Reactionary Expat responded to my article on white nationalism the other day, and if you have an hour or so, it’s worth your time to listen to it if you have an interest in the topic.
The confusion that’s happened in our corner of the web has a lot to do with confusion between means and ends.
Obviously, I’d like to promote eudaemonia for the Anglosphere. White nationalists also say that they want their 14 words, which isn’t really that far from eudaemonia (human flourishing).
The rhetorical and political means that they choose to pursue that goal are wrong-headed at best, and utterly doomed at the worst. Attempting to form new political parties (trying to apply a miracle patch to democracy) or turning whiteness into a victim-identity (using the means of the left towards different ends than they were intended) are both addled.
Saying that “if they’re pale and have a heartbeat, I love ’em” is not fundamentally all that far from the universalist position that states that all people are of equal value. It also runs into the shoals of the fact that said pale people are almost universally opposed to racial thinking with the same lockstep conformity that they all affirmed before World War II. A consistent pan-European nationalism that purported to represent the will of the people would be forced to oppose the same thing that it purported to support — citizenship for whites only.
One of the reasons why the previous belief melted into John Lennonism was because it encouraged the disruption of the old hierarchical ways of thinking in which people were very much unequal, regardless of their race.
Thinking about history as a way to hunt for scapegoats and Scooby Doo villains is also counter-productive. For every actor, there’s an object.
What it is good at, as a movement, is generating a certain feeling among people — much like most ideologies, it creates a sense of commonality among strangers where there is none. It’s painful to be alone in the world. It’s consoling to believe that there are people out there, whom if you just repeat the right words to, they’ll have your back. If you repeat the same lines together, read the same books, you too can convince yourself that there’s some sort of bond there, that there’s direction, and that you’re headed towards a certain destination together.
Unfortunately, all ideological constructs are unstable, because they’re built on mountains of language alone. This is one of the reasons why so many ideologues change their feathers so often and are so eager to believe in new doctrines after their old ones have failed them (speaking from experience).
In order to recreate civilization, more than clever combinations of words are needed. And that’s hard for modern people to understand, because we’ve been marinated in ideology forever and know nothing outside of it in the same way that past peoples were marinated in religion to such an extent that irreligion was unthinkable.
Ideology is the drug that suspends attention to reality so that others can control us. This is why it is enduringly popular: for the betas, it removes responsibility; for the manipulators, it gives them a personal zombie army.
“Dear zombies, you are most valued. Now, open up your wallets and go do something dangerous for me. I’ll be right behind you as you charge the barricades, I promise.”
White Nationalism was destroyed in part by the tendency of informers to infiltrate groups, urge them to do catastrophically stupid stuff, and then retreat into the background to become “experienced” members of the community.
My own feeling with White Nationalism — which I mention because I think you will at least partially share it — is that it like National Socialism attempts to be a replacement for Leftist ideology, but dooms itself by being of the same framework. In my view, ideology is a replacement for religion and has the same apocalyptic sensations which serve to motivate people, but it tells only part of the story. To resurrect our civilization, a complex interaction of forces in parallel is needed, like requiring oxygen, gasoline and electricity to restart an engine. We need strong/moral leadership, cultural/genetic health, and also a restoration of transcendental feeling, of which religion is part (and is also part of culture). No one of those alone can do it for us, and white nationalism hopes to make one — the ethnic/cultural restoration — a religion or ideology standing in for the rest. I doubt this will succeed, but even more dangerously, it can replace the need for the others. Like scapegoating, this human tendency toward simple answers can doom us.
I agree with everything that you’ve said here.
The problem as I see it is that there has been a steady, determined effort to cut back on the production of gasoline, electricity is in short supply and we don’t have very much in the way of oxygen-producing plants around.
Your “resurrection” is something very much not desired by those who are on top of the grave, enjoying their inheritance, freedom and control.
Thanks for the link. I’ll have to respond more later simply because I’m going to be away this weekend.
No worries.
My problem with your response, RE, is that it sounded like your attempts to define who is and who isn’t white got a lot into “No True Scotsman” territory. My own view is that whiteness simply isn’t enough to build a world worth living in. But to me it sounded like you were saying that it is, but only after you disqualified anyone who would be a net negative to that world (e.g. whites who are on welfare) as not being “true” whites.
I mean, in the end you and I may be getting to the same place, but it seems to me like you’re going a very roundabout way to get there.
This is partly a response to AntiDem and partly a response to Henry Dampier.
My own position is that I am caught between a rock and a hard place and I think both sides in this debate (within the alt-right) have good points. I agree with everything Henry Dampier says about the problems with WN, and yet I don’t see how the West gets itself out of this hole. I’m not so sure there is a happy ending here.
Yes, as others have pointed out liberals/Yankees/whomever are an enormous problem. Likewise, I think people on welfare are a problem. I think those things can probably be addressed after the West deals with its even more pressing existential crises. There are currently multiple crises, but the worst should be addressed first, and those probably involve WN solutions. I am fully aware that this is a very complex issue and anything we do will likely create cascading unintended consequences. Yet something still needs to be done.
White people were not always in the state they are in. They got to that point through a combination of programming and the wrong incentives (including who breeds now). I mentioned the country from which I come (Australia) being an example of a place filled with those who were supposedly the dregs of British society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Yet it turned out okay with the right incentives and discipline.
