Lothrop Stoddard In Geopolitics

                       By Margot Metroland

                    

June 29 is the birthday of T. (for Theodore) Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950)—scholar, lecturer, geopolitical and racial theorist, and author of perhaps eighteen books.

For a century now, anyone with an interest in geopolitical and racial matters was bound, sooner or later, to come across Stoddard’s name and work. Although he held three degrees, including a doctorate from Harvard, in his career he was always foremost a journalist and popular lecturer rather than an academic scholar. 

His first book was his PhD thesis, an authoritative but gruesome account of the early history of Haiti (The French Revolution in San Domingo, 1914). With the publication of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy in 1920, Dr. Stoddard was soon a household word, a favored commencement speaker, and expert commentator in the press.

             

The success of this book made it possible for Stoddard and his publisher, Scribner’s, to build a kind of Rising Tide franchise: The New World of Islam(1921), The Revolt Against Civilization (1922), Racial Realities in Europe (1924), and Clashing Tides of Color (1935) are some books in this vein. Stoddard also turned his hand to biography on occasion, as well as travel, sociology, and international finance. For a while, Scribner’s were publishing a new Stoddard volume almost every year.

The lecture circuit, and making new, arcane theories popular and accessible, came naturally to Stoddard. Raised mainly in Italy and widely traveled in Europe, he grew up the son of another popular lecturer and travel writer, John Lawson Stoddard (1850-1931).[1] Father Stoddard was a prolific author of books and articles, and died in Italy. Young Lothrop, however, seems to have spent most of his adult life in and around his family’s ancestral glebe of Brookline, Massachusetts.

Because so many of his early books touched upon racial matters and eugenics, Lothrop Stoddard today is often misunderstood as a faddish, sensationalist scaremonger, known mainly for spreading alarm about the “yellow peril” and the threat of the “brown races.” Of course he did turn his hand to subjects of “human biodiversity” (as we would call it in a later era), but a lot of this is due mainly to the times in which he wrote.

Through most of the 1920s, matters of race and eugenics were very much to the fore. This was the time the Johnson-Reed Act (aka Immigration Act of 1924) was passed, severely limiting national quotas of immigration, and when compulsory sterilization for the feeble-minded and disabled was the law in 30 states[2]; the time when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. upheld one of these laws (Buck v. Bell, 1927) by declaring, “Three generations of imbecliles is enough.” And of course the racy titles that Scribner’s affixed to so many of those bestselling books may well raise eyebrows today.

It has been Stoddard’s misfortune, moreover, to be forever confused with other contemporary writers on race and history, primarily Madison Grant whose The Passing of the Great Race (1916) presented a simple and forceful argument for the “Nordic theory” of history: essentially the idea that there are three large subgroups of Europeans—Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean,—with the Nordics at the top of the heap.[3] This basic theory itself was not new; its rough outline had been promoted in the 1800s by such writers as Comte de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. It was not a central interest of Stoddard’s, although he readily acknowledged differences in races and cultures.

Nevertheless, in Madison Grant’s introduction to The Rising Tide of Color, Grant seems to be endorsing Stoddard’s book as an amplification of his own theories. All this is highly misleading, and causes one to wonder whether Grant ever got around to reading what Stoddard’s actually wrote. Anyone picking up The Rising Tide of Colorand reading only the introduction will get a very mistaken idea of what the book is really about, which is the dislocations and aftershocks of the Great War, and the effect of that disaster’s massive (40,000,000) slaughter within the white world. The continuing rise of Japan is predicted, but Stoddard’s attitude is that of concern, not contempt. Nevertheless, Stoddard afterwards bore a reputation as the “yellow peril” man, and this is almost certainly due to Madison Grant’s introduction.[4] 

But if he was something more than merely a race-theory popularizer like Grant, what was Stoddard really? Where do we put him? Probably Stoddard is best defined as a geopolitical theorist, moving in the same philosophical space as such cartographically oriented thinkers as Karl Haushofer and Halford Mackinder. This is the school of thought that regards the literal shapes of countries, and their geographical location vis-a-vis the rest of the world—as well as their people’s ability to exploit seacoasts and other natural features—as the main determinants of national ascendancy.

Some of this worldview informs The Rising Tide of Color and The New World of Islam. But Stoddard fortifies it all with a missing factor that does not show up on a classroom map. A basic human element: fecundity, a people’s ability to breed; against which any theories of superior race or civilization pale into insignificance.

Of course brute fecundity by itself is not enough.There is another relentless dynamic at play in an evolving civilization: the ability to breed the kind of human beings who can keep up with the culture. 

The truth is that as a civilization advances it leaves behind multitudes of human beings who have not the capacity to keep pace…. Some are congenital savages or barbarians; men who could not fit into any civilization, and who consequently fall behind from the start.  They are not degenerates; they are “primitives,” carried over into a social environment in which they do not belong . . .

And how does the Under-Man look at civilization? This civilization offers him few benefits and fewer hope. It usually affords him little beyond a meagre subsistence.

This is from The Revolt Against Civilization. Its thesis, in brief, is that Increased rates of degeneracy are the natural outcome of an advancing civilization, continually spreading, Malthus-like, as the civilization advances; till finally the mass of degenerates the whole structure down in violence and revolt:

For degeneracy does threaten civilization.The presence of vast hordes of congenital inferiors—incapable, unadaptable, discontented, and unruly—menaces the social order with both dissolution and disruption.[5]

Somewhat facilely, Stoddard tries to illustrate his point by citing revolutions from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks: a wobbly point, since those were clearly insurrections managed from above, and not long-term end-products of misfit degenerates.

Much of the volume is a brief for eugenic breeding (to counteract the drift to degeneracy), while the cover of the original edition bears the Soviet hammer-and-sickle device. Thus—Bolshevism is the result of Bad Breeding. It seems forced and frivolous today, but it was likely the result of marketing pressures and publishing deadlines.

Meantime, Stoddard gets to drive home his basic point home, however confused and muddied it may be. A nation’s breeding policy is at least as essential a factor in geopolitical strategy as trade policy or defense.

Notes

1. Chicago Sunday Tribune, Sept. 26, 1943.

2.See http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/ . Also Brunius, Harry. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity, 2007.

3.There is a line in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) in which the narrator’s friend Tom Buchanan announces he’s been reading a book by “this man Goddard”—“Goddard” being an apparent conflation of Grant and Stoddard, along with the eugenicist H. H. Goddard (1866-1957), who is remembered mainly for his study of hereditary degeneration in the pseudonymous Kallikak family.

4. As late as 1940, Time magazine was publishing a squib that began, “Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, Brookline, Mass. political lecturer and author, whose racial theories (he used to frighten the U. S. with the yellow peril) make him persona grata to Nazis, went recently to Germany as correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance.”

5. Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization (1922).

The Jewish Question for Normies

                           By Aedon Cassiel

         

The notion that the Alt-Right is full of hatred and bigotry against Jews is one complaint that is echoed almost equally across both the Left and Right. Even many mainstream conservatives who oppose the Alt-Right but would never agree that the Alt-Right is racist because of its perspectives on race still accuse the Alt-Right of being anti-Semitic because of its perspectives on Jews.

In an article called “You Can’t Whitewash the Alt-Right’s Bigotry“ at The Federalist, Cathy Young spends the larger portion of the article talking about the Alt-Right’s relationship with Jews: “The trolls of the Alt-Right are well-versed in anti-Semitic tropes such as Jewish control of the media.”

As she notes, Milo Yiannopoulos (who is Jewish) “bafflingly waved [this] aside as a mere statement of statistical fact.” To let Yiannopoulos speak for himself, here’s what he said:

. . . the Jews run everything? Well, we do. The Jews run all the banks? Well, we do. The Jews run the media? Well, we do . . . It’s a fact; this is not in debate. It’s a statistical fact . . . Jews run most of the banks; Jews completely dominate the media; Jews are vastly disproportionately represented in all of these professions. That’s just a fact. It’s not anti-Semitic to point out statistics . . . It’s not anti-Semitic to point out that these things are true.

