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Intolerance Not Worth Anyone’s Tolerance [1]
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Date: 2022-12-17
The following exchange took place on April 24, 2011, almost three months before the Norway massacre occurred, on July 22, 2011. The mass shooting of seventy-seven civilians, mostly teenagers attending a Labor Party youth wing summer camp, was perpetrated by a white Norwegian angered by a rapidly changing racial demographic in his country due to increased non-white immigration, especially of the Muslim faith.
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“Have you heard about Norway? Its capital city, Oslo?” the young, white man (early 20s) asked me. He’d noticed my swift glance at his computer monitor, for we were utilizing adjacent Internet-access computer terminals at the local library. Thus he decided to make conversation out of my brief interest in the colorful website he was perusing.
I gave him a puzzled facial expression, since I hadn’t clearly understood his query. “A quarter of the population [in Oslo] is Iraqi,” he stated in what sounded to me to be suppressed displeasure, regardless of his own non-Norwegian ethnic background.
He went on to mention the blog he was viewing, specifically an impassioned commentary posted by a white Norwegian citizen who, upon his return from a long stay abroad, was considerably upset at such a significant racial demographic change there.
He then advanced his point of view to include his perception of such immigrants (and asylum seekers) as unacceptably excessive in their procreative proclivities. “[The blogger] wrote that he cried. Imagine, going back to your home country, to the capital city, and a quarter of the [residents] are Iraqis!”
As for the guy relating all of this to me, his choice of terminology and tone of voice clearly revealed that the said demographic change in Norway bothered him almost as much as the dismayed Norwegian blogger posting his racially charged comments on the website.
I recall thinking that at any moment I’d hear from him the then-popular yet nonetheless devious disclaimer, 'I know it’s not politically correct to say so, but …' [Today’s ‘political correctness’ is, of course, pejoratively referred to as ‘woke’ or ‘woke-ism’.]
Although I didn’t desire getting entangled in discussion involving ethnicity or immigration, I pointed out that Norway is a nation within the most liberal portion of the most liberal continent on the planet; therefore, its immigration and refugee acceptance policies are likely to reflect that liberalism.
His response was that non-white nations, notably the rapidly developing China and India, “would never be as tolerant” of hypothetical white immigrants and asylum-seekers overwhelming those nations’ respective Chinese and Indian populaces.
The guy’s bold comment procured from me a somewhat awkward and uncomfortable mention of China’s one-child policy established in 1979 to counter its current and future overpopulation concerns.
To be accurate, however, I added that the policy theoretically limiting procreation is realistically only enforced in the heavily populated urban centers, such as its capital city Beijing. The metro regions’ policy violators are penalized with (in place of frightful forced abortions) sizeable fines grudgingly accepted as the cost of doing baby-boy-bearing business.
Meanwhile, the policy is typically overlooked in the far less populated rural farming regions where daughters are often accumulated until a male heir is had.
I then also noted that white-dominated nations’ women folk each freely hold the option of bearing many children if she so desires, yet their women folk generally still are the most likely amongst women of all colors on the planet to place their careers before procreation, at least until they reach their later child-bearing years.
The only response my words elicited from him was to briefly relate that he supports conservative political parties in anticipation that their immigration and refugee acceptance policies remain solidly conservative.
It then momentarily raced through my mind, though they were thoughts I kept to myself at the time, that contrary to popular news-media dissemination, xenophobia and bigotry are not just confined within white-against-nonwhite boundaries.
White folk are often enough victims of racist violence, yet such 'biased crimes' (in the Western world, anyway) are rarely, if ever, prosecuted by the state/crown or reported as such in the mainstream news-media, most likely for political and/or ideological reasons. Furthermore, racial-divide-propelled hates crimes not involving whites at all also receive little news coverage.
But I managed to catch a few column inches in The Vancouver Sun during the early 2000s, in regards to some young African men temporarily residing in China as foreign university students in Beijing. Many disapproving, likely-jealous Chinese male students openly resented the foreign students cavorting with (consenting) Chinese female students. Matters became bad enough that the foreign students were intimidated into hastily leaving the Chinese university—all the while being referred to as “the black devils.”
Needless to say, it’s unlikely the angered Chinese students’ nasty conduct represented the racial perspectives of the general Chinese male student population.
When I eventually left the library, I experienced a subtle sense of guilt. I couldn’t help but feel somewhat cheapened by even having engaged in such discussion consisting of implicit and some explicit racial intolerance.
I was uncomfortably aware that I had (albeit briefly) suspended my, for the most part, progressive principles during the discussion and thus felt kind of lousy for it. Unfortunately, though, too many people worldwide—such as the said frustrated white Norwegian blogger who’d just arrived back at his home country that was evolving in its racial makeup, and his sympathizer at the local library—would not share in such after-the-fact guilt.
I’ve since come across the same guy three times, during which he maintained his opposition to most non-white immigration into white-dominated areas of the globe, especially Canada. But most notable was that he didn’t mention a word about Anders Behring Breivik—the infamous young, white Norwegian man sufficiently zealously opposed to his government’s pro-multiculturalism policy as well as large-scale non-white immigration into white Europe, to kill seventy-seven mostly teenaged Norwegian citizens.
He did, however, deny my observation that Jesus, contrary to the white man that he’s often portrayed to be in movies and portraits, was olive skinned like every other person around him in that part of the world.
It’s well accepted by Biblical scholars that Semites from what are now Egypt and the Middle East couldn’t have acquired white skin until after their mass migration (during the centuries A.D.) into the dominant white regions of Europe.
As for Norway, in late November of 2011, a secondary school, contrary to the directions of Oslo’s education commissioner, segregated white from non-white Norwegian students, according to a news-story, in order “to prevent a situation of ‘white flight’ developing”—i.e. a large number of white students leaving the school, claiming that they feel overwhelmed by the non-white students and the practiced customs of their ethnic/cultural background dominating the classrooms.■
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