We Are Not Conservatives

                            By Alex Stark

   

If there is one thing that frustrates me to end, it’s seeing white nationalists/advocates actively supporting conservatism, especially after it has proven just as destructive to our cause as liberalism on ethnic issues and vastly more destructive than liberalism on every other matter.

I find that white advocates generally support conservatism for two reasons. The first reason is that they essentially become single-issue voters because they believe that conservatives will be more hawkish in regard to illegal immigration. While white nationalist conservatives understand that mainstream conservatives still fully support third-world immigration and multiculturalism, they will settle for anyone who will do something about our demographic situation, however insignificant it may be.

This approach baffles me, as anyone who thinks conservatives are substantially better on immigration than liberals is extremely misguided. Did we forget that in 1986, Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants and that his act didn’t even obligate employers to verify the authenticity of workers’ documents?

I think liberals have better reasons for their support of immigration and multiculturalism than conservatives. It strikes me that liberals actually believe that immigrants enrich our country culturally and economically, while conservatives (being good corporate puppets) support immigration as a way to get cheap labor and to weaken unions. I can’t think of a single conservative politician who has done anything to meaningfully combat multiculturalism in any way. Conservatives are truly just cowards afraid to address any of America’s demographic threats and alienating potential voters and afraid of upsetting their corporate overlords, so in the public discourse they generally parrot liberal lines about diversity being our strength and so on.

In a way, I can respect liberals for their belief that a multicultural society is a good thing, even though I profoundly disagree with this view, because they are sincere, while conservatives hide their true reasons for supporting immigration. Just look at Mitt Romney as a perfect example of conservative cowardice on this issue. In recent debates he called Arizona’s SB1070 law a model for the nation. Anyone with eyes can see that he was only trying to cut down his primary opponents by moving to their right to win the support of gullible blue-collar whites. Just weeks ago, Romney confessed at a private fundraiser that winning the support of Latinos is critical and his campaign staff has said that he’s still making up his mind on his positions about immigration reform.

The other reason white nationalists vote conservative is because they sincerely support conservative principles. This deeply rooted conservative ideology amongst many (if not most) white nationalists is, in my opinion, possibly the greatest threat to our movement gaining any traction or being taken seriously. I find that the political ideology espoused by these white nationalist conservatives betrays a profound ignorance when it comes to understanding the political questions of our time.

Conservatism has harrowed our country: its economic policies have been disastrous, it has greatly empowered corporations, it has screwed over countless impoverished European-Americans, it has pursued treasonous foreign policies and wars that our citizens have no stake in, it has fought relentless battles over non-issues like abortion and gay marriage, it has ravaged the environment, it has obstructed meaningful progress in Congress with the abuse of filibusters, it has undermined healthcare reform, and it has threatened to cut successful welfare and entitlement programs. Liberalism has the more compelling case and the greatest intellectual weight — Greg Johnson has admitted before that the left attracts the brightest minds — on almost every issue except the matter we find ourselves discussing here on Counter-Currents.

Let’s look at the records of conservative Republicans across a few of the issues and see whether their goals are really in line with those of white nationalists.

1. In 2011, the Republican-led House voted nearly 200 times to weaken, block, or delay needed measures to update laws that defend our air, water, wildlife, and lands.

2. In 2010, the Republican Supreme Court Justices held in the Citizens United case that corporations can make unlimited political expenditures. The decision also allows tax-exempt incorporated public advocacy groups to spend money on political races without disclosing their donors’ names in their FEC filings. Republicans love to decry Obama for disregarding the constitution, but is there any decision more contradictory to the spirit of the constitution than the Citizens United ruling?

3. Republican-led state legislatures across the United States introduced 2,044 provisions restricting women’s reproductive rights in 2011 and 2012. Their legislation has focused on mandating that women seeking an abortion must have medically unnecessary ultrasounds intended to scare them out of going through with their abortions and the legislation also narrows the time when abortions may be performed and limits insurance coverage of abortion.

4. Republican state legislatures have implemented right-to-work laws that cripple unions. Controlling for all variables, wages in right-to-work states are 3.2 % lower, the rates of employer-sponsored health insurance are 2.6 % lower, and the rates of employer-sponsored pensions are 4.8 % lower compared with non-right-to-work states.