Is he right? Well, of course. Jews, who are 2% of the American population, make up about 30-47% of the CEOs, founders, presidents, and chairmen of major media companies. There is no debating it. And what goes for the media goes for the halls of academia as well: In Charles Kadushin’s 1974 work The American Intellectual Elite, Jews represented nearly half of Charles Kadushin’s full sample of elite American intellectuals.

In the 1995 Harvard publication Jews and the New American Scene, Seymour Martin Lipset (who is Jewish) discusses his concerns about whether “American Jews [will] survive their success . . . [or] the United States’ uniquely hospitable environment [will] lead inexorably to their assimilation and loss of cultural identity[.]” Note that Mr. Lipset here equates maintaining one’s cultural identity against threats of assimilation—into a uniquely hospitable environment, no less—with survival. To identify with the mainstream of the very society which allowed one such great success would then be annihilation. Destruction. Death. These are precisely fears that whites are deemed paranoid racists for expressing in the context of whites’impending minority status in the United States within the next few decades. And Mr. Lipset is afraid of this happening not because of rising crime, or racist policies that single out Jews out of prejudice, or anything else that almost everyone would agree is bad, but rather because Jews in the United States are so successful that they might forget to identify themselves in contrast to the society which has allowed and enabled that very success. If it’s racist paranoia for whites to worry about becoming a minority in the first place, then just exactly what are we supposed to call this equation where success as a minority is literally twisted to mean annihilation?

But Jewish authors won’t be condemned for it. Indeed, authors like Lipset have no qualms about discussing the fact that Jews (who again are around 2% of the American population) represent “26 percent of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writ­ers, and producers of the 50 top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” Critics like Cathy Young will never rise up to chastise them for passing off “anti-Semitic tropes” for talking about it. Not even as Lipset goes so far as to state that “American exceptionalism [e.g. the social arrangements allowing Jews such tremendous economic and sociopolitical success] may threaten the future of Jews even more than did anti-Semitic hostilities of the past.”

Surprisingly, Marilyn Mayo—who tracks the Alt-Right at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism—actually goes so far as to admit that “You can have some of the ideas of the Alt-Right, which is anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism, and anti-globalism, without it being anti-Semitic.” However, she goes on to emphasize that “a good deal of the people who are talking about the ideology of white identity, white culture, focus on Jews as part of a problem for them.” The implication is supposed to be that this is so obviously inherently bigoted that no further discussion whatsoever is necessary to calmly explain just exactly why these individuals are wrong. Is it to be classified as automatic bigotry by default when people who are talking about “the ideology of [black] identity, [black] culture, focus on [racist whites] as part of a problem for them”—as takes place, say, in basically any discussion about “cultural appropriation” that has ever taken place?

Okay, so if we were to grant that Jewish authors like Seymour Martin Lipset—not to mention the raw numbers—are right that Jews do in fact have disproportionate influence over the American media and academia, what then? Marilyn Mao apparently accepts that one actually can oppose things like immigration, multiculturalism, and globalism without being “anti-Semitic.” But supposing one does accept these positions, how would this effect one’s relationship with Jews? The core of the problem is not that the Alt-Right hates Jews for being Jewish. The core of the problem is that, in practice, no one will actually admit what Marilyn Mao just did: that one can oppose immigration, multiculturalism, and so forth without being “anti-Semitic” (or otherwise deserving of an equivalent amount of deep moral condemnation). The entire point of the Alt-Right’s talk about Jews is to call attention to the fact that Jews have led the effort historically to the present day to condemn anyone who holds these positions.

Demographically, Jews skew significantly to the Left of American politics. Whether we’re talking about abortion, pornography, premarital sex, gay marriage, or feminism, Jewish views (particularly on social issues) have long been to the left of the American mainstream. Nathan Abrams, a Lecturer of Modern American History at the University of Aberdeen, quotes Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw, as stating: “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.” A study in 2012 found that Jews, along with Buddhists, were by far the most likely to report having had premarital sex (with Christians and Hindus much less so, and Muslims by far the least). While just shy of half of all Jews support the legalization of abortion without any restriction or qualification whatsoever, no other group exceeds 25% support. Whereas 93% of Jews support legalizing abortion in all or most cases, the next-closest group (white Protestants) only reaches 59%, while black Protestants and Catholics are at 50% and 48% respectively.

Whereas white Americans skew about 54-40 in favor of the Republicans, American Jews skew about 64-26 in favor of the Democrats. And while the counter-examples of Communist persecution in places like China and North Korea make it impossible to view Communism as a whole as “Jewish project,” Jews have beendisproportionately likely to join Communist movements (as Ilya Somin, a Jewish Professor at George Mason School of Law, freely admits).

All the way back to the beginning of the 20th century, Jews were at the forefront of efforts to fight restrictions on immigration.

As the progressive eugenicist Edward Alsworth Ross wrote in the 1914 book The Old World in the New, “The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains.”

Or, as Representative Scott Leavitt stated on the Congressional record in 1924 in defense of the 1924 Immigration Act,

The instinct for national and race preservation is not one to be condemned, as has been intimated here. No one should be better able to understand the desire of Americans to keep America American than the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Sabath], who is leading the attack on this measure, or the gentlemen from New York, Mr. Dickstein, Mr. Jacobstein, Mr. Celler, and Mr. Perlman. They are of the one great historic people who have maintained the identity of their race throughout the centuries because they believe sincerely that they are a chosen people, with certain ideals to maintain, and knowing that the loss of racial identity means a change of ideals. That fact should make it easy for them and the majority of the most active opponents of this measure in the spoken debate to recognize and sympathize with our viewpoint, which is not so extreme as that of their own race, but only demands that the admixture of other peoples shall be only of such kind and proportions and in such quantities as will not alter racial characteristics more rapidly than there can be assimilation as to ideas of government as well as of blood.

Or as Hugh Davis Graham writes in the 2002 book Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America,

Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of the movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of the Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. . . . To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

And it’s difficult to fail to notice just how many Jews condemn the idea of strengthening border policies in the United States as the pinnacle of white racist political evil while supporting policies in Israel that not only strengthen borders, but for example actually throw African immigrants out by the thousands to keep Israel Jewish. As a matter of fact, should Trump win the nomination, the veryJewish company that built the walls in Israelwould by vying for the chance to build the walls in the United States. But we still find countless examples of high-profile Jews who in one breathwrite articles like “White Nationalism is a Scourge that Won’t Go Away,” and in the next pen articles with headlines like “Israel’s Jewish Essence is Non-Negotiable.”

Ethnonationalist immigration policies for me—but not for thee. Are we wrong to notice that this seems hypocritical? Are we bigots for noticing? I don’t think we are.

A Facebook page titled “Open Borders for Israel” does exist, but its founders and followers are not Jews or Israelis who actually support the idea of open borders in Israel. They’re people ironically calling attention to the fact that nobody does that. And today, Kevin MacDonald notes that

Even Daniel Pipes, who is known as an “Islamophobic” critic of the Muslim community, is not supporting Donald Trump because of his stance on immigration- and diversity-related issues. This may seem surprising because one of Trump’s signature proposals has been a moratorium on Muslim immigration, while Hillary Clinton wants to ramp up the number of refugees and other immigrants from Muslim countries. . .  Indeed, Pipes just quit the GOP over this issue. . . . Needless to say, this is especially hypocritical given Pipes’ status as a pro-Israel activist, since Trump’s proposals parallel the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

Thus, even “conservative” Jews who aren’t part of the trend of Jews skewing so far to the left of the American mainstream have gone a long way to redirect conservatism away from its traditional ideals. The leading founders and luminaries of the neoconservative movement—Bill Kristol, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leo Strauss, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Elliott Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Robert Kagan, Jonah Goldberg, David Frum, and many others—are extremely disproportionately Jewish—enough that neoconservatism basically can be seen as a “Jewish project.”