That sort of thing can be achieved again to a certain extent, but that is a process that is going to take time. In the meantime, several Western countries are looking at complete destruction and replacement within a much shorter time period. It’s nonsensical to me to talk about rebuilding a better culture before anyone can address the fact that Germany is looking at more than 1 million third world immigrants per year indefinitely. Those people are going to care even less about rebuilding the culture than white liberals or whites on welfare, who can at least be reformed later, not to mention that many will be red-pilled pretty soon anyway.
The problem for the right at this point in time is that they simply don’t have the numbers or the power. People on the right are clutching at straws simply because they are in such deep trouble right now. People under stress do not necessarily act rationally. Sometimes they respond in very bad ways, but ways that are perhaps the best available to them. It does concern me that white nationalism is simply going to be a replacement for leftism. Yet unless there is a lot happening behind the scenes, I don’t see anything else that is even remotely challenging to what is happening right now. White nationalism might or might not be a vehicle that can be abandoned, but it’s the best shot I can see right now. Again, maybe I can’t see some things.
The other issue is that although I do have a certain level of disdain for various groups of whites, where the culture is at, universal suffrage and other things, I think that certain strands of NRx simply want to wish all of these problems away as being stupid. They are stupid, but failing to take into account the reality on the ground (as stupid as it may be) is a road to nowhere. It’s also the same thing many on the left do. NRx risks being completely irrelevant simply because it is so way out there that it’s a complete non-starter for many people.
Many within our movement forget that many of us did not begin where we are now. Perhaps some did, but for many, it was a process, a journey. A softly, softly approach may be necessary; certain concessions, or at least doing things by degrees may be necessary. I firmly believe that although we shouldn’t be doormats, we should keep the door open for liberals and others who want to come through.
At the end of the day, I can’t entirely see the way forwards here. I will freely admit that I don’t have all of the answers. I am unsure, if not completely confused, about a lot of things. My own ideas are evolving on all sorts of issues. The main reason I started my Youtube channel was as a means of engaging with other people grappling with the same issues and getting to know such people. So, if other people have answers here, I’m all ears.
One thing to remember about leftism is that it has absolutely no facility to consider that it might be wrong built into it. This goes all the way back to Marx, who claimed that what he had was not a political idea or an economic theory or a philosophy, but was hard science; that it wasn’t simply a goal to be worked towards, but was historically inevitable.
And so the left has decided to prove its egalitarian beliefs and the transformative power of its ideas correct by undertaking the grand project of bringing millions of Third Worlders into the First World, where, because they *are* equal and because these ideas *are* transformative, they’ll be made into Swedes and Germans and Belgians in no time. Here you have to understand that “But what if it doesn’t work?” is not a question that they are capable of considering. You may tell them that if it doesn’t work, it will be the end of the world for Europe, for the white race, for ideas and institutions that it took thousands of years to build. But you have to understand that that won’t affect them one bit. The left is not a political movement in any normal sense; it is a fanatical utopian cult. For members of a fanatical utopian cult, the failure of their foundational ideas *is* the end of the world. If the left’s foundational ideas aren’t hard science and aren’t inevitable, then everything they’ve done since they cut off Marie Antoinette’s head has been in vain. They will never, ever admit to that. Not ever.
But the problem is that the left is very, very good at getting its way in democratic political systems. Nothing done within that system ever seems to have stopped or even long delayed its slow march to getting everything it ever wanted (Yes, the Nazis got elected – in a young democracy during an economic crisis – but more or less the first thing Hitler did was to make sure he could never get un-elected). And I don’t just mean now: 2500 years ago, Plato warned us that democracies always end in social degeneracy and financial insolvency. It is simply the nature of democracies that they pull towards outcomes that we would call “leftist”.
All of which is by way of asking: What exactly is WN’s plan? Knowing what you want things to look like is useless unless you have some idea of how you’re going to get from A to B, and so far, I see nothing out of WN. They’re all fired up about Donald Trump at the moment, but for reasons I detailed in the comments over at Social Matter (http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/10/18/rand-paul-icarus-and-you/#comment-19745), I don’t think that will amount to anything. Voting isn’t going to work. Posting pictures of Hitler on internet forums isn’t going to work. Shooting nine random black church ladies in South Carolina isn’t going to work.
WN doesn’t seem to me to have a plan, other than letting everyone know that they’re very, very, very, very, very angry, which isn’t going to work, either. In fact, they seem to regard anyone who *does* have a plan as some kind of pantywaist or taped-glasses nerd who wastes valuable time on faggy shit like coming up with a plan when there’s anger to be expressed.
This was all by way of saying that the mass invasion by immigration of white countries is never going to stop under liberal mass democracy, which the left has learned to play like a fiddle. To my way of thinking, any plan to stop that invasion that doesn’t first get rid of liberal mass democracy is putting the cart before the horse and is doomed to fail.
That’s my plan. It may be a good plan or a bad plan, but at least it’s a plan.
I don’t advocate democracy. I’m not sure whether I mentioned that word in that talk or not, but I don’t support democracy as a system of government, probably for all the same reasons you don’t.
I also don’t have any hope that Trump or any other current politician will save things. If nothing else, a Trump presidency would die a death by one thousand cuts as every bureaucrat down to the local dog catcher threw sand in the gears. That would be if the Supreme Court didn’t just openly block him at every juncture first.