The greatest horrors conservatives have inflicted on this country, as well as the rest of the West, are their neoliberal economic policies. I’ll mention a few relevant points and then wrap up my argument, but I must encourage everyone to read Timothy Noah’s series of articles about income inequality on Slate, as well as Paul Krugman’s NYT columns, and also William Deresiewicz’s recent humorous article about capitalism and psychopathy at the NYT.

In light of the current economic crisis, Hayekian/neoliberal economics should have been discredited as these theories were the driving force behind our pursuit of financial deregulation, while Keynesian economics should have been validated. However, conservative governments across Europe, showing their weak grasp of economics, decided to remain faithful to the principles that resulted in this crisis and have implemented sweeping austerity measures. Conservatives argued that we needed to reduce our deficits, bring down our national debts, undertake structural reforms, and promote growth, however the results haven’t been promising as countries like the UK have slipped into a double-dip recession.

At home, Republicans have rallied around the Paul Ryan budget plan that would have America take the same course as Europe. Republicans show no signs of possessing the faculty of critical thinking that would dictate that their economic policies must be reevaluated when confronted with the reality of Europe’s prolonged recession, but detachment from reality is a conservative hallmark. There is no reason tackle the federal budget deficit or the debt at a time when we’re facing staggering unemployment and underemployment that prevents the lower and middle classes as well as private corporations from spending and consuming regularly. Once the economy has been stimulated and has fully recovered, then it will be an appropriate time to work on reducing our debt.

Realistically, Obama has governed very center-right and all of his failings to improve the economy can be attributed to the way he has caved to Republicans any time they have pushed back against him. Obama’s stimulus was anemic not only because of its small size, but because it was full of tax cuts that Republicans had demanded.

With regards to Eric Holder, many white nationalists hate him because of how he sued Arizona over SB1070, and I agree that that was ridiculous. However, the fact that Eric Holder hasn’t prosecuted Goldman Sachs or any of the other financial institutions that were caught defrauding their clientele is even more serious. Many figures on the left, like Eliot Spitzer, have called for Holder’s resignation, however I am doubtful that Holder will suddenly grow the balls to prosecute Goldman Sachs and I certainly don’t think that a Republican attorney general would have done so either.

I haven’t said much about Mitt Romney yet, but I fail to see how any white nationalist could even contemplate voting for him. He epitomizes everything wrong with conservatism. Here’s a portrait of Mitt Romney to give you a better understanding of what kind of leader he is.

1. I deferred military service to go bicycling in France and while I was there, I lived in a 5-bedroom house with a chef and a housekeeper.

2. I’ve claimed that I lived like a poor person then.

3. I spent the duration of the Vietnam War proselytizing and converting people to my faith rather than serving my country.

4. I worked at Bain Capital where I became the CEO. I turned the company from a venture capital enterprise into a corporate raider.

5. I drove 22 companies into bankruptcy after stripping them of their assets and selling them off.

6. In the case of Ampad, I personally helped Bain reap $100,000,000 after completely destroying a profitable company.

7. I laid off more than 10,000 living, breathing people, solely to line my own pockets.

8. I enjoy firing people.

9. Of the companies I didn’t completely bankrupt, I drove tens of thousands of people with livable wages into accepting minimum wage and told every single one of them that if they didn’t like it they could leave.

10. At the same time I gave the company’s top management huge pay rises.

11. I created countless jobs on foreign shores and the people who worked for me there earned a couple of dollars a day, in appalling conditions and with no safety standards.

12. I retired and my termination agreement still sees me receiving more than 7 million dollars a year and because they are deferred payments, I pay 13 % in taxes on unhidden money, though until it became illegal in 2011, I hid it in tax havens.

13. I had the third lowest job creation rate of any state in America as governor.

14. While I was governor, I used the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan and created Romneycare, which lowered the insurance costs for my electorate by 1/3

15. I was proud when President Obama decided to use the plan, as I thought it would help my chances of becoming President, but when my party vilified it, I abandoned my only life accomplishment.