Neoconservative “godfather” Irving Kristol, in a 2003 article titled “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” explains that “the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics….” And with respect to the U.S. taking military action overseas in the interests of Israel? “No complicated geopolitical calculations of [the U.S.’] national interest are necessary.” Samuel Francis’ essay “The Neoconservative Subversion” in Brent Nelson’s Neoconservatism describes Jewish/neoconservative activists’ “efforts not merely to debate, criticize, and refute the ideas of traditional conservatism but to denounce, vilify, and harm the careers of those Old Right figures and institutions they have targeted.” (All emphasis mine—and note that Francis here uses “Old Right” to refer to prototypical paleoconservatives, and not as Greg Johnson does to refer to fascists, national socialists, and related movements ) And as Stephen Sniegoski argues in The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, the neoconservatives aren’t just responsible for pushing the United States into the Middle East, but how those conflicts have played out has often been tailored to the interests of the state of Israel as well.

Thus, the neoconservative transformation of American politics has evolved into the promotion of a kind of “invade the world, invite the world” strategy. First, the U.S. military gets involved in war in the Middle East (an effort that simply is in fact disproportionately pushed by Jews); and next, after we’ve dropped bombs on all of their relatives and givven them more than enough reason to hate us, the U.S. then invites refugees to come over to visit for tea (another effort that also is in fact disproportionately pushed by Jews). Surely, this strategy has something to do with the significant upsurge in domestic Islamic terror attacks since 9/11.

In contrast, what the Alt-Right stands for is policies that place “America First” by not bombing foreign countries when we have little to gain from doing so, yet also not trying to invite them over for tea afterwards. As a friend in Russia tells me, all of the Chechen Muslims he knows seem to think that that’s actually a pretty good deal. They weren’t clamoring to come relocate to the States, anyway. But an end to the bombs would be nice.

And yet, guess what the Jewish activists at the Anti-Defamation League think of the phrase “America First” when Trump adopts it as a campaign slogan? They think it’s “anti-Semitic.”

So Jews are, of course, not a monolith. There are plenty of Jews who share, or at least can respect, the basic core values of the Alternative Right. Some do hold socially conservative values; some do oppose allowing demographic changes through unchecked immigration.

Some even consider themselves members of the Alt-Right [cite Jonathan Siedel]. But nonetheless, Jews have been so heavily disproportionately involved in efforts both to fight those values and to condemn anyone who holds them that if we subtracted all Jewish influence from the equation both for and against us, the entirety of U.S. history would unquestionably have proceeded very differently. The norms and values we fight to re-establish today were only deconstructed decades ago because of efforts to fight them that probably never could have succeeded without Jewish efforts at all.

Had Jews not been able as a group to exert as much influence over the course of U.S. political policy as they have, the alt-right would not today be a fringe effort to restore classical values and policy preferences. Because it wouldn’t have to be: those values and policy preferences would have remained at the core of the American mainstream for the last century.

Aren’t Jews Just White People with a Different Religion? 

The Alt-Right begins with acceptance of human biodiversity—the thesis that different human populations have evolved psychological and behavioral differences which are partially biological in origin.

Now, the argument from human biodiversity to ethnonationalism goes something like this:

1. People tend to get along better with others who are behaviorally and psychologically more like themselves.

2. Since behavioral and psychological traits are heavily influenced by genes, people therefore tend to form deeper friendships with others who are genetically more like themselves.

3. Since a member of a given race is genetically more similar to the average member of his race than he is to a non-member (Lewontin’s fallacynotwithstanding)  ethnically segregated societies will have proportionally more people with a greater degree of genetic relatedness between them. They will therefore have proportionally more people with a greater degree of behavioral and psychological similarity between them, and they will therefore tend to have more social trust and civic participation, as well as stronger interpersonal bonds and relationships.

4. Since these are all positive values that we all ought to encourage, for everyone’s sake, peaceful movement towards ethnostates is something that members of all races have good reason to support.

Indeed, studies have confirmed that people tend to form close relationships with people who are about as genetically similar to them as fourth cousins, and a mountain of studies have established the claim that increases in racial diversity do in fact result in decreases in social trust, civic participation, and altruistic or co-operative social norms.

Furthermore, it is now known both that Jews are genetically distinct enough to qualify as a “race,” and that despite a significant degree of European admixture, Jews are in fact geneticallymore closely related to Palestinians than they are to European populations. Some scholars, including Kevin MacDonald, have speculated that Jews’ greater levels of ethnocentrism compared to whites is one genetically influenced personality difference between whites and Jews. As evidence for this hypothesis, he points to a chapter titled Monographs for the Society for Research in Child Development in the anthology Growing Points in Attachment Theory and Research. In the chapter, the authors point to research in which Israeli infants were shown to have much stronger fear responses to being left with strangers than any infants from any other race—with infants from North Germany showing the least fear of all. In fact, the fear responses from the Israeli infants were often so severe that the experiments were frequently cut short altogether.

In any case, the result is that the Alt-Right tends to extend its conclusions in favor of ethnonationalism towards support for Zionism—both of a means of providing Jews with an ethnic homeland of their own (consistent with its support for ethnonationalism in general), and as a means of humanely creating an ethnic homeland for whites free of Jewish social and political predominance as well.

However, as Kevin MacDonald says in his acceptance speech for the 2004 Jack London Literary Prize, titled “Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?” the reality is that I greatly admire Jews as a group that has pursued its interests over thousands of years, while retaining its ethnic coherence and intensity of group commitment. There have been ups and downs in Jewish fortunes, to be sure; but their persistence, at times in the face of long odds, and their spectacular success at the present time are surely worthy of emulation.” Other members of the Alt-Right have at times even framed their political philosophy as a call for a “sort of white Zionism.”

Framing the Alt-Right as “anti-Semitic”, when in so many ways its political philosophy is nothing other than an exact mirror image of Jewish Zionism, seems just a little bit odd. Don’t you think?

As Betsy Woodruff writes for The Daily Beast in an article titled “Alt-Right Leaders: We Aren’t Racist, We Just Hate Jews,” “Bad news, Jews: You don’t get to be part of Richard Spencer’s white ethno-state.” But Diaspora Jews aren’t spending millions of dollars to try to bring Israeli Jews out to Europe and the United States. Israeli Jews are spending millions of dollars to try to bring Jews to Israel from places like Europe and the United States. And websites like Judaism 101 tell us that “Living outside of Israel is viewed as an unnatural state for a Jew. The world outside of Israel is often referred to as “galut,” which is usually translated as “diaspora” (dispersion), but a more literal translation would be “exile” or “captivity.” So the Alt-Right’s answer to Mrs. Woodruff’s comment is: why should they want to be? They already areexpressing their desire for their own ethnostate. And the standards of political correctness that condemn whites for even daring to think about the subject already freely allow Jews not only to express their desires for, but to actually have, their own ethnostate.

Newsflash: Whites don’t “get to be” part of Benjamin Netanyatu’s Jewish ethnostate, either. Will The Daily Beast use that fact to condemn the Jews behind Zionism? Of course not.

But, funny enough, the Alt-Right doesn’t either.

White Nationalists Are Not "White Supremacists"

                             By Greg Johnson 

   

The charge that White Nationalists are “White Supremacists” has two aspects. First, there is the claim that whites think of ourselves as superior to other groups. Second, there is the idea that whites want to rule over other groups.

I do think that whites are superior to some groups in some ways. I am very proud of our people, and we have a great deal to be proud of. In the areas in which we excel, we have done a lot for the world. Our superior achievements in comparison to other races are why so many non-whites are flooding into white societies. There’s no need to mince words about that or apologize in any way.