Furthermore, I think that there is likely going to be a major economic crisis within the next presidential term. The left needs to completely own that (not that they will, of course, but it’s better than the right being stuck holding the bag).
If there were a really good, easy way of ending liberal democracy, then I’d be all for it. I’m fairly well resigned to the fact that this is going to be decided via “extra-political” processes within the next decade or two at the latest, probably after both economic and social collapse. That conflict is going to require boots on the ground.
I do think that liberal democracy is done for one way or another. A century from now, it’s not going to exist in the West. What will replace it though? To my mind, there are only three likely candidates: the West becoming a giant, dysfunctional state like Brazil, Islamic states or a renaissance of the West.
Ensuring that the third scenario obtains is going to require boots on the ground, as I mentioned. There are going to need to be foot soldiers in this war. Where are they going to come from and what is going to bind them together? I can’t see any likely contenders at this point other than some form of racial consciousness, as flawed as that is. It is worth pointing out at this juncture that my own son is only half white, and he may end up being excluded from the West as a result if WN wins, which is why I don’t want complete WN. I don’t like this possibility, but tell me who is going to fight for the West other than white men (with perhaps a few ring-ins such as my son), essentially? Where is the line between a mob and an army?
The West may or may not be able to discard this racial consciousness and ideology later. Yes, that possibility of continued leftism is a real danger (as is the fact that my own children would likely be excluded, as I have mentioned). I don’t think that a desire to overthrow liberal democracy is going to be the thing that animates and unites enough people first though. I wish it were that simple, but I don’t think it is. For better or worse, we do live in a democratic age and if we do not take that into account when assessing people as potential allies or supporters then we’re going to have precious few allies or supporters.
Tell me your plan though, because from where I sit, I don’t see any good options but would like to hear some.
It is “become worthy”: http://www.socialmatter.net/2014/11/14/become-worthy/
>Where is the line between a mob and an army?
A mob only wins when the army lacks cohesion to fight, especially with modern technology.
>Where are they going to come from and what is going to bind them together?
That’s a great question and the answer is a bit closer than it might otherwise seem just because it’s been under-covered by the press. I’ll be writing more about it going forward. I think Martin van Creveld gets it right in his “Rise and Decline of the State.”
I wrote about it here: http://www.henrydampier.com/2014/07/war-is-the-ailing-health-of-the-nation-state/
And here: http://www.henrydampier.com/2015/09/the-nation-state-undermines-itself/
I haven’t done a great job on this site making all the articles organized and accessible. As the archives have grown, it’s tended to sprawl, and some of the newer articles assume familiarity with a lot of the previously published material.
Henry: I understand this concept of becoming worthy and am trying to apply it to my own life. I also think I understand what you are trying to do.
I am just pessimistic and I’m just not sure that it’s enough. There is the notion that when the crisis hits, the worthy will appear from the shadows and rescue civilisation. I am not sure that that is enough. Currently, the worthy are being hunted down and purged, even as the ranks of the unworthy are being artificially swelled.
It’s not enough to just say that we need to hide better or build better institutions of our own. They’re trying their hardest to make sure that there is nowhere to hide and all that you own can be taken away in an instant unless you’re willing to completely pack up and expatriate.
You articulated my reaction WN better than I ever could. I always found it distasteful and low-class at best, dangerous thinking at worst. It forces you to look at the world through racialist goggles.
White nationalists reconfigure the Marxist dialectic of oppressor-victim into racial terms; if they could just make a white-only state then everything would be wonderful, so goes their logic. Sounds an awful lot like the worker’s paradise.
You’re better read on this than I am, but I do not think classical Western philosophy from the Greeks onward focused on racialism,other than that different groups have different identities.
Like I said before I cannot buy into WN as a viable option because for generations damnyankees and various White ethnic groups who immigrated here have shown 0 kinship with Southron Whites.
Everything in US politics ans history shows pan White cooperation does not happen. No WN has countere or even answered my point.
Seems to me that like that’s the same as saying, “there’s never been a cure of polio in the past, so that’s proof there can’t – and shouldn’t (!) – be one in the future.”
What a dumb reply; one is an issue regarding technology and science, the other a historically provable track record of behaviour of one ethnic group toward another
Given the damn yankees track record, why would any Southern White trust them in the future? The only thing we have to predict future events is past events and those past events say yankees would rather side with jews, queers, negros, beaners etc then Southern Whites.
That’s what you need to over come and something your reply doesn’t address. Are you a woman to ask pointless questions designed to score points vs coming up with a workable answer?
I’m not a white nationalist either but the author’s self-satisfied assuredness regarding his attainment of the nth degree of human enlightenment, viz., absolute freedom from religion and ideology, reflects just kind of historically WASPish ignorance he is condemning here (‘“if they’re pale and have a heartbeat, I love ’em”,…the universalist position that states that all people are of equal value’). Does the author understand that this merely asserted freedom from ideology constitutes for him a religion, that is, his own metaphysical story he tells himself about the world and how he relates to it? Having “ideology”, “religion”, “superstitions”, “prejudices” (all of which amount to the same thing) is inherently part of being a human being – we can’t get by in the world without them. Beyond the irony of failing to recognize that (e.g.) purely empirical materialism is an ideology (with all the same fundamental “superstitious” underpinnings as any conventional religion), there is the hubris that results from assuming oneself to be operating in some absolutely refined logical atmosphere where the polluting influence of all conventionally “irrational” (e.g., economically irrational) factors are stripped away. There’s no heart to that artichoke. Interests are determined by “ideologies” and ideologies are mutually determined by interests in their turn. There’s no way to separate them in actual practice because the distinction is fundamentally only cognitive. That’s what Belloc meant when he said “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.”
