Mamdani’s Year Zero: NYC Whites Out White People From Its History

“When progressives say they want to dismantle ‘whiteness,’ they want you to believe they mean some complicated sociological phenomenon,” wrote commentator David Marcus in 2021. “They do not. They mean ‘white people.’ They mean they want to dismantle the lives of white people.”

This warning could come to mind when pondering Mayor Zohran Mamdani-led New York City’s recent erasure of “whiteness.” This amounted to omission of Italian-heritage (and, reportedly, Irish and Jewish) neighborhoods from a “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” map. Many don’t think it was an accident, either. After all, Mamdani was the guy seen in a 2020 photo giving the middle finger to a Columbus statue.

Thankfully, this was when he was younger and more immature — way back in 2020.

In fairness, Mamdani’s map (below) does list Polish and Ukrainian neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the omissions are glaring, especially considering the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA’s) well-known anti-Western passions. (Mamdani is, of course, the DSA’s most prominent member.)

Machiavellian Map?

So were the map’s omissions by design? Legal Insurrection founder Bill Jacobson certainly thinks so. The goal is “to erase European heritage in New York City,” he recently asserted. “Children will grow up thinking New York City was created by the Third World. It’s symptomatic of what has happened in our education system.”

After quoting the above, commentator Jack Fowler then added:

So infamously here, there’s no Little Italy. New York has five boroughs — The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island — and each of them has their Italian enclaves, but you won’t find a Little Italy in any of them.

This is especially striking considering that, to state the obvious, NYC is a European (Western) idea and municipality. Founded in 1624 as New Amsterdam, it became New York in 1664 when the English seized it from the Dutch. The modern City of Greater New York was later created by consolidating the areas that became its five boroughs. At this time (1898), do note, the metropolis was still more than 98 percent white, too.

But now some want to white out this history. Commenting on this, historian Victor Davis Hanson says that Mamdani, arrogant and ambitious, considers his NYC mayorship just a steppingstone to a much grander, globalist stage. Hanson then stated, in a recent interview with the aforementioned Fowler:

In this globalist vision, he wants to get on record that his city is just a conglomeration of all these different nations in the world, with one asterisk: In his world, immigration really didn’t start until 1965. European immigration, thanks to Teddy Kennedy’s immigration reforms, ended, and immigration from the former British Commonwealth — New Zealand, Australia, etc. — declined.

We instead took people from … the former Third World.

So, he thinks the world was started then. When he talks about immigrants, he doesn’t mean the hardworking Italians. He doesn’t mean the hardworking Jews. He doesn’t mean the hardworking Irish, all of whom came in enormous numbers and all were very poor.

And they built the country.

… When he says immigrants built this country, that’s kind of a racist thing, because he’s only talking about people who are non-European. …

And this country was, basically, with black people making up about 10% of the population, about 85% of the population White, and about 5% Asian and 5% Hispanic for most of its history until about 1965 or 1970.

So, he’s wiping all of those people out, and he’s just saying that people like himself — the Indian diaspora, the South American diaspora, the African diaspora — these are the real immigrants who built America. That’s what he means.

He’s an Orwellian figure. He really does want to use language and communication to wipe out large areas of knowledge.

… This [immigrant-enclaves] map could have come right out of “1984.”

The History of Erasing History

However one views this map, however, the actions of Mamdani’s ideological forebears should give pause. After all, history erasure has defined the Left ever since its French Revolution birth.

It was then that those Gallic radicals created their new calendar, beginning in 1792. It had 10-day weeks and omitted the Lord’s Day. In fact, its main purpose, confessed its chief architect, Charles-Gilbert Romme, was to “abolish Sunday” (and Christianity, of course).

Later, Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) and replace them with the “Four News.”

Then there was the Marxist Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia with their “Year Zero.” They would destroy books, libraries, and records to eliminate “old knowledge.”

Now, realize here that Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a well-known Marxist scholar and postcolonial theorist. The mayor knows the above history — he was marinated in it.

He also may approve of it.

Note, too, the mentality at issue. Normal people consider history and may say, “This was a mistake; that was a mistake. We mustn’t repeat them.” This Year Zero mindset is different: It doesn’t consider history. It doesn’t seek to learn from it.

It simply deletes it.

From this perspective, history doesn’t exist. “History has stopped,” as the novel 1984 put it. “Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

And that’s the whole idea. Study history and you may understand the “Party” is usually wrong. Know the mistakes of the past and you may realize the Party is peddling them. You may learn, too, that Western culture is the civilizational light of the world. And when cultural devolutionaries aim to extinguish that light — which stands in Marxist darkness’ way — this cannot be allowed.