It is easy to find ways in which we are superior to other groups. But you can also find ways in which we are inferior to other groups. I just don’t think this issue matters, however, because as Kevin MacDonald and Jared Taylor have pointed out, even if we were the sorriest lot of people on the planet and had accomplished almost nothing, it would still be natural, normal, and right for us to love our own and to be concerned with the future of our people. And it would still be politically expedient to demand our own sovereign homelands.

As for the idea of whites reigning over other people, I don’t want that. I am a nationalist. I believe in self-determination for all peoples. The people who are actually committed to whites ruling over other people are the civic nationalists of the Alt Light. People like Gavin McInnes, for instance, claim that they are civic nationalists and Western civilizational chauvinists. But they are not ethnic or racial nationalists. They have basically conceded multiracialism to the Left. It is a victory they are not even going to question, much less try to roll back.

Chauvinism is an attitude of superiority. A Western chauvinist believes that Western civilization is superior. What is Western civilization, though? Basically, it is white civilization. The Alt Light is thus committed to the idea of white civilizational superiority, which is the first form of supremacism. They try to evade this implication with a hat trick, of course, declaring that Western civilization is a universal civilization, but it’s not.

Western civilization is a product of white people. The people who are most comfortable in Western civilizations are white people. When Blacks, Asians, and other groups come to white countries, they want to change things to suit them better. The Western chauvinist must say “no.” Non-whites have to live by white standards, including white laws, which are of course enforced by the state. In effect, this means whites must rule over non-whites. This is white supremacism in the second sense.

Now I believe that if non-whites live in white societies, we damn well better impose our values on them, or they will create a society that we do not want to live in. We really need to reflect for a moment on the absurdity of the situation in which it is now “problematic” for white values to be “supreme” in white societies, which were created and sustained by white people and white values.

But we have to be honest about the fact that it is a form of oppression to impose white standards on non-white populations and demand that they “assimilate,” that they surrender their identities, that they go around wearing the equivalent of uncomfortable shoes or seasonally inappropriate clothes. Because a civilization should be as comfortable and as becoming as a well-tailored suit. And blacks don’t find white civilization comfortable. It is like demanding they wear shoes that are two sizes too small when we impose our standards of punctuality and time preferences, demand that they follow our age-of-consent laws, or foist the bourgeois nuclear family upon them. These things don’t come naturally to Africans. White standards like walking on the sidewalk, not down the middle of the street, are oppressive to blacks. Such standards are imposed by the hated “white supremacy” system. But if we don’t impose white standards upon them, we have chaos. We have great cities like Detroit transformed into wastelands.

There’s a line from William Blake, “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.” Because lions and oxen are different beasts, to put them under one law forces them to live contrary to their natures. White supremacism would be like lion supremacism: demanding that the ox live by the code of the lion. But the ox doesn’t eat meat. He eats grass. Eating meat doesn’t come naturally to him. The true white supremacists are the civic nationalists, who would think they are doing the ox a favor by declaring meat the “universal” diet and force-feeding it to him.

White Nationalists are not white supremacists, because it is not our preference to rule over other groups. Although if forced to live under multicultural systems, we are going to take our own side and try to make sure that our values reign supreme, our preference is to go our separate ways. We want an amicable, no-fault racial divorce so we can live in the manners that most befit us in our own separate homelands.

White Pride & White Guilt

 By Michael Polignano

“Light” by Fidus

Slovak translation here; French translation here

Today in the United States and most of the White world, as soon as a White child is old enough to understand language, he is told that he should feel guilt for the crimes of his ancestors. Guilt for finding, conquering, enslaving, and killing off non-Whites around the globe . . . and littering in the process. Guilt, not for his own crimes, but for the crimes of other people of the same race.

But he is also told that he should feel no pride in the amazing achievements of his race. No pride in the pyramids and the Parthenon, no pride in the arch and the dome, no pride in White science and technology and medicine, no pride in the glories of European painting and sculpture and music, no pride in Plato and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, no pride in the exploration of the globe and the conquest of space. Pride, not in his own achievements, but in the achievements of other people of the same race.

But if it is reasonable to feel White guilt, then it is reasonable to feel White pride.

This is a subversive thought, for if one does a balance sheet comparing reasons for White guilt and White pride, Whites might discover that they have far more to be proud of than guilty of. Then they might decide to resist their dispossession.

Faced with that prospect, the advocates of White dispossession will retreat to the last refuge of ethno-political scoundrels and cowards: individualism. They will piously lecture us that there are no groups, only individuals—that even if the White race has produced more creative individuals than the other races combined, only the individuals, not the race, should be honored—that the only person entitled to feel proud of Edison’s achievements was Edison, because he earned it—that nobody has the right to a pride that he has not earned by his own efforts—that people who do feel pride in the achievements of their racial brethren are losers who need to derive self-esteem from the achievements of others because they have no achievements of their own—and so forth.

The individualist argument goes as follows: The only pride we have a right to is pride in our own achievements. Racial pride is pride in the achievements of others. Therefore, we have no right to racial pride.

I will grant that we have not, strictly speaking, “earned” the pride we feel in the achievements of others. But the false premise of the individualist argument is that we have no right to things that we have not earned. We call something of value that we receive from others without earning it a “gift.”

But does it make sense to describe the goods passed on by long-dead ancestors and kinsmen as “gifts”?

I think so. It certainly makes no sense to call it an exchange relationship, since there is no way to repay benefactors who are dead or anonymous. Moreover, one of the functions of the Last Will and Testament is to confer gifts after one’s death when there can be no possibility of exchange. One can even give gifts to complete strangers and distant future generations.

A creative genius might take money in exchange for his works during his lifetime. But after he is dead, his collected works become a gift to future generations. We certainly cannot return anything to Aristotle or Galileo or Mozart of value equal to what they have given us. They have given us too much and are not around to receive payment.

There is no question that we have a “right” to things that we receive as gifts. If racial pride can be understood as a gift, then we have a right to that feeling.

But when someone gives us a gift, we naturally want to transform it into an exchange. Receiving a gift puts us in someone’s debt, which is not a pleasant feeling. But exchange puts us on equal footing, which is more consistent with our sense of dignity and desire for independence. So we satisfy ourselves with the mere pretense of an exchange by repaying our benefactors with thanks.

But how do I thank people who are anonymous or long-dead: my distant forebears and the racial kinsmen who make me proud?

Certainly not by resting on their laurels or by making their achievements a substitute for mine, which is the puerile individualist accusation.

First, we can become worthy recipients of what they have given us by learning to appreciate our history and culture.

Second, since it is impossible to return their patrimony to them, we can at least pass it on to future generations, so that they can continue to live on through their works.

Third, we can thank them by making ourselves worthy of the pride they have given us, by achieving something of greatness ourselves.

Fourth, we can work to preserve and pass on the genetic heritage that has made the cultural heritage possible.

In this time of racial peril, the highest and noblest thing any of us can do is work together to ensure the survival and flourishing of the White race, so it can give birth to new Leonardos and Newtons and Teslas.

But if we have a right to White pride, then do we not also deserve White guilt?

I think “guilt” is the wrong concept, for guilt implies responsibility, and racial guilt implies collective responsibility. A group of people acting together may be responsible for an act. But it is not just to punish an innocent person for a misdeed committed by another member of his race or community.

The proper concept here is “shame,” not guilt, for I can feel ashamed of the misdeeds of others without being responsible for those misdeeds.

We have all felt shame at the misbehavior of other people. It is easy to understand when the culprit is a relative or friend and his actions reflect badly on us. But we also feel shame at the misbehavior of complete strangers. Yet I feel this only when their actions are “all too human,” meaning that they reflect badly on me simply because, as a human being, I could have made the exact same mistake. They point out our universal human weaknesses and failings.

