When Are You Going To Stop Playing?
tfw we havent stopped playing yet
Give them all your jobs, exalt them much above your own Babbitt-hood, and (being but human) they will surely take advantage of this heaven-sent reversal of status. And they will not then find the Poor White Trash by whom they are surrounded anything like so ‘romantic’ and bewitching as the White American has been persuaded, cajoled, and bullied into finding them.—The American Negro, once in power, would probably not be very much troubled by the exotic sense!
What is the upshot of all of this, then? Why, I can see nothing for it, I am bound to confess, but to put the following disobliging question to the Western European, and (with more diffidence) to the American: ‘When, sir, when, madam, are you going to stop playing? The self-indulgent Nineteenth Century White “Playboy” is today historically nonsense. When, oh when do you propose to put away childish things then—for you are, in the post-war world of Debt and Dole, no longer in the position of a spoilt-child? When are you going to realize, do you suppose, how things have altered for all of us? It would be nice to know! When do you think we may expect you to draw in your horns, to face the fact that you are no longer a White Overlord or anything jolly of that sort at all, and to give your best attention to the safeguarding of your famous White Skin, and as a consequence cease sentimentalizing with regard to the Non-White World, of what ever hue or kind?
To this the Hitlerist would add: ‘When, respected sir, and gracious madam, are you going—oh short-sighted, much-indulging, sentimentally-renegade person that you are!—when may we hope that you will turn for a change to more practical interests? How about giving your White Consciousness a try for a little—it is really not so dull as you suppose! A “White Australia”—that may be impracticable. But at least there is nothing impracticable about a “White Europe.” And today Europe is not so big as it was. It is a “little peninsula at the Western extremity of Asia.” It is quite small. Why not all of us draw together, and put our White Civilization in a state of defense? And let us start by mutually cancelling all these monstrous debts that are crushing the life out of us economically.’
-excerpted from Hitler by Wyndham Lewis (1931)