16. It cost Massachusetts $200,000 when I replaced all of the state’s government computers to hide my record.

17. I think corporations are people but if you look at my history, you’ll find that I don’t think people are people.

18. I have been perpetually running for president.

19. I have made $1/4 billion by destroying thousands of lives.

20. I don’t care about any of those lives, as they can’t contribute to my campaign to lower America’s living standards.

21. I spent $200,000,000 to beat the weakest and most bizarre field ever in Republican politics.

Not only is his record appalling, but so are his policies. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has determined that relative to current policy — that is, if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, as Romney wants to do — Romney’s tax cutting plans would increase the deficit by nearly $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s on top of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Romney has promised to close various loopholes to pay for his tax cuts, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Until he does, the Tax Policy Center concludes his plan would cost $5 trillion — which would be added, yes, to the deficit. Romney’s plan would also cut the top corporate tax rate form 35 percent to 25 percent.

Last but not least, there is the issue of income inequality. Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, has documented a five-decade pattern in which income inequality has grown under Republican presidents and shrunk under Democratic ones.

The most significant challenges America faces today include income inequality, financial deregulation, the decline of the middle class, and the loss of opportunity. When you look at a list of countries ranked by the Gini coefficient, the US has levels of income disparity comparable to China, Russia, and Nigeria. Our economic inequality has long been masked by our high per capita income. Generally, our income is higher than the rest of the Western world. However, America’s higher income generally reflects our lower taxes. And our lower taxes reflect a neglect of social services to our citizens. In the US, the cost of healthcare is nearly double that of any other country, yet we have 50 million-plus with little or no insurance at all. By contrast, other Western countries have higher taxes that are used to support robust social service programs such as healthcare.

Finally, income disparity is not just a material measure. It is also a measure of social cohesion. I fear the US will not be able to escape the same social issues that now plague third world countries. Our own citizens will no longer continue to accept third world levels of income inequality while the elite amass vast and largely untaxed fortunes.

Suicide of the Right

                        By Samuel Francis

        

Republican leaders in 1996, including Bob Dole (center), Jack Kemp (to Dole’s right), and Patrick Buchanan (far right).

After spending several weeks in deep hugger-mugger at the Republican Party platform committee this summer, the leaders of the Right wing of the GOP emerged triumphant. Their deeply beloved and totally useless Human Life Amendment was reaffirmed. The obnoxious statement of “tolerance” for the opinions of those who disagree with the amendment was excised. Language about immigration, fair trade, the Second Amendment, and other issues important to the Right, religious and otherwise, was approved. The Washington Post, reporting on the adoption of the platform the next day, seemed ready to be taken off to a nice quiet place in the country to recuperate from its neurotic angst over the American Right and its victory. “The Republican platform committee today approved a statement of party principles closer in tone and emphasis to the nationalism and domestic conservatism of Patrick J. Buchanan than the party’s presumptive nominee Robert J. Dole,” trembled The Post‘s Thomas Edsall. And, for once, the general staff of the legions of the Right was in agreement. “This is very Buchanan,” beamed Bay Buchanan, Mr. Buchanan’s sister and campaign chairman. “We could not be more pleased. This is much more of a populist, conservative Buchananesque platform than we ever dreamed, to be honest.” Other leaders of the right like Phyllis Schlafly, Gary Bauer, and Ralph Reed concurred.

Well, since we’re being honest, the truth is that the conservatives got suckered, as some of them began to glimpse in the next few days when speaker after speaker ascended the podium at the Republican convention to avoid, contradict, or simply ignore the platform that had just been adopted. By the time Mr. Dole was officially chosen as the party’s leader, The New York Timesreported, some foes of abortion were mystified. “A lot of pro-life people are saying, ‘What’s going on here?'” whimpered one anti-abortion delegate, Mrs. Elaine Hawkins of San Antonio. “It’s like they’ve squished the issue out of existence. We know it’s there in print, but I don’t hear anybody talking about it.”

Nor was it only abortion that nobody talked about. “I haven’t read the platform and I’m not bound by it anyway,” Mr. Dole proudly announced to the press. The Post‘s David Broder reported the next week that “Dole, Speaker Newt Gingrich and party chairman Haley Barbour were comically eager to affirm that they paid the document so little heed they hadn’t even read it.” As for the central feature of the platform’s immigration plank, a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment or constitutionally valid legislation to end automatic U.S. citizenship for the children of illegal aliens born on American soil, former Rep. Vin Weber, a close adviser to Mr. Dole, let it be known that Mr. Dole simply didn’t support it. The Wall Street Journal‘s Al Hunt gleefully reported the next week that the party’s vice presidential nominee, Jack Kemp, was “horrified by the platform’s call to deny citizenship to children born in America of illegal immigrants.” By the end of the convention it was clear to everyone save those who wrap themselves in illusion that the conservative efforts to craft the party platform meant nothing. Inevitably, the lines of poet John Dryden crept into the mind: “All, all of a piece throughout: Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue.”