In the same way, I feel shame for the crimes and follies of other White people, but only if their failings are typical of Whites and thus reflect negatively on me, making me self-conscious of my own racial weaknesses and potential follies.

As for the usual charges against the White race—racism, slavery, colonialism, environmental destruction—I feel no shame for these at all simply as a White man, and no White person should.

Racism—properly defined as a natural preference for and solidarity with one’s own kind, not as hatred for others “just because they are different”—is nothing to be ashamed of at all.

Slavery, imperialism, colonialism, genocide, environmental destruction, and the like are all shameful things, and I wish that none of them had happened. But these crimes have been committed by members of all races whenever they have had the means and opportunity. They are all too human, and all human beings should feel ashamed of them.

The only reason these crimes are lodged against the White race in particular is that we were better at them than the others. We defended Europe from the Huns, the Moors, the Mongols, and the Turks and eventually went forth and conquered most of the globe. The other races are probably more ruthless, cunning, and cruel. But we beat them because of our superior inventiveness, superior social organization, and questing, adventurous spirit.

So when Whites are singled out for blame, we are being attacked not for our crimes, but for our virtues—for being winners rather than losers in the brutal struggle between different races for dominion over this planet.

That struggle has not disappeared just because Whites have abandoned their conquests and gone home.

October 9, 2004

Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No.22 Answering Normie Questions

                            By Greg Johnson

        

To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” To subscribe to the CC podcast RSS feed, click here.

Greg Johnson answers normie questions about White Nationalism and white identity posed by JM of the NoMoreDogma YouTube channel. Please share your own answers below. Topics include:

1. “Unearned” pride (see Michael Polignano, “White Pride & White Guilt“)

2. White supremacism (see Greg Johnson, “White Nationalists are Not White Supremacists“)

3. What “white privilege” really is, and why it is not a problem

4. “Normative” whiteness, or Frenchness, or Englishness

5. The objective forces driving whites to greater ethnocentrism

6. Why environmentalists are white supremacists

7. The unworkableness of multiculturalism and the workableness of homogeneous societies as objective facts, not matters for guesswork

8. The hypocrisy of those who preach multiculturalism while avoiding it in real life

9. The neurological basis of this hypocrisy

10. Why racists have better mental health than anti-racists

11. How modern liberal attitudes toward race are analogous to Victorian attitudes about sex

12. Outliers vs. averages and the necessity of basing social policy on averages

13. The NAXALT fallacy, radical individualism, and sentimentalism (see Greg Johnson, “In Defense of Prejudice“)

14. Why the common good has to trump individual interests when there is a conflict

15. The legitimacy of love of one’s own

16. How advocates of miscegenation admit that diversity is a curse and in effect call for genocide to create racial and cultural homogeneity

17. How miscegenation promotes greater racial polarization in future generations; how anti-natalism leads to more pro-natal future generations

18. The way forward after Charlottesville and Shelbyville

This is just the first of an ongoing series of podcasts in which we work on talking points responding to common objections to White Nationalism. Please share your questions below.

Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ

                         By Jonathan Bowden

   

Czech translation here

Few films have been pilloried quite as much as Mel Gibson’s Passion, yet when I last checked it was one of the ten most financially successful films of all time. Indeed, the sheer success of this piece with Christians around the world led to a deescalation of the semi-orchestrated attack on the film. Nothing succeeds like success, and I remember with amusement watching a bus with an advertisement for Mel Gibson’s Passion on the side of it snaking through the town where I lived at the height of the furore. But what of the film itself?

The Passion of the Christ is a highly artistic and metaphysical film from an ultra-Catholic perspective. As a director, Mel Gibson shows an impressive aesthetic sense and great artistic originality. This is reflected in every detail. Even the color palate of much of the film has an ocher tint or wash that resembles the painting of early Renaissance masters such as Giotto and Cimabue.

Several scenes are especially striking: the ravens attacking the thieves who are exposed with Christ on the Cross and Simon being made to carry the Cross on behalf of the Savior. But most assuredly the depiction of the Devil or Satan as a shaven-headed and androgynous Supermodel has to go down as one of the most startling innovations in cinema history.

Interestingly enough, the reaction to her appearance inside Italy was quite different to outside, and for a comparison try to visualize Lady GaGa as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust and you begin to get some sense of the frisson.

In High Christian art an artist is given free rein to depict the diabolical because it is outside the locus or expectation of human imperfection. The more perverse the depiction, the more aesthetically revelatory — so holds this particular theory.

One of the more interesting critiques of the film, particularly in Europe, was that it was blood-thirsty, sado-masochistic, and little more than a Biblical slasher movie. Yet none of the violence is gratuitous, and all of it fits in with the depiction of the Passion per se. During the first fifty minutes to one hour of running time, there is literally no violence, save some scuffling in the Garden.

This fits in with a very benevolent depiction of the Romans throughout the film. One is reminded that Mel Gibson’s faith is called Roman Catholicism after all. The Bulgarian actor playing Pilate  (who bears a striking resemblance to Mussolini) depicts him, in Nietzsche’s words, as the real hero of the New Testament. This could quite easily fit in with Gibson’s prognosis — after all, the whole point about the film is that Christ’s extraordinary moral arc or point of departure has to do with the fact that he is not a Man (sic).

On the issue of anti-Semitism, so-called, I have nothing to say. The film is not in the least anti-Semitic. It is a traditionalist High Catholic art film with all the suppositions which that implies. It is definitely not philo-Semitic, however. What the alleged scandal involving its release goes to show is that the implied penumbra of censorship and over-sensitivity needs to be confronted and stood up to.

Gibson did nothing offensive whatsoever — even, from a classicizing point of view, the use of Latin throughout most of the feature just adds to the effect. Nothing more . . .

I recommend that people re-visit this film on DVD now that the firestorm has well and truly died down. I think that Mel Gibson’s film can be seen as a Christian altarpiece extension, à la Grünewald, to Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia(Parts 1 & 2). That’s Olympia — not Triumph of the Will. There is a subtle difference . . .

Towards A New European Palingenesis

By Chad Crowely 

Pentti Linkola

The hallmark of all revolutionary ideologies has been the forlorn attempt to create a “New Man.” Like Pygmalion, this “New Man” takes on the characteristics of whatever political ideology is currently en vogue. For want of a better, meta-historical term, the so-called “Right” has enjoyed marginally more success in this endeavor than other revolutionary movements. Accounting for this marginal degree of success are the metapolitical underpinnings of all revolutionary, Right-leaning ideologies. Historically speaking, these objectives are revanchist in nature, and are usually premised upon adhering to the realities of the natural world, i.e. inegalitarianism, hierarchy, and order. Delving a bit deeper, the reimposition of both hierarchy and inegalitarianism would in truth signify the reintegration and harmonization of the natural world with the world of man.

Part of the enduring quality of the Right is its attempt to redefine the relationship between man, society, and the wider natural world, in a realistic manner from which the “Left” has always shied away. The reclamation of the championing of the natural world is a cause worthy of the human and political capital of the real Right. Before any tangential political gains can be made, the prevailing metapolitical discourse must be reshaped in our image. Transforming the discourse associated with an entire worldview takes time, but as revolutionaries, it is our duty to contribute to the movement by whatever means necessary. For example, some progress has been made in the mainstream, specifically in some of the environmental sciences, but a greater Right-leaning presence there is necessary. The contemporary “green movement” is a joke, but a robust environmentalist mentality should be, and has been, an integral component of all revolutionary Right-wing movements throughout the ages. The field of “deep ecology” was one such movement which, during its nascent stages, possessed great potential, but like all things born into this age, it’s been infiltrated by the dissolutive religion of postmodernism.

