anything but what China is under the CCP”.

    My personal suspicion is that there are way too many people packed into way too little space, and that the competing interests from all concerned are going to end with the Chinese trying for a “last gasp” imperial thrust that’s going to be resisted with a vehemence they radically underestimate.

    Honestly, the Communist ideology isn’t a terrible analog for the Mongols… They’re moving through the same dynastic process, and it’s likely to end similarly, with overreach and then failure. Which will likely take most of Asia with it.

    Would not surprise me a bit if the majority of the ethnicities and nationalities of Asia still living are those that took part in the diaspora to North America. The war is going to be akin to the one the Mongols fought trying to conquer Vietnam, and it will get genocide-level ugly. The ethnic Han running the CCP know that they’re on a treadmill they can’t get off of, and once they realize internal economic expansion ain’t happening, welllllll… Southeast Asia beckons.

    I expect that the whole thing will reach a crescendo about the time the Chinese demographics run out of steam. That’ll be their Gorbachev moment… Either acquiesce to a long, slow slide into irrelevancy or die ugly in a nuclear holocaust.