March 13, 2023

Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier

Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier

Source: Wallace Collection

In Douglas Murray’s 2019 book The Madness of Crowds, the popular conservative author revealed something strange about the Google Image results when he typed the phrase “European Art” into the wholly unbiased search engine in question. The first painting that appeared was not da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, nor Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier. Instead, it was a c.1650 portrait by the Spanish Old Master Diego Velázquez of his assistant Juan de Pareja—who was black. Pareja was no lone lump of coal in an online snowdrift. As Murray said:

[Google] presents the history of European art as consisting largely of portraits of black people…. [This] is…certainly “representative” of what some people today might like to see. But it is not remotely representative of the past…. Portraits by or of black people were very unusual until recent decades when the populations of Europe began to change. And there is something not just strange but sinister in this representation of the past…. [It] is simply not a truthful representation of history, Europe or art.

As George Orwell once warned, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The fake demographics of Google’s fake art-gallery, once accepted as an “accurate” representation of the West’s racial past, can then be used to manipulate white European and Americans citizens’ impression of their demographic present, too; and, ultimately, to help determine their sad demographic future. 2023 marks 75 years since Orwell completed writing his dystopian classic 1984, from which the above quote is taken; he was only 39 years out with his title.

“The ultimate aim appears to be to instill a form of false consciousness in white people so that they come to wildly underestimate their own numbers in their own countries.”

The Silenced Majority
I have recently written elsewhere of the Orwellian efforts of Rosemary Campbell-Stephens, a black British academic, to introduce the disingenuous Newspeak term “Global Majority” into the current BLM-ridden world. The idea is to speak of white people in white-majority nations like the U.S. as actually being the minority because, when you arbitrarily add up all the other non-white people on Earth together as one amorphous mass, they vastly outnumber the total number of whites on the planet.

Imagine you live in Iceland, where 99 percent of people are white. Then imagine a single black Nigerian named Ndulu invades central Reykjavik. Although clearly an ethnic minority within a local Icelandic context, by misleadingly labeling himself part of the “Global Majority” who are not white Icelanders, like the 1 billion-plus people who populate each of India, China, and Africa, Ndulu would thus become entitled to go around informing the 99 percent of white post-Vikings who surround him that they are in fact the ethnic minorities there, despite the fact the overwhelming majority of Indians, Chinese, and Africans live in…well, India, China, and Africa, not Iceland (and also despite the fact Ndulu himself is neither Indian nor Chinese).

As Ndulu now somehow represents the “majority,” the “minority” of white Icelanders should immediately stop oppressing him with their so-called Icelandic “normativity” and adapt themselves in every conceivable respect to his way of life, not the other way around; after all, why should the majority submit to the sway of the selfish minority? That would just be unfair!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Racial Statistics
A 2021 op-ed Marjorie Campbell-Stephens co-wrote for Canadian newspaper The Toronto Star reveals how such reverse colonization is supposed to work. Canada, like all historically white nations, is naturally built upon “deeply embedded white supremacist foundations,” say the non-white authors, who somehow manage nonetheless to secure columns in such an amazingly xenophobic land’s leading media outlets. Key to fixing this “is changing the way we think and talk about racialized people [i.e., non-whites] in this country,” namely by thinking and talking about them in a demonstrably inaccurate fashion.

Canada’s bureaucratic use of terms like “visible minority” to denote non-whites purportedly “situates whiteness as the reference standard and the norm by which all people are judged,” which “works to sustain white supremacy.” Historically, whites in Canada were the only ones who “held the power to categorize people in relation to themselves” like this, and “This elite group never defined themselves for the minority they are, and instead acted with the confidence of a majority.”

But…they were a majority, weren’t they? They still are, in fact: Canada is currently 70 percent white, despite the best efforts of Justin Trudeau with his boot polish. Yet, via lying labels like “Global Majority,” race hucksters seek to systematically train people into disbelieving the evidence of their own eyes and census records about the demographics of these nations as they actually stand today. Wherever white people are still in a majority, they argue, we need to speak of them as if they are not. Verbal control becomes a means of political control, an authentically Orwellian concept.