But actually something had been brought about. By engaging in the conflict over the meaningless platform, the conservatives allowed Mr. Dole to quell the incipient rebellion from the Right and to unify the party under his leadership. The convention began with Mr. Dole and the party establishment uncertain whether Pat Buchanan would endorse the final ticket or quit the GOP and run with Howard Phillips’ Taxpayers Party and thereby deny any possibility of victory in November to a party establishment that had ignored, insulted, and abused him and his 3 million supporters ever since he announced his candidacy. By the time the platform had been adopted, with considerable input from the Buchananites, that option was no longer possible, even if it had been desirable. By working with the platform committee, by writing a platform with which “we could not be more pleased,” the Buchananites and the Republican Right in general signed their own political death warrants, binding themselves to the party and the ticket, consigning themselves to political irrelevance, and ensuring that any walkout or rebellion they mounted thereafter would be universally regarded as simply one further confirmation of the fanaticism and sourness that their enemies habitually attribute to them.

If there was any doubt of the irrelevance of the Right to its own party, the selection of Mr. Kemp removed it. No other neo-conservative leader in the country commands as much of a political following (which is not to say that he necessarily commands much of a following), and no other major Republican leader is as much in thrall to neo-conservatism as a body of ideas and as an organized faction, as Mr. Kemp. Unable or unwilling to mount a campaign in the primaries, Mr. Kemp stayed out of the contest for the nomination and was widely regarded as politically defunct. His support for affirmative action in the face of the growing Republican and conservative consensus to abolish it; his support for NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, unlimited “free trade” in general; his foreign policy of global democratism; his enthusiastic and fiscally catastrophic attachment to Big Government, as evidenced by his enlargement of the Housing and Urban Development Department in the Bush administration; his bottomless zeal for supporting the full measure of civil rights laws and policies; and his fierce hostility to any suggestion of immigration control in the face of growing popular and intellectual disenchantment with immigration all placed him on the Left of the Republican Party and in bitter opposition to its Buchananite, America First, culture war, nativist, protectionist, populist, and new nationalist Right that actually entered the primaries and seemed for a while to be on the eve of victory. The choice of Mr. Kemp as Bob Dole’s running mate and the resurrection of the representative leader of a political persuasion and faction that has no tangible popular support outside the Beltway was a calculated kick in the groin to the Right by the party’s leadership, a kick to which the right, after its platform triumph, was unable to respond with the only weapon it had left, the threat of secession from the party; and if this ticket wins the race against President Clinton, its victory will almost certainly mean the political extinction of the kind of conservatism the Buchananite Right represents.

If the ticket wins, Mr. Kemp as Vice President will be positioned for his own race for the White House in 2000 and, barring a disaster in the Dole administration, will have the inside track to the nomination. Even if the ticket loses, it is not difficult to anticipate what the neo-conservative and even the liberal line will be — that Mr. Buchanan and the Right stuck the ticket with an “extremist” platform that simply frightened away mainstream voters, that the decrepit Mr. Dole was not supportive of Mr. Kemp’s pollygoggle policy-wonkism and refused to unleash his running mate’s bottomless genius, that Mr. Kemp was the unsung hero of the 1996 ticket and ought to be given another opportunity to crush the narrow-minded Mr. Buchanan and to redefine the American Right in his own generous Lincolnesque image. Win or lose, then, the real victor to emerge from the byzantine backstairs politics of San Diego this summer will be Mr. Kemp and his Beltway cabal, who will proceed to re-define the American Right in their own terms and to back up their re-definition with political power.