The WASPs in the 1930’s and beyond, (and their Puritan and Anabaptist predecessors), so self-satisfied in their immanent attainment of absolute enlightenment – Russell and Dewey told them so – arrogated to themselves the absolute right to experiment radically and blindly with what they saw as the denuded, mechanical husk of what had been, until Newton (and restored by Hegel), merely the outward, material aspect of an infinitely more dynamic – organic – reality whose opposite pole we might call “religion”, “ideology” – that is, “society.” The same kind of ignorance displayed in “if they’re pale and have a heartbeat, I love ’em” is reflected in the notion, practically put in effect by the American policy elite in the 1930’s, that interests and ideology can separated. But the notion itself is cynical: the idea that social policy could be used to harmonize the disparate interests of Americans while leaving their respective “ideologies” – faiths, families and völker – intact was a lie. The theoretical result of a social engineering that apprehends itself as free from ideological bias – a homogenized, efficiently governable population – is in reality an atomized, dispirited and alienated cohort (the only thing held in common between them, stripped as they are of their identity/”ideology”, is atomization and alienation) and one which readily affirms “if they’re pale and have a heartbeat, I love ’em”. What I am getting at here is that a big part of the reason we have wound up in the position of being forced by the logic of events to gravitate towards white nationalism is a misplaced faith, which goes unrecognized as such, in the kind of supposedly value-free political existence the author advocates. A new clever combination of words is exactly what we need. “Ideological” constructs are the only constructs that are stable. Racial “constructs” are not stable. Ostensibly value-free political constructs are not stable. What has united men through history more than blood and geography? Mountains of language. There is a bond there and a direction that points to a common destination.
I can understand Reactionary Expat’s saying that he feels “caught between a rock and a hard place” with regards to “white nationalism”. I remember when the expression “white nationalism” first began to catch on. At the time it was an umbrella term that covered almost everyone who was willing to express ideas that were both race-realist and pro-white. It’s meaning has narrowed since. Back in the 1990s and the early 2000s there were individuals who were widely thought of as “white nationalists” who I had no problem thinking of as being “on the same side” as myself. In Carol M. Swain’s 2002 book “The New White Nationalism in America”, for example, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance was described as a “white nationalist”. The late paleoconservative writer Sam Francis was described as a “white nationalist” by his enemies and certain of his friends, including Peter Brimelow of immigration patriot website VDare and John Zmirak (in his entry on Francis for ISI’s The Encylcopedia of American Conservatism). Zmirak tried to argue that what Francis was really concerned with was culture rather than race (missing the point that to Francis the two went hand-in-glove, as the remarks from the speech which cost him his job at The Washington Times indicated). Brimelow made the very valid argument that the era of multiculturalism and identity politics has created a need for a “white nationalism” otherwise whites would have no one to speak for their interests when everyone else does. If white nationalism is an appropriate designation of Taylor and Francis’ position on race, I have no objection to it.
Things have, of course, changed in the ten years since Francis passed away. While the enemies of men like Taylor and Francis continue to describe them as “white nationalists”, I think there are far fewer people of their way of thinking who would self-identify with the term. I remember a couple of years after Francis passed away, Steve Sailer began to advocate something he called “citizenism” in his VDare column. The concept, if I recall, was a kind of civil nationalism joined to a race realism that did not include and indeed rejected, racial identity advocacy for whites. Sailer put forward this “citizenism” concept in opposition to “white nationalism”. Jared Taylor argued for white group advocacy at VDare, which, due to the way in which Sailer had framed the debate, meant arguing for “white nationalism”, but I don’t think he was comfortable with the term himself, and said a number of times that he preferred to refer to his and American Renaissance’s position as just “race realism”. What was happening was that “white nationalism” was shrinking in meaning, ceasing to be an umbrella term for all pro-white groups, and becoming restricted mostly to those who to some degree or another identified with National Socialism.
I never liked the expression “white nationalism”. Among the lessons I absorbed a long time ago from the writings of such “paleoreactionaries” as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and John Lukacs was that nationalism was in its origins and for most of its history a phenomenon of the left. It’s ideological roots are in the democratic dogmas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it’s first real political expression was the French Revolution, through the nineteenth century it was constantly aligned with either liberalism or the radical left, and found its culmination in the ultimate synthesis of left-wing movements, nationalism and socialism, in the Third Reich. Nationalism, demands that we give our ultimate loyalty to race and nation, and is suspicious of such basic loyalties as our loyalty to God, the Church, family, friends, and neighbours. Much older than the essentially left-wing nationalism, is the classical virtue of patriotism, an affection for and loyalty to one’s country and countrymen that grows naturally out of the affections and loyalties that ordinarily arise in the family and in the home. The man of the right ought to be a patriot, not a nationalist.