When it first came into existence, the science of “deep ecology” possessed a great deal of potential, but sadly, and not unsurprisingly, most of its adherents are fanatical liberals, save for a few isolated “radical” individuals. The term deep ecology was first coined and popularized by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss in 1972. Næss felt that “deep” helped to delineate his brand of ecology from the “shallow ecology” and environmentalism of his contemporaries. From Næss’s perspective, his type of ecology was “deep” in that it explored the nature of the relationship between mankind and the natural world in an innovative manner the postmodern scientific enterprise had ceased to pursue for quite some time. And yet sadly, and contrary to the intentions of most of its founders, contemporary ecology, “deep,” “shallow,” or anywhere in between, concerns itself chiefly with the exploration of the natural world from a purely scientific perspective. As such, ecology and the wider field of the environmental sciences is wholly disinterested in and woefully bereft of the tools necessary to examine the complex philosophical underpinnings surrounding the larger questions regarding mankind and his relationship to the natural world.

To deep ecology’s credit, individuals like Næss, and more controversial figures such as the “eco-fascist” Pentti Linkola, view the natural world from a non-anthropocentric perspective, predicated upon balance and harmony rather than exploitation. Unsurprisingly, it is within this innate notion of balance, as it relates to the natural world, where there is an organic coalescence between the environmental movement and ethnonationalism. With his usual rhetorical gusto, Greg Johnson quite aptly stated that it is the centrality of nature which gives birth to the affinity which exists between “eco-fascism” and ethnonationalism. Ultimately, as ethnonationalists, we seek not only a return to the normality of a natural world in balance, but also for it to flourish again. A healthy world in environmental and metaphysical equanimity is a world sought by all racially-conscious peoples. Moreover, by working towards environmental homeostasis, we are reorientating European civilization itself one step closer to the undertaking of a new European paleogenesis. Successful civilizations are those which are organic in composition, both physically and metaphysically, and as such they are centered upon cyclicality, proportionality, and harmonic order.

Conceptually speaking, there are a number of problems with the “green movement,” and the severity of these issues makes the movement in its current iteration virtually useless to ethnonationalists. More precisely, the problem with individuals like Næss, and quite frankly with the entirety of the contemporary “green movement,” is ideological inconsistency and, ultimately, hypocrisy. Individuals like Rachel Carson, credited as the founder of the modern “global environmental movement,” rally for the preservation of the natural environment, but do so haphazardly, as they never satisfactorily seek to address, quantify, or rectify the relationship between mankind and the wider natural world. Ostensibly, environmentalism is a field concerned with caring for and improving the Earth’s environment, yet issues pertaining to mankind’s deleterious effect on it such as by overpopulation are systematically ignored. Herein lies the philosophical inconsistency intrinsic to all variations of postmodern environmentalism: The field is fixated upon the environment only as it relates to the level of utility which it affords to mankind. Channeling Savitri Devi, the natural world is impersonal, neither good nor bad, and its improvement or impoverishment is in no way connected to its utility for mankind. Even the speciously labeled “non-anthropocentric” mainstream approach to the environmental issue, which operates under an alleged “ecocentric lens,” is structurally inconsistent given that it skirts around the real issues, such as the steps which must be taken to halt overpopulation. Of course, a minority of brave individuals such as Linkola have advocated drastic solutions to these problems, but they are largely ignored and ostracized by mainstream elements within the “green movement.”

A perspective which has gained some popularity in radical ethnonationalist circles is biocentrism. Popularized by members of the German “vitalist” philosophical school, most notably Ludwig Klages, biocentrism is a metaphysical perspective on life, politics, and the environment. The biocentric worldview posits that all creatures, human and non-human alike, possess intrinsic value, and that notions of biodiversity and environmental protection should be accorded the utmost importance. More specifically, and in contrast to both mainstream “deep ecology” and the modern “green movement,” biocentrism is innately inegalitarian. The metaphorical well from which biocentrism springs is the natural world and its indifference to mankind and the equalitarian predilections of our species.

For we ethnonationalists, a return to the normality of the natural world is a return to inegalitarianism and its interrelated concepts of hierarchy and order. All social animals function along hierarchical lines, and in this regard, human beings are no different from any other creature. Civilizational order comes from adhering to hierarchical social patterns, and as such is an innate component of human nature and of the natural order itself, of which mankind is a product. The commonalities between the natural world and the inegalitarian worldview is evinced not only by their similarity, but also graphically illustrated in the naturalistic tendencies of the European philosophical tradition. From Plato’s Republic to Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, to the the later works of Plotinus and Proculus, all the way to the Church Fathers, notions of hierarchy and order, as dual philosophical manifestations of the inegalitarian worldview, have been extemporized as being analogous to both the natural world and the divine. The natural world is inegalitarian in operation and function, and as ethnonationalists, our idealized society is one in which this timeless principle is mirrored.

Up until very recently, the perennial resurgence of the inegalitarian worldview across the European philosophical tradition was a testament to the close relationship between European man and the natural world. In medieval Europe, the notion of the scala naturae was the guiding basis for social order and harmony. Scala naturae, or “ladder of Being,” colloquially referred to as the “Great Chain of Being,” is evidence of this. By the same token, the scala naturae was an attempt by medieval Europeans to both understand and thus systematize the natural world, and by extension, replicate it within their social order. Of course, during the Christianization of Europe, the philosophical concept of the Great Chain of Being was infused with an overly semiticized Christianity, and its propensity for anthropocentrism, but that is a topic for an altogether different essay. One could argue that until very recently, the inegalitarian, biocentric worldview was the metaphysical fundament for all of Europe.

Further proof of the bond between the natural world and ethnonationalism is the immutable reality of race. A more modern derivation of the Great Chain of Being as it relates to race is the concept of “Blood and Soil.” This refers to the indivisible relationship between a racially unique people and the land in which they reside. Blood and Soil was first conceptualized by the nineteenth-century Romantics Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, and later popularized by the brilliant National Socialist philosopher and activist, Walther Darré. For Darré, a profound and dangerous shift had occurred in Weimar Germany, and throughout the entirety of post-war European civilization itself: one which the concept of Blood and Soil sought to correct. From Darré’s perspective, the reality of race and its connection to the land was being systematically extirpated from the European psyche by those hostile to Europe. Darré went so far as to declare that “the unity of Blood and Soil must be restored,” and it was this assertion that best encapsulates the raison d’etre of the German National Socialist movement.

With the above in mind, it’s no coincidence that both the nascent fields of environmentalism and ecology originated in nineteenth-century Germany. Indeed, it was the prominent German biologist Ernst Haeckel who first coined the term “ecology.” To Haeckel, ecology as a field of scientific endeavor was holistic in orientation, as it concerned itself primarily with understanding the nature of the relationships that all organisms, and not just mankind, share with the surrounding natural world. To Haeckel, mankind wasn’t special, but rather: “Man is not distinguished from [the animal world] by a special kind of soul, or by any peculiar and exclusive psychic function, but only by a higher degree of psychic activity, a superior stage of development.”[1]Conversely, in an attempt to liberate mankind from the shackles of metaphysical superstitions, radical scientific materialists such as Haeckel, John Tyndall, Ludwig Büchner, and others propagated a purely materialistic worldview which was not only antithetical to any notion of the spiritual, but also marked the beginning of the process of alienating European man from his natural world.

The works of Ernst Haeckel and others wielded a great deal of influence upon the radical ecological and environmental perspectives which permeated National Socialist ideology. National Socialism, however, had the unique ability to take the positive scientism of individuals like Haeckel and synthesize it, in a coherent and organic fashion, with the more metaphysical musings of Ludwig Klages and his biocentric worldview. Under this, a rebirth of the inegalitarian worldview was able to take shape. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler summed up this new synthesis by writing that:

Man must not fall into the error of thinking that he was ever meant to become lord and master of Nature. A lopsided education has helped to encourage that illusion. Man must realize that a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature and that his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife.[2]

Hitler’s exposition is reflective of the European predilection for revering the natural world, but is also illustrative of the indissoluble bond shared by all Europeans with it. In an even more naturalistically-orientated, metaphysically revanchist manner, Hitler wrote, “The subordination of the interests and life of the individual to the community . . . [is] the ultimate will of Nature,”[3] and this goal is still being pursued by many within the ethnonationalist movement to this very day.