For the Buchananite Right, the Christian Right, the Old Right, the Hard Right, the paleo-conservatives, and the paleo-libertarians, that will mean political oblivion, the final disappearance of any serious hope of influencing American politics in a direction away from the gargantuan state and the state’s alliance with both overclass and underclass against the middle class, or in a direction toward dismantling the warfare-welfare state, controlling immigration, reversing the erosion of national sovereignty, withdrawing from the pursuit of a globalist-imperialist foreign policy, and restoring a Eurocentric cultural order. It is one thing to lose an election, but as long as the losers are able to define the opposition, they retain the possibility of eventual victory. It is another thing to lose the opposition itself, to allow not only the victors but the losers themselves to define the terms of debate and the rules of the game. That is what the election, and maybe even the defeat, of the Dole-Kemp ticket this year would mean — that it is not the real Right that defines the opposition and sets the framework of the political discourse but the fake Right the Dole-Kemp ticket represents.

Of course, the rank and file Republican and the average citizen who votes for this ticket against Mr. Clinton cannot be blamed for his choice. Supporting the re-election of an administration led by one of the most repulsive men in American political history, mottled with the gangrene of corruption and sexual license and emitting the stench of tyranny, is not a choice most decent Americans should welcome, regardless of their political beliefs. But the fact is that the re-election of Bill Clinton might just be better for the nation and the only political forces able to salvage it than the victory of Mr. Dole and his running mate. The evils of the Clinton era should not be the trump card by which a rival party, today almost indistinguishable from the Democrats in their basic worldview and policies, is allowed to win a rigged deal.

At least since the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, the real Right in the United States has voted for the Republican ticket on the grounds that it was choosing the lesser of two evils, and every four years we hear the same refrain from the ticket’s apologists — that the country just can’t survive Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, or Bill Clinton. But the truth is that of course it does survive and that the victories of the centrist Republicans who are these villains’ foes never make any difference anyway. Conservatives, having worked themselves into a dither over the iniquity of the Democrats, fall for this argument in every election, and then, within a few years or a few weeks, are amazed to find that the centrist Republican candidates whom they have put in power have betrayed and ignored them once again. The argument that we just have to support the lesser of two evils to avoid destruction is merely a formula by which evil is perpetuated in power and men and measures that are not evil are driven into perpetual exile; if the real Right listens to the formula yet again this year, it may be the last time it will enjoy the opportunity to hear it.

Yet it may be that I exaggerate. Neither Mr. Dole nor Mr. Kemp is able to represent the social forces that are beginning to rally around the real Right that they managed to snooker at their convention this year, and it remains questionable if Mr. Dole’s endless rehearsals of his adventures in a war that ended more than fifty years ago and Mr. Kemp’s childish bubble-chatter about utopias of high technology, unlimited growth, and everybody getting rich will speak to the people whom Whittaker Chambers called “the plain men and women of the nation,” who see their material wealth, their communities, their nation, their people, and their civilization vanishing before their eyes. Even if they are still unwilling to embrace what the real Right offers and even if no such alternative is available to them, they may yet find alternatives in Ross Perot, the Libertarian Party, the Taxpayers Party, and other vehicles that are reasonable facsimiles and which come a lot closer than what the two “major parties” offer.

It may be, then, that what we saw in San Diego this summer and what we are seeing now in the race between Huey, Dewey, and Louie is simply the last gasp of a dying political system that is designed to ensure that no alternative and no challenge to the interests it protects can emerge. Unable to attract a mass political following on their own merits, those interests must advance candidates like Mr. Dole, Mr. Kemp, and Mr. Clinton, who offer the best counterfeits of the real Right they can concoct, and Middle Americans are increasingly biting hard on the currency they peddle to test its real value. It may be that the present two-party domination of national politics is now so exhausted that Middle Americans will soon emerge in their own party with their own agenda and consciousness unencumbered by the trivia and distractions of the major parties. But what ought to have become clear this summer is that that agenda and consciousness cannot be advanced by either the established leadership of the Republican Party or even by the party’s Right wing that allows itself to be swindled for a meaningless platform that the leadership despises.

This article was originally published in Chronicles Magazine in November 1996.

Nationalism, True & False

                         By Samuel Francis

        

William Kristol, guardian of neo-conservatism.

Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation — what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power. Like most princes, most ruling classes tend to be better at one than the other, and depending on their talents, interests, and psychologies, they will habitually rely on one style of domination more than on its complement. In the twentieth century, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes have rested their power on the use of force — to the point of what the Germans came to call Schrecklichkeit, or Terror pure and simple — but they did not fail to attend to the arts of manipulation as well. Communist brainwashing and the high science of propaganda that Joseph Goebbels perfected were perhaps as useful to their respective regimes and the ruling classes they served as the Cheka and the Gestapo.