That having been said, in the times in which we live, there is a need for some sort of advocacy for white people. Mr. Dampier has pointed out, correctly, that everything that has been done to harm the interests of whites has been done by white people, with the support of large numbers of white people, who have largely embraced liberalism and leftism. The white nationalists point out, correctly, that the anti-racism that is the official orthodoxy today, is merely a euphemism for being anti-white and that it is white countries and only white countries that are told that they must dismantle their national and cultural identities, become multicultural, and import thousands to millions of aliens. The conclusion to be drawn from these two sets of facts, is that the white peoples of the world need to be delivered from the consequences of their own foolish embrace of modern, universalist, and liberal ideas
I grew up in the 6th poorest county in the usa (last I checked). Why is/ was it that poor? Because damnyankees and left coast liberals got into environmentalism and voted to shut down coal, textiles and timber. Then they went after tobacco leaving us apples, weed, moonshine and welfare. Detroit is wealthy in comparison to my kin folk, and the damn yankee spends more money on negro schools in Detroit then our schools in Appalachia
Damnyankees unleashed negos,( twice, once during the war of northern aggression, the other during the civil rights movement) to use as electoral and actual physical weapons against us, once so they could collect tariff money and wouldn’t have to compete against a low tax trading nation next door. They literally called for genocide against my people and are still calling for culturally genocide against us.
The second version of the Klan was mostly anti White ethnic groups as those groups flooded in to lower the value of native born labor and dramatically change our culture. Like the mexicans are doing now. It was the damn yankee who wanted those invaders, wanted the cheap labor and when those White ethnic groups got here, they got right to voting for bigger more progressive government and acting against Founding Stock and the founding principles
The 1st English only laws were in response to White immigrants
Here in the South yankees are still flooding in and causing problems for us.
The list goes on and on. Their is no historical record to suggestion Pan European cooperation and kinship like the WN want
yankees are my people’s real enemy. I have put a lot of brown skinned men in the ground but they were never my people a tenth of the harm the damnyankees have. Whatever chunks of hardship I have dealt with from non Whites here at home has been because yankees ended Jim Crow and tried to force us to go to negro schools. It’s the damn yankee governments that checks our hands every time we want to take action to clean up our elections or address the mexican invasion. They have come down here in such numbers, Florida, Carolina and Virgina are barely Southern. They have changed our courts and everything else and none of it for the better.
Negros, mexicans, Jews, queers etc are the pawns of the damn yankee. The real enemy of my people are White not black or brown or what have you. Regionalism and Kinism are the answer to our collective issues down here. Southern Secession, separation from, not closer ties to the damn yankee is what we need.
Without a doubt I am the least schooled men who regularly posts here. Didn’t even make it out of high school, and I have not yet seen a reasonable argument for WN’s that offsets the historical record and everyday reality. If an unschooled hillbilly like me can see Whites are the enemy and WN’s unrealistic how does WN stand a chance in the here and now real world?
This is one of those problems that pure ideology notions run into: actual history and irreconcilable conflicts. Yanks would rather ban coal mining in the US and have the Chinese burn it than risk a more independent south.
This has been going on since before the Civil War. Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer goes into a lot of detail on the differences between the four different groups from England that emigrated to the United States.
To put it shortly and put aside two other groups (Royalists and Quakers0 , the “damn yankees” settled New England, and the Scots-Irish settled the frontier country which became what we call the South today.
The damn yankees absolutely hated the Scots-Irish, primarily because this group was from the north of England and had been at the center of the border wars of Britain for nearly a millenia. The Scots-Irish were a warlike clannish people, and the nature of their people was used time and time again by the damn yankees. First as a barrier between the violent Native American tribes of Appalachia, and extending all the way until today to fight wars in the middleeast for the Neocons. You ever wonder why more Southerners sign up to fight in wars then any other region of America? Why the South had the best generals and the most men in the fight? Scots-Irish ancestry and culture is your answer.
Realistically there never should have been a United States. The cultural difference between the Yankees and Southerners was far too strong. WN’s understand the great accomplishments of Western Civilization and forget that across the Continent and in the New World we were far more violent towards each other then nearly any other group. Within Britain alone the amount of strife and violence is massive.
The need for unity to resist the tide of mass immigration is there. But we should not forget that the situation did not come about because of Third-World migrants. It came about because of universalist, modern and progressive ideas, mostly propagated by White men. The Jew horn may be sounding in many circles, but we should not forget that their current influence in the West is the result of leftist policies.
Legit
And love those books, being Ulster Scot myself
Great comment, brother. Thanks for adding your voice.
The most dangerous and subversive things self proclaimed white nationalists can do is A) aquire property B)network with other whites with agency and C) have as many children as possible and raise them with a racial consciousness.
I listened to Reactionary Expat’s YouTube a few days ago so forgive me for any lapses in memory.
I thought that there was a degree of imprecision in the way he used the word “whiteness”. Whiteness seemed to be a catch all phrase to include concepts such as culture, skin colour and personal affinity.
I think this approach, which seems to be quite common when this subject comes up, leads to a lot of problems with regard to the whole “white” movement and the ambivalent feelings generated by it.
I found it interesting that he did not consider the Greeks,Spanish and Southern Italians “white”, which is something any serious ethnographer would regard as ridiculous. (BTW, I don’t have any ancestral link to those groups.) I also found it interesting that he considered non-Caucasian individuals who were acculturated to Anglo-Society, “white on the inside” and had a affinity for them. There is continual semantic shifting of the word.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that amongst people like RE, is that whiteness is conceptualised as a series of associations in his mind and the interaction between reality and this conceptual schema is what generates the cognitive dissonance.
