Paul Sheehan is a big fan of the adage ‘when you’re onto a good thing, stick to it.’
Sheehan discovered some time ago that there was mileage to be had in writing opinion pieces about how various sinister forces of darkness (literally) were intent on bringing down good White folk, and he has used this basic template again and again. There is a large and varied cast of villains, including African-Americans, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Aborigines and (above all) multiculturalism, but the storyline is always the same.
In 1995, while a visiting fellow at Harvard University, Sheehan wrote a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald called ‘Four Stories the US Media Refuses to Tell.’ Topping the charts at number one was ‘The Race War of Black Against White’ a ‘dirty war’ that he said had so far claimed 25 million victims, in the form of inter-racial crime of Blacks against Whites. Sheehan has no time for criminologists who warn that it is dubious to draw this kind of links between race and crime, because once other socio-economic factors are taken into account, the racial differences are not significant. In any case, Sheehan can speak to the reality of the race war because of ‘ my own experience with Black Americans in the past decade, which includes attempted murder, assault, theft, bottle-throwing, being showered with beer, and being called ‘cracker’, ‘honkey’, ‘motherf…er’, ‘White trash’, and ‘blue-eyed devil’.
This ‘dirty war’ of Blacks against Whites has now generated, in Sheehan’s words, a ‘violent White reaction’ in the form of White militias and atrocities such as the Oklahoma bombing. White reaction? Just who is reacting to who, here? It is true that Sheehan describes the 30 year long ‘dirty war’ of Black crime against Whites as ‘retribution’, but he never explains or acknowledges just what they might be seeking retribution for assuming, of course, that this is even the case.
On the other hand, White militias, rather than being consistent with the lynch mob mentality that has justified the murder of Blacks (and Whites who didn’t tow the line) for generations, are a ‘reaction’ to Black crime and to the government’s ‘ aggressive preferences for Blacks in jobs, education and civil rights.’ Huh.
It is 12 years since this piece was published. I revisit it now partly because it has had such a long afterlife on the net, predominantly on White supremacist websites and chatrooms, sometimes with Sheehan’s name attached and sometimes not. It made one such appearance only last month and last year it appeared in The White Patriot Leader (‘newspaper for White Americans’). In 2005, it was posted on a New York Times blog chat about race, crime and abortion.
The role of Sheehan’s article on White supremacist websites has been noted in a scholarly paper on recruitment by extremist groups on the internet with the authors citing the legitimising function of such material:
References to authoritative sources serve a useful function for White extremists. For example, Aryan Nations offers the following information that it claims comes from the Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper:
‘Most victims of race crime about 90 per cent are White. Almost 1 million White Americans were murdered, robbed, assaulted or raped by Black Americans in 1992, compared with about 132,000 Blacks who were murdered, robbed, assaulted or raped by Whites. Blacks are committing more than 50 times the number of violent racial crimes of Whites.’
This is an obvious propaganda technique, presenting erroneous information, not providing alternative sources to show more than one side of an issue or variable estimation.
Of course, Sheehan is not responsible for the unauthorised use that others have made of his writing. Some of my own articles have appeared on similar websites, because I have been critical of some Muslim men, although to judge from the emails informing me that I’m a product of ‘race treason’, I’d say their readers are not exactly my fans. I don’t doubt that Sheehan would loathe some of the material that appears alongside his article, not least for its toxic anti-Semitism.
But you would think that having his work so enthusiastically received by the David Duke website, by WhiteHistory.com, WhiteNationalism.com, listed as ‘recommended reading’ by Nordwave (right above the featured article ’10 commandments for National Socialists, by Dr Joseph Goebells’), and attached to the MySpace profile of white supremacists from Ohio might give him pause for thought. Even if you stood by your opinions, you might consider using a more three-dimensional form of expression.
Not Sheehan. ‘The Race War of Black Against White’ includes many of the themes that have characterised his journalism and books ever since: the linking of race to crime; the way that White racism is described as an understandable reaction to ethnic misbehaviour and the marginalisation of Whites by government, while ‘ethnic’ misbehaviour itself is seen as somehow innate and inexcusable; and the selective use of statistics combined with anecdotal stories of ‘reasonable’ White unhappiness in response to persecution by what Damn Edna refers to as ‘tinted people’. This material has buttered Sheehan’s bread for more than a decade.
It’s a wonder White people dare leave their homes each morning, besieged as they are by African American gangsters, Vietnamese triad members, Lebanese Muslim rapists and terrorists, not to mention an Aboriginal ‘feral underclass’ in Australian rural towns. And all of these sinister characters backed by governments who are at the mercy of ethnic branch-stacking and intent on imposing anti-White discrimination under the guise of multiculturalism. No wonder all the White folk are out there joining militias and voting for One Nation.
Except they aren’t. As Sheehan often and repetitively points out, most Australians are not deeply racist. Perhaps this is because, despite Sheehan’s moral panic, they do in fact feel basically safe when they venture onto the streets. Perhaps they don’t feel put upon and persecuted by uppity wogs and blackfellas. And perhaps they don’t feel that way because, in fact, they aren’t
Donate To New Matilda
New Matilda is a small, independent media outlet. We survive through reader contributions, and never losing a lawsuit. If you got something from this article, giving something back helps us to continue speaking truth to power. Every little bit counts.