The worldview articulated above was one which up until very recently was implicitly embraced, to a greater or lesser extent, by the whole of European civilization. Further, the acceptance of the realities of race, social order, and hierarchy as being connate to the natural world were deemed to be so glaringly obvious that to reject them was pure absurdity. As ethnonationalists, we seek a return to the sanity of times past. As the most evolved members of mankind, it is our duty to safeguard the sanctity of the Earth, and our first step towards this goal is recognizing that not only is race real, but that earthly and cosmic balance comes from adhering to the timeless principles of the inegalitarian worldview of hierarchy and order. Indeed, we must evangelize about this.

In physics there is a principle of perfect internal disorder. This principle posits that it is the nature of the relationship between order and disorder (entropy) which brings about balance. When a system is said to exist in perfect internal disorder, it is existing in a state which is in equilibrium, or more specifically in balance, and balance comes from an adherence to that which is natural. At present, European civilization is standing at a great precipice, and in Nietzschean fashion, it is the duty of our race to serve as the “bridge” to the other side which restores order to the planet.

The first step towards a return to normality starts with acknowledging our position within the Great Chain of Being, and more precisely with realizing that all life, both human and non-human, has intrinsic value regardless of its utility. We must also again embrace the ideas most recently manifested by the Germanic concept of Blood and Soil, in other words that race is a natural reality and must be recognized as such and safeguarded for future generations of Europeans. In a manner similar to our forebears, we must also strive to seek a relationship of equipoise between the scientific and the metaphysic. By embracing the interrelated concepts of hierarchy, race, and the sacrosanct importance of a natural world in balance, we Europeans will be one step closer towards a revitalization of the inegalitarian worldview which has been the impetus for the success of our race since time immemorial. The first step towards ushering in a new age of European palingenetic rebirth begins with the Reconquista of the natural world – and this conquest should begin from within.

 

                                    Notes

[1] Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe(New York: Andesite Press, 2015).

[2] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Stone Mountain, Ga.: White Wolf, 2015).

[3] Ibid.

In Praise Of Pentti Linkola

                         By Derek Hawthorne

               

Pentti Linkola
Can Life Prevail? A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis
Trans. Eetu Rautio and Olli S.
London: Arktos, 2009

Years ago, “deep ecologist” Andrew McLaughlin (a follower of Arne Naess) produced an essay titled “For a Radical Ecocentrism.” It’s an explicitly political piece, arguing for how the principles of deep ecology are compatible with left wing progressivism. (The essay even includes one section titled “What Deep Ecology Offers Social Progressives.”) McLaughlin and others like him are, of course, fervent egalitarians and advocates of “direct democracy.” And McLaughlin agonizes for pages on end about the problem of awakening “the people” to the ecological crisis they face and getting them to “organize” and do something.

The elephant in the corner of McLaughlin’s geodesic dome is, of course, the problem of whether the ecological crisis really can be solved democratically (he and others like him are quite willing to see capitalism sacrificed in order to save the earth — and rightly so — but for them democracy is the holy of holies). At one point in his essay McLaughlin compares ecologists to the abolitionists who ended slavery in America. He is honest enough to admit, however, that the abolitionists ultimately only triumphed through the use of force.

Enter Pentti Linkola, the controversial Finnish thinker who has the obvious solution to McLaughlin’s conundrum: the environmental crisis cannot be solved democratically, because human nature always plays democracy for a fool. The vast majority of people think only of their narrow, short-term self-interest, of their personal comfort, security, and satisfaction. And they vote accordingly. Saving the planet from the depredations of modern, consumerist culture will require self-sacrifice and austerity. But the majority will never go for that. In order to save the planet, we must therefore bid farewell to democracy.

Linkola writes

I find it almost inconceivable that, despite all contrary evidence, an intelligent individual might still have faith in man and the majority, and keep banging his head against the wall. Why won’t such a person admit that the survival of man – when nature can take no more – is possible only when the discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression meted out by another clear-sighted human prevents him from indulging in his destructive impulses and committing suicide? How can such a person justify democracy? (p. 139)

And here is an even stronger statement:

Stupidity reaches a climax among those people who argue – without having learnt a thing from history or being able to read a single sign of our times – that man knows what is good for him: “the people know.” From this absurd assumption derives a suicidal form of government, parliamentary democracy, born among the tyrants of mankind, the West. Alas it looks like the bubble of democracy will never burst: as we struggle to enter the new millennium, we can abandon all hope. (p. 159)

And I cannot resist quoting a third, magnificent passage:

Democracy is the most miserable of all known societal systems, the building block of doom. Under such a system of government unmanageable freedom of production and consumption and the passions of the people are not only tolerated, but cherished as the highest values. The most serious environmental disasters occur in democracies. Any kind of dictatorship is superior to democracy, for a system where the individual is always bound one way or another leads to utter destruction more slowly. When individual freedom reigns, humanity is both the killer and the victim. (p. 174)

Americans remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that the European Right has always been “environmentalist” (a position they associate exclusively with leftism). “Eco-Fascists” have been around for a very long time. It is one of Linkola’s great virtues to show unequivocally that the approach of the Left, with its emphasis upon democracy, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism, is completely incapable of addressing our present ecological perils. The trouble with leftists like McLaughlin, of course, is that they love their fantasy vision of the future more than they actually want to save the planet. Or, perhaps more to the point, it may be that they hate those who would be displaced and disenfranchised by that fantasy future more than they love the earth. (Yet another case of leftists proving they are simply those who are incapable of loving their own.)

Pentti Linkola

For many years Linkola (born in 1932) was known only within Finland, his work (except for a few short essays) untranslated. Now Integral Tradition Publishing (publishers of several works by Julius Evola) have brought out a volume of Linkola’s writings in English, under the title Can Life Prevail? A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis. (This is a translation of a collection published in Finnish and titled Voisiko Elämä Voittaa.) It brings together a number of relatively short essays by Linkola on a variety of topics, divided into sections such as “Finland,” “Forests,” and “Animals.” The key subdivision of the book, and the one containing Linkola’s most controversial statements, is the fourth one, “The World and Us.” My review will deal almost exclusively with the material in that section.

There is one claim for which Linkola is particularly notorious, and that is his insistence that the planet cannot be saved without a drastic reduction in the world’s population:

It is worth stressing once more that the chief cause for the impending collapse of the world – the cause sufficient in and by itself – is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. A secondary cause that is accelerating the process of devastation is the increasing burden that each new member of the population brings upon nature. (p. 127)

How can we reduce the world’s population? Linkola advocates limiting the number of children couples can have, as well as cutting off all aid to Third World countries, including an end to all African aid. This is so that, quite simply, nature might take its course and thin out the human herd. He has also been known to muse wistfully about the beneficial effects of natural disasters, and deliberate nuclear and biological attacks on major cities.

However, Linkola’s message is not limited to insisting that the population must be reduced. In the same volume, he states that it is patently absurd to think that the earth could continue to bear its human population without “a dramatic change such as the abandonment of the whole [of the modern] Western culture and way of life” (pp. 128–29). The “deep ecologists” like Naess and McLaughlin also advocate a radical critique – indeed, abandonment – of modern Western culture, but they do not go far enough. Linkola calls upon us to face the fact that modernity is unsustainable, including our modern social and political ideals and institutions.

Though Linkola never says anything (so far as I know) about race, he does oppose the immigration of Third-Worlders into the Western, industrialized nations. He does so for a very simple reason: letting more people into the modern, industrialized nations means that the mechanisms of modern industry will have to expand to accommodate them. And he is keenly aware that the immigrant birthrate vastly exceeds that of the native, Western populations: “There is no use counting the immigrants at the border: one should wait a while and look in their nurseries” (p. 130).