This is all typical of System 1 thought, which tends to think in terms of associations. White=Good=Culture=Pleasant=Refined=English landscapes=Order. Ring the bell and all these pleasant associations come to mind. Hence the problem when running into the reality of White proles who upset this paradigm. Amongst normal people, the white prole generates more revulsion than the cultured and pleasant “wog”, hence the unwillingness to both affirm collegiality with the former and generate hostility toward the latter despite advocating a pro-white position. Hence being caught between a rock and a hard place. Furthermore, the only people who can transcend our natural affinities for the pleasant and the good, despite the carriers of them being “not white” are quite literally psychopaths, which explains the virulence of the Stormfront types who would rather a white savage than a civilised black man. Normal people are repulsed by this latter position.
This is one of the reason why entryism by the Stormfront types is so toxic to any conservative or identitarian movement. As it tends to drive away the humane individuals–which promote social cohesion–and instead degenerates into a cabal of psychopaths who ultimately turn on themselves.
The core problem for people like RE is the conflation of White=Good and UnWhite=Bad, since our day to day experience occasionally empirically refutes this conflation. The way out of this problem is to adjust your mental models to account for empirical observation but the mental revolution that this entertains is far to much for some and its easier to explain away phenomenon than it is to change our thinking.
What I would suggest to RE is that he not so much a white identitarian as he is an “affinitarian”, i.e someone who has a affinity for the pleasant, ordered and good. His dislike for the Boers is because they are unpleasant whites, his dislike for the swarthy types stems from the fact that he prefers the lithe and the fair, his dislike of the blacks comes about from the fact that the majority of his experiences with them has been unpleasant but he’s quite happy to accept the ones that are pleasant. But to redefine everything he likes as “White” and everything else “not-white” is stupid. It’s an excessive cognitive simplification.
There’s a lot here to unpack.
This does seem to be common. Does the map match the territory? In some superficial and statistical ways, it does. In the ways that have actually mattered in either American history or elsewhere, this map isn’t a good map. This doesn’t mean that when people like Auster regretted the destruction of the historic American nation that he regretted the impressive and good things about those people. What’s to regret is what made those people good. To throw away the good and to say that only the gene-stuff matters is to miss I much of what makes a person and a people. Auster could condemn the rainbow nation without pretending that it was some alien imposition. To pretend also that the pre-Hart-Celler America was one of true racial unity is also ahistorical. The reason why they imported all those people was to smash their domestic cracker enemies without resorting to something like war.
I think that many people want to keep their eyes shut to the roots of the progressives in this sort of breezy pseudo-racial thinking which characterized the early progressives up until the end of WWII. The postmodern shift was less of an enormous jump than it seems to be on the surface of it. To some extent the thorough memory holing of American history in particular makes this a challenging topic to discuss. What incenses people are the mandatory indoctrination sessions and the like — they want a kinder variant of liberalism that goes down some different path that could never have succeeded and never will succeed.
There’s also a desire to rewrite the history and redefine who did what to whom at what time — which is again a mirror of the New Left’s recasting of the White cisheteropatriarch as history’s greatest villain with all the vehemence of Pravda or Der Stürmer. This was something set into motion much earlier in the 20th century with great force and enormous weight, and none of us have the ability to stop or alter that course.
I’ve got to be brief since I’ve got to go to work but
Does the map match the territory?
It does, hence the traction amongst the cognitive misers and why the heresy is so difficult to root out and keeps recurring. It’s interesting that “racism” is a relatively new concept to Western thought, though slavery has a longer intellectual lineage. Still, I can’t but help note that the racial understanding of man appears on the stage roughly about the same time that the “common man” is given a legitimate voice in public affairs.
It’s a Mass-man phenomenon.
Slumlord: Many would easily posit that Southern Europeans are not white because of either genetic or cultural reasons. That idea is hardly new to me. You may have missed that I said that we’re not living in the past, however.
You also constructed several other straw men there. I didn’t argue that white = good and “unwhite” = bad. Likewise, at no point have I actually claimed to be a WN or an identitarian. You may have missed the part where I mentioned that I am married to an East Asian, for instance, and where I have mentioned my reservations about prole culture in the past.
I admitted that I agree with Henry Dampier’s criticisms of WN. My point is that virtually no one cares about all of these aspects of Western civilisation held dear by many on the alt-right except Westerners themselves. I live outside the West. I’ve travelled to dozens of countries outside the West. All they want is our money, our technology and the worst aspects of our modern culture. They don’t give a damn about the rest of it. We are the only ones who will save that.
It doesn’t matter whether people on the alt-right see themselves as one group if their enemies lump them all together and hunt them down as such. I am neither a WN nor a Christian traditionalist, for instance, yet I believe that for better or worse, we’re all in this together and will stand or fall accordingly. That’s why I try not to have enemies on the right, even when I don’t agree with their positions. My own children are not (going to be) white, but I still value the West. It is currently facing a grave existential crisis. Whilst people on the right split hairs, millions of people who would gleefully suck the West dry and destroy all of its institutions and culture are pouring in.
Yes, as others have mentioned, white liberals are a massive part of the problem. However, I say keep the door open because many of them are going to be red-pilled quite soon. A lot of people on the alt-right have very short memories for where they or many of their allies were politically a very short time ago.