“Whiteness,” crow the article’s authors, “is in its death throes,” sustained only by “the continuation of deficit narratives” that promote the alleged untruth that people in majority-white nations like Canada live in, um, majority-white nations like Canada. Instead, “Correctly describing the Global Majority as such, disrupts this narrative and moves racialized people from the margins to the center.” The ultimate aim appears to be to instill a form of false consciousness in white people so that they come to wildly underestimate their own numbers in their own countries, and become imprisoned inside a real-life mental version of Google’s fake art-gallery.

Disturbingly, this Big Brother tactic can work. A 2022 article by novelist Lionel Shriver in the London Times revealed that, due to systematic overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in the U.S. media, the average American believes 42 percent of their fellow countrymen are black, whereas the true figure is only 12 percent. Even more unbelievable, the average black American questioned believed they were in the majority of the U.S. population, supposedly making up 52 percent of it. A similar survey in the U.K. found respondents guessed Britain’s own population was 20 percent black—the true figure then being 3 percent. Big Sister Campbell-Stephens must have been delighted.

The Tyranny of the Minority
Daniel Lim is a U.S. citizen of Chinese ancestry and Burmese birth, whose 2020 essay “I’m Embracing the Term ‘People of the Global Majority’” reveals how such 1984-style neurolinguistic reprogramming methods can twist previously healthy non-white minds. “For the first 18 years of my life,” Lim writes, he was blissfully unaware of modish racial shit-speak like “people of color,” but this all changed when he attended college and “became active in social justice movements on campus.”

Although ethnically Chinese, when growing up in Burma, Lim passed visually as a local. Therefore, he says, “I feel incredibly lucky to have lived in an Asian country where I was not racialized,” unlike later when he was in the evil white USA—doubtless all the ethnically persecuted Rohingya Muslims raped, slaughtered, and burned alive by the genocidal ruling Burmese military junta feel precisely the same.

Unlike the mass-murdered Rohingya, Lucky Lim today possesses only bogus First World problems, like his damascene realization that the very term “people of color” is one that “centers whiteness” as it “perpetuates the pernicious idea that whiteness is the default and white people therefore have no particular race.” Supposedly, “Race is a special identity marker that is only assigned to people who are not white; who are the other.”

This self-pitying analysis ignores that vital thing known as “context.” A white man, living in yellow Burma, would seem like the cultural and ethnic “other,” as George Orwell himself once found when employed as a British-era white colonial policeman there. Likewise, Lim is equally obviously “other” in America, as the vast majority of Americans do not remotely resemble Jackie Chan.

Lim claims the “affirming” and “super-inclusive” term Global Majority “makes non-white people’s identities independent of whiteness. It is a term that not only decenters whiteness, but renders it irrelevant.” No, it doesn’t, it does precisely the opposite. It plainly merges and then defines each and every non-white person’s identity purely in obsessive opposition to those careless enough to have been born with white skin, leading to alarming doublethink logic like the following:

…people of color in the US are often considered minorities even as [when bundled together] they will outnumber white people…by as early as 2050. The term “minorities” is intended to indicate people of color’s position in the American racial power hierarchy. The term “people of the global majority” enables non-white people around the world to refuse to play by the hierarchy of white supremacy and autonomously claim their own power—power that is born from global solidarity, rather than oppression.

By habitually (but correctly) calling Western non-whites minorities, Lim argues, you disempower them; by disingenuously calling them majorities, however, you give them power. But power over whom? The only logical conclusion would be “power over whites.” Long before the end of this century, the Global Majority mob, if dubiously conflated in aggregate, will outnumber whites all throughout Europe and America. Then, if the race hucksters get their way, they will ruthlessly begin to bend whitey toward their will within whitey’s own ancestral homelands, as Europeans like Officer Orwell once cruelly did to their own non-white ancestors in places like Burma.

Maybe when you Google the phrase “European Art” in 2084, absolutely every historical painting of the continent’s “native” people will by then look like Juan de Pareja; temporary Caucasian interlopers like the Mona Lisa and Laughing Cavalier will have long been successfully tossed down the Orwellian Memory-Hole.


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