Lurking in a world where mice are lecturing cats on veganism and hares are volunteering as fox appetisers, Cicero's De Officiis reads like a quaint relic from a less enlightened age. "The highest law is the safety and well-being of the people," he'd thunder, but today? Western whites, those perennial overachievers of guilt, have flipped the script. They've birthed a creed where self-flagellation isn't just virtue; it's salvation. Call it ethno-masochism: the pathological piety of a civilisation so steeped in its own sins that it begs the whip from those it once colonised, imported, or simply irked. It's not mere naivety; it's a full-blown religion, complete with dogma, martyrs, and inquisitions against the unrepentant. And as the "great collapse" looms – that hazy spectre of economic implosion, borderless chaos, or just plain old famine in the "starving wastelands" – one wonders: Will the choir keep crooning when the collection plate's empty?
This isn't hyperbole; it's pattern-matching at its bleakest. The litany of examples reads like a black comedy scripted by Kafka on a bender: Robert Fisk, battered by Afghan refugees in 2001, doesn't rage – he reflects. "Their brutality was entirely the product of others, of us," he writes for The Independent, absolving his assailants as collateral of Western hubris. Fast-forward to 2008: Vittorio Arrigoni tattoos "muqāwama" (resistance) on his arm, sails into Gaza's blockade like a modern Gandhi, only to get kidnapped and garrotted by Salafist jihadis. His legacy? Hagiographies from the ISM, framing his death as a noble footnote in the Palestinian epic. No blame, just beatification.
The hits keep coming, a grim rosary of redemption arcs. Cologne's 2015 New Year's Eve mass assaults? Mayor Henriette Reker – herself fresh from a stabbing – counsels women to keep strangers at "arm's length," as if burqas were the real fix for imported misogyny. A "No Borders" activist raped by Sudanese refugees in 2015? Her comrades hush it up: "Don't feed the racists." That gay Berliner in 2015, strangled with a dead snake after hosting Moroccans? A symbol, sure – but of what? Not predation, per the narrative, but the perils of pity unreciprocated. Norwegian pol Karsten Nordal Hauken, raped by a Somali guest in 2016, spirals into therapy and opioids – then mourns his rapist's deportation like a personal crucifixion. "He's a product of an unfair world," Hauken weeps to NRK, as if war-trauma absolves violation.
Germany's Selin Gören, ambushed and forced intohorrors by Iraqi migrants in 2016, shields their names from cops: "I won't fuel racism." Tajik cyclists in 2018, mowed down by an ISIS car-bomb? Their "evil doesn't exist" manifesto dies with them, eulogised as pure-hearted folly. Canadian Edith Blais, desert-captived by Burkina Faso jihadis till 2019, emerges not vengeful but explanatory: "They're poor; they don't know wrong." Sweden's bullied teen in 2020, urinated on by migrants? Interior Minister Mikael Damberg chalks it up to their "hopelessness." Würzburg's 2021 knife frenzy by a screaming Somali? Mayor Christian Schuchardt frets for the community's insecurity: "How would you feel as a foreigner?" Milan's 2024 Duomo gropes, Palestinian flags waving? Victim Imogen gaslights eyewitnesses: "Blatant lie!" And October 2025's Bilbao rape? Izaro blasts Vox's "racist junk," not the Malian who shattered her.
This isn't coincidence; it's catechism. Ethno-masochism – a term the Identitarians hurl like a curse, but apt here – isn't accidental empathy gone awry. It's a secular scripture, forged in the crucibles of post-WWII atonement, decolonisation's hangover, and academia's endless seminars on "whiteness as pathology." White guilt, once a niche Protestant tic, metastasised via Frankfurt School reruns and TED Talks into a universal solvent for sin. The West's original sin? Being effective: building empires, borders, and welfare states that others now crash. The expiation? Open the gates, mute the critiques, and when the bill comes due in blood, receive it with thanks. Martyrdom isn't tragedy; it's the ticket to moral Valhalla, where the virtuous signal eternally.
Why whites? Why the West? It's no disease of melanin, but of monopoly. For centuries, Europe and its spawn dominated via tech, trade, and tenacity – a hegemony that bred not just wealth, but a reflexive recoil. Colonial ledgers? Balanced by importing the debtors. Feminism and LGBTQ+ gains? Fragile flowers to be trampled in atonement's garden. It's psycho-sexual, as one 2025 paleocon blog dubs it: a "pernicious illness of the Western mind," where self-loathing loops like a Möbius strip of masochism. Elites amplify it – think Davos drones preaching "global citizenship" from gated enclaves – but it's grassroots gospel too. Social media's echo chambers? Heresy hunts for "xenophobes" like Vox, excommunicating any who dare tally the tab.
Yet what of the "great collapse"? That Mad Max mirage of supply-chain snaps, migrant surges, and fiscal fiascos – already auditioning in 2025's Euro riots and U.S. border strains. Will the faithful hold vespers amid the rubble? History whispers, no. Utopian cults crumble when the pantry's bare: Jonestown's Kool-Aid quaffers didn't fast; Soviet commissars fled the famines they engineered. Ethno-masochism thrives on surplus – the luxury of abstracting away the animal basics of security and sustenance. Starve the beast, and tribalism reasserts: Hares bolt from foxes, sheep shear wolves before supper. We've seen glimmers – Cologne's backlash birthed AfD; Sweden's no-go zones spawned SD surges. Post-collapse? The choir might croak a different tune: "Universal justice? Pass the rations."
The irony? This "religion" claims to save the world but dooms its acolytes. True progress isn't suicide pacts; it's Cicero's equity – safeguarding the flock without self-slaughter. Perhaps the wastelands will teach that. Or perhaps, in the ashes, a new creed rises: one of unapologetic survival, where forgiveness follows fortitude, not frailty. Until then, the West's faithful keep kneeling – and the wolves keep circling.