The issue with downplaying the influence of liberals is that all of these countries were > 90% White before the 1960s. Losing the high ground to liberals resulted in them bringing in foreign auxiliaries to help them loot their countries. Sweden is the most absurd example of this. You can have the most homogeneous society imaginable and lose it all in a short period of time by ignoring deeper philosophical/political issues related to democracy.
The winning play in democracy with e-z citizenship and universal suffrage is to import reinforcements from abroad to crush your domestic enemies. Electing to play the same game by the same rules without adopting the obvious winning strategy is a recipe for permanent defeat. It’s like trying to win a basketball game by throwing the ball out of bounds repeatedly and getting frustrated that your team’s score never goes up.
If what they want is to preserve their nations, then they have to revoke support for democratic means and the democratic way of thinking.
I understand the problems with liberals. I understand the problem with Sweden and other Western nations. I understand the problem with democracy. Dealing with these issues is hardly easy, however.
I get the theory:
1. Stay beneath the radar and become worthy.
2. Economic or social crisis.
3. Emerge from the shadows and restore the monarchy as the legitimate form of government.
4. Win!
By the time liberal democracy really falls apart in Sweden though, there may well be a very anti-democratic populace. It’s just that it might consist of Muslims calling for Sharia Law who outnumber/overpower neoreactionaries calling for restoration of monarchy.
However, the above may turn out like this:
1. Stay beneath the radar and become worthy.
2. Economic or social crisis.
3. Muslims/Africans/some other group seize power instead and institute their own form of government.
4. Lose! Oops.
That’s a bad unintended consequence of pretending that politics now doesn’t matter, hence why I find myself caught between a rock and a hard place on this issue. I don’t want liberal democracy and all the rest of it, but I also don’t want Sharia Law or the third world in the West either.
@RE
Many would easily posit that Southern Europeans are not white because of either genetic or cultural reasons.
Can you give me some reputable references? No, Seriously. Even in past politically incorrect ages, Coon, in his “Races of Europe “clearly put them in the Caucasoid Category. Even the Stormfront guys don’t exclude them.
This is a serious problem. Where White starts and where it ends defines the scope of nationalist project. Because the way I remember your definition of it, it whiffed strongly of Nordicism. That’s fine and I don’t get upset about it, but you’re not really gonna get a hell of a lot of supporters from European descended peoples whom you’ve defined as unwhite.
Secondly, what is White Culture? Is it the culture of the Fabian Socialists, German Neopagans or the Scandi Luterans? If you’re thinking traditional white culture then you might as well excise the Hellenic and Latin components of it which were obviously unwhite, as well a Christianity, which played a not insignificant part in the history of Europe, and we all know how unwhite that is. It’s founding member was a Yid and it was imported into Europe by the swarthy types.
Yes, as others have mentioned, white liberals are a massive part of the problem. However, I say keep the door open because many of them are going to be red-pilled quite soon.
Here’s what I don’t get. Under your schema you exclude this wog and want to keep open the door for this whitey?
These aren’t strawmen arguments, they’re the logical consequences of the positions you espoused on you post.
Whilst people on the right split hairs, millions of people who would gleefully suck the West dry and destroy all of its institutions and culture are pouring in.
Rule No 1: Make friends with the people who support you.
Rule No 2: Don’t make alliances with your enemies even if they’re white.
If you want to save Western society, you’ve got to understand what is Western Society. Getting a whole bunch of exclusively white people together isn’t it. Sweden is still pretty much run by Nords yet it enthusiastically embracing a death wish. What’s killing Sweden is the ideas that Swedish politicians have embraced in their heads. Their genetics have not provided any protection.
Kulcha matters. Particularly Jesus Kulcha. If you luv God you’re gonna hate Mohammed. If don’t care about God, you’re not really gonna care about Mohammed either.
The shite that’s happening now wouldn’t have happened in Lepanto times. But then again they were ignorant and did not know much about astrophysics and organic chemistry. The ignorant Catholic religion, poor nutrition and low IQ meant that the Europeans were able to repulse the towelheads, something we can’t seem to do in this age of mass tertiary education.
Now we learn why the ancients cultivated valor — without that, no other value is sustainable. We have a cultural hangover from WWI that says that valor is obsolete — that what we need is sensitivity and cleverness in its place.
Here are just a couple of sources about how defining race was a contentious issue:
“In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many “races” there actually were:
‘Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.’”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_race_concepts#Racial_anthropology)
“Maltese and Greeks, sometimes seen as ‘semi-coloured’, were prohibited from 1916 until 1920.”
(http://guides.naa.gov.au/more-people-imperative/chapter4/index.aspx)
“There was no universal consensus of the validity of the “Caucasoid” grouping within those who attempted to categorize human variation. Thomas Henry Huxley in 1870 wrote that the “absurd denomination of ‘Caucasian'” was in fact a conflation of is Xanthochroi and Melanochroi types.[28]”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race#Relation_to_whiteness)
Anyway, all of that is irrelevant because I mentioned in my talk that in the current era, no one has the luxury of splitting hairs on such an issue.
Furthermore, multiple times I have said that I am not a white nationalist, the most obvious reason being that I am married to someone who is not of “white” descent and have a mixed child. You also may have noticed the point in the talk where I talked about non-white people in the West who I would not wish to see expelled from the West because they have assimilated culturally. You continue to construct straw men around this issue.