Further, Linkola argues that the egalitarianism that prevails in Western, democratic societies is also incompatible with ecological responsibility, primarily because it leads to overpopulation. It is on this point that Linkola makes some of his strongest, and most controversial statements. For example: “On a global scale, the main problem is not the inflation of human life, but its ever-increasing, mindless over-valuation. Emphasis on the inalienable right to life of fetuses, premature infants and the brain-dead has become a kind of collective mental disease” (p. 137). He goes on to lament the fact that capital punishment has been eliminated in most Western countries, as even the most heinous criminals are deemed to have a “right to life.” Amusingly, he rails against Finland’s (and other countries’) herculean and hugely expensive attempts to rescue “every mad fisherman who has ventured into a storm with a boat made of bark, thus salvaging another unique and irreplaceable individual from the embrace of the waves. The mind boggles” (p. 137).

Part of what motivates comments such as these is Linkola’s general misanthropy: a quality he shares with the left-wing deep ecologists. These latter are always heaping scorn upon “anthropocentrism” and insisting that human beings are simply one species within the vast web of life, no more to be valued than any other. Of course, such an attitude is symptomatic of the perverse mindset of the left: it is absurd to suggest that we should value our own species no more than we value any other.

Further, it is entirely possible to affirm the “organicism” of deep ecology, its claim that we are part of a vast, interdependent ecosystem, and to act to preserve that ecosystem precisely because we are part of it. The biological egalitarianism of the deep ecologists should be completely unsurprising to us. The deep ecologists are almost entirely deracinated white Westerners, who believe it is wrong to value their race ahead of any other. Their opposition to “anthropocentrism” simply extends this suicidal ethno-masochism to the species itself, and claims we have no right to value our own species over any other.

There is certainly a strain of this sort of thinking in Linkola, but it seems, again, to be motivated more by misanthropy than by egalitarianism. (And what intelligent, aware person isn’t a misanthrope in this world?) Furthermore, though Linkola does decry the tendency to regard all human life as sacred, he also seems ready to make distinctions between humans and to argue that some lives are more valuable than others. At one point he says “How can anyone be so crazy as to think that all human life has the same value and all humans the same morality, regardless of numbers?” (p. 139).

Perhaps Linkola’s most famous statement about the dangers of over-valuing life is his “lifeboat analogy”:

What to do when a ship carrying a hundred passengers has suddenly capsized, and only one lifeboat is available for ten people on the water? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to pull more people onto it, thus drowning everyone. Those who love and respect life will instead grab an axe and sever the hands clinging to the gunwales. (pp. 135–36)

Christianity (and the Left) would teach us to haul more people on board – but as Nietzsche taught us, Christianity (and the Left) hates life.

Linkola does not confine himself, however, to the issues of over-population, and how democracy and equality exacerbate it. He offers a broad-based critique of all aspects of modern culture, especially its assumptions about freedom and happiness. “Never before in history have the distinguishing values of a culture been things as concretely destructive for life and the quality of life as democracy, individual freedom and human right – not to mention money” (p. 154).

But how can Linkola oppose the idea of human rights? He states that all rights claims essentially express one thing: “ME, ME, ME.” In the West, the rhetoric of rights is essentially a way of securing self-interest, as is democracy itself. The West’s conception of freedom really means “freedom to consume, to exploit, to tread upon others. . . . Words like responsibility, duty, humility, self-sacrifice, nurturing and care are always spat upon [today], if they still happen to be mentioned” (p. 155).

It is no surprise that the country for which Linkola has the least sympathy is the United States. He writes that “the United States is the most colossally aggressive empire in history,” reminding us of the terror and devastation it spreads across the world in the name of “democracy.” “The U.S. is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times. Anyone aware of global issues can easily imagine how vast the hatred for the United States – a corrupted, swollen, paralyzing, and suffocating political entity – must be across the Third World – and among the thinking minority of the West too” (p. 164).

Why so wretchedly villainous? Why more villainous than, for example, the U.S.S.R.? Because the United States, for all its rhetoric, does not act in the name of any noble ideals, but entirely in the name of Mammon. It is for the security of commerce and the corporation that it bombs, invades, exploits, and tortures all over the globe. Linkola goes on speak glowingly of the hijackers on 9/11:

The servants of Allah sacrificed their own lives and the lives of a few disciples of the Dollar. The aim of the servants of market economy is to murder the whole of Creation and mankind as soon as they can. The deep ecologist and protector of life, the guardian of the continuity of life, would certainly choose Allah when things get tough. Given the situation, the towers of the World Trade Center were the best target among all the buildings of the world, both symbolically and concretely. It was a magnificent, splendid choice. (p. 166)

It is apparent that Linkola’s instincts are those of a true Right Winger, yet it is hard to peg him as a Traditionalist of the sort Integral Traditions generally publishes. And he would probably reject the claim that he is on the Right, seeing serious flaws in both sides of the political spectrum. He states at one point “For all their mistakes, even such recently-buried ideologies as fascism and socialism, both of which emphasized communal values and contained restrictive norms, were on a higher ethical level” (p. 155). It seems clear, however, that Linkola’s sympathies lie squarely with fascism. Though, again, there is nothing I have read in Linkola that is racialist or nationalist, he clearly opposes the internationalism of the Left, and any sort of global, homogenizing force. He thinks that small is better, and that life must be based in small, local, largely self-sufficient communities.

In the last major section of text, in fact, Linkola describes the sort of society we must build if we are to save ourselves. He advocates a mandatory limit of one child per woman; elimination of the use of fossil fuels; elimination of most use of electricity; a return to traditional agriculture; a drastic reduction in foreign trade; and an end to air traffic. In passages reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious, Linkola discusses how he would reform the educational system, which would impart practical skills, and basic knowledge of reading, science, and philosophy.

It seems that Linkola would leave a bare-bones market economy in place, but he would extirpate most forms of competition. Books would be published, but only good books (no trash). There would be tougher punishments for criminals. Drug use would be stamped out, even the use of tobacco. And, perhaps most mouth-watering of all, there would be an end to “information technology.” (Relax: in Linkola’s world this website would no longer be needed.)

Linkola writes:

What would be left, then, would be: an endless spectrum of arts and hobbies (singing, music, dancing, painting, sculpture, books, games, plays, riddles, shows  . . . ); numerous museums; the study of history, local customs and dialects, genealogy, the countless pursuits related to biology; handicrafts and gardens; clear waters, virgin forests, marshlands and fells; seasons, trees, flowers, homes, private life . . . – in other words: a genuine life. (p. 205)

None of this will be the result of popular choice, of the “will of the people.” Instead, it will be imposed upon us by wise leaders. (I, for one, would be delighted to live under the thumb of Pentti Linkola.)

Linkola tells us that “there is only one considerable problem in the world: the impoverishment of life on Earth – the diminishment of life’s richness and diversity” (p. 168; please note: by “diversity” he means the diversity of species).

To this we might add the following qualification: the survival of life on earth is one of the two most important problems we face, the other being the survival of our race. After all, for whom are we to save this earth, anyway? These two aims, saving the planet and saving the race, go hand in hand. The measures necessary to accomplish one will accomplish the other. It is democracy, capitalism, egalitarianism, and “human rights” that have weakened both our race and the ecosystem. To save both, these forces of decadence and dissolution must be ruthlessly crushed.

Can Life Prevail? is a book filled with challenging and provocative ideas. One of its great virtues is that it demonstrates thoroughly and conclusively how the Left’s advocacy of ecology is incompatible with its fetishes of democracy and equality. Integral Traditions is to be commended for at long last making the ideas of Linkola available to the English-speaking world.

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