Under my schema I acknowledge that this is a complex issue with definitions that have changed over time (including my own!), that there are indeed many ways to slice this, which is why I began the talk by acknowledging that I agreed with Henry Dampier’s original criticisms of white nationalism, yet can also see where the white nationalists are coming from. You keep trying to force me into a black and white position that I have rejected multiple times. Likewise, on multiple occasions I have acknowledged that liberals are a huge part of the problem, but you continue to construct a straw man on that issue also.
In principle, I agree with your two rules. Anyone would. Where things get tricky – and which no one has really been able to successfully answer – is how to actually deal with the present existential crises facing the West. Because once you get rid of all of the “unworthy”, you’re left with an elite club of about three people who are supposed to singlehandedly save civilisation; that is if they deign to sully their hands with politics. Because once again, I am not saying make alliances with people just because they’re white. I have argued multiple times that by and large, the only people who care about Western civilisation are white people. This does not include all white people. However, many people now on the alt-right were liberal or in some other way “unworthy” only a few years ago. Many more are likely to come over to this side in the near future. Therefore, we might want to keep the door open to them.
For the umpteenth time, yes, I understand that the problems with Sweden are to do with the Swedish people themselves. Ditto for any other nation you wish to mention.
Your points about Christianity and Lepanto being the be-all-and-end-all don’t make sense. The Siege of Constantinople in 1204 by Christians against other Christians permanently crippled the Byzantine Empire (and actually dissolved it for a while), paving the way for the eventual capture of Constantinople by Muslims in 1453. Likewise, the Franco-Ottoman Alliance (1536), which lasted more than 250 years, predated and outlasted what happened at Lepanto (1571). Such an alliance led to the French and Ottomans actually campaigning together against multiple different Christian European nations at various times!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Ottoman_alliance)
There were also a number of Protestant alliances and joint actions with the Ottomans.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_and_Islam#Military_collaboration)
Likewise, later, there was the Crimean War, which saw Christian nations fight with the Ottomans against another Christian nation.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War)
The point that you seem to miss in this is that there is no easy solution here. Various sides in this argument have good points to make, yet also miss a lot of things. I don’t profess to have any more answers than anyone else, but at least I can admit that. That is, after all, why I titled the talk “Between a Rock and a Hard Place on White Nationalism” rather than “How I Became a Moderator at Stormfront”.
Good comment. I don’t think I’m trying to push you out of an ambiguous position — the ‘hard place’ that you’re mentioning in your video is the demand for unity which is innate to nationalism as a political technique. Nationalists demand absolute unity because anything short of that would threaten the entire mission. It can’t tolerate ambiguity on whatever ground that the movement decides to make its cardinal point of unity.
There are more White proles then any other sort of White. For any type of pro White movement to succeed, it will have to appeal to us lower class Whites and restore their ability to be strong, jobs that can support a good size family, hearth and bread, blood and soil type of thing, and yes upper class Whites will have to prefer the savage White over the genteel negro, if for no other reason then it’s the savage White who fixes your car and toilets and is willing curb stomp violent non Whites and do all the other dirty work required to keep the genteel life going
This is an important issue that can’t be wished away.
Thank you. Like to read your thoughts on it
I just got through the rest of RE’s response.
It seems to me as though he’s simply stymied and rather out of ideas. In the end, it sounded as if the answers given were pretty much all “The West is broken. The solution is for it to not be broken anymore.” Here I don’t mean to make fun. I don’t have a workable idea that can be easily implemented, either – if I did, we wouldn’t be having this discussion in a dark corner of the internet, under pseudonyms.
As for religion and the idea that we can’t come back to Christianity, I couldn’t disagree more. I’m old enough to remember the Cold War, and I can tell you with certainty that anyone who in 1985 had predicted that thirty years hence, Russia would be not only be well along the path to re-Christianizing, but would be doing so with the full encouragement of its government, would have been a prime candidate for getting thrown in the looney bin. It would quite literally have been less outlandish to say that in thirty years, America would be ruled by the Wicked Witch of the West (although, if Mrs. Clinton keeps up her numbers in the opinion polls, that may end up happening too).
I’ve long said that America will be very lucky indeed if what happens to it is only what happened to Russia when its empire fell apart – a quick, bloodless collapse, then ten years of miserable poverty, followed by the rise of a smart, tough, nationalistic autocrat who will slowly start the process of setting things right. But Russia has always held a special place in the heart of the Blessed Virgin, and she has favored them with blessings that I think America neither deserves, nor will get.
We have been very wicked, and deserve to be punished.
And we will be.
“It seems to me as though he’s simply stymied and rather out of ideas. In the end, it sounded as if the answers given were pretty much all “The West is broken. The solution is for it to not be broken anymore.” Here I don’t mean to make fun. I don’t have a workable idea that can be easily implemented, either – if I did, we wouldn’t be having this discussion in a dark corner of the internet, under pseudonyms.”
You’re right. I don’t know what the solution is and it does worry me. I have not taken offence at your criticisms. I was actually quite interested in your thoughts because I have seen you write intelligent and insightful comments at multiple sites before. The people who annoy me are those who continue to miss the above points and misrepresent me.
“I’ve long said that America will be very lucky indeed if what happens to it is only what happened to Russia when its empire fell apart – a quick, bloodless collapse, then ten years of miserable poverty, followed by the rise of a smart, tough, nationalistic autocrat who will slowly start the process of setting things right.”
Your points prior to this were well made. Who knows what is going to happen in the future? However, like you, I am quite pessimistic about how bad things will get yet.