Unlike European totalitarians, their American counterpart in this century has tended to rely on manipulation, which involves not only massive and constant indoctrination through the mass media but also the whole battery of techniques by which the population is managed to think and act the way the managerial ruling class wants it to think and act. Those techniques include the bread and circuses of mass consumerism and the entertainment industry as well as the blunter ideological disciplining delivered every night on television and in most Hollywood films. Of the two styles of power, reliance on manipulation is probably more effective, and certainly more economical than reliance on force. Every shepherd knows it’s more expedient to train a sheep dog to keep the sheep in line than to run after every beast that strays from the fold himself, and every ruler or ruling class understands that the means of force are always finite while the means of manipulation are virtually inexhaustible. You might sooner or later run out of bullets, but there is no bottom to the pit of delusion to which a populace eager to be enslaved will consign itself.

The reliance of the American managerial class on manipulation rather than force explains why dissidents are not simply rounded up and imprisoned or shot as they were in the sister regimes in Europe, as well as why the victory of the new elite in the middle of the century was so peaceful and virtually invisible to all but keen observers like James Burnham, C. Wright Mills, Garrett Garet, and a few others. Instead of being repressed, opponents of the revolution were either ignored and marginalized or in some cases rewarded and thereby digested within the belly of the beast. Even the hare-brained bomb-throwers of the New Left were not for the most part seriously subjected to coercive repression, except perhaps by local and state police agencies that had not yet been “sensitized” by the regime’s federal law enforcement apparatus, but rather were coddled, rebuked, and generally ignored until they grew up. Within a decade of their prediction of the storm of revolution that was about to descend on the ruling class, most of the more grotesque spokesmen of the Weather Underground had become dentists, insurance salesmen, and big-city lawyers, and the intelligence, security, and law enforcement branches of the regime never paid as much attention to the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, or the various Maoists, Guevarists, Trotskyites, and anarchists of the period as they are today paying to perfectly law-abiding and patriotic militias and grassroots activists of the Right.

Today, the regime is paying as much attention to the militant Right as it is for a simple reason — the means of manipulation is beginning to crumble as the official ideology of the regime is discredited and rejected, and as alternative means of communication become available that the ruling class is unable to control. Computers, faxes, the Internet, and other technologies allow dissident groups to flourish and communicate with each other in ways that were not available to dissidents of an earlier day, and all of these technologies are (so far) virtually independent of both the police power and the manipulative reach of the regime. Hence, incidents like Waco, Ruby Ridge, and similar acts of coercive repression become necessary to discipline the opposition, our very own form of Schrecklichkeit, and the emerging federal police state, with the help of semi-private intelligence-gathering arms like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, can be expected to offer at least as thorough use of coercion as the secret police of the European dictators.

Nevertheless, the ruling class is not stupid, and it knows very well that it cannot sit on bayonets forever. Therefore, it is rather clumsily trying to patch together new means of manipulation before the whole society spins out of its control. President Clinton and the “New Democrats” are the left side of this effort, while on the Right what is generally known (at least among paleo-conservatives) as “neo-conservatism” is its right side. Both are essential to preserve the illusion of political and ideological alternatives and the shadow of freedom, but any close examination will show that there is about as much real difference between them as there was between the Dole-Kemp ticket last year and its rival.

The Clintonian effort at keeping the sheep of the Left within the herd seems to have been successful, at least for now, but on the Right there are problems. Unlike the Left, the Right has actually produced a real and politically significant alternative to neo-conservatism in the Buchanan movement and in paleo-conservatism, or what may be called the “Hard Right” in general — ranging from this magazine to groups like the John Randolph Club and a variety of grassroots activists over to the militias and their constituencies. The problem for neo-conservatism is that most Americans on the Right don’t buy what it’s selling, don’t look to it for political or ideological leadership, and won’t swallow the managerial conservatism that it has formulated and made the dominant expression of the Right over the last twenty years or so.

Well, what is to be done? If at first you don’t succeed, try again. In the last few months, the current crop of neo-conservatives has been trying to sprout a new ideological line, one that might reasonably be expected to capture the Populist Right, assimilate it within the digestive tract of the regime, and thereby ensure that it does not eventually produce a movement or a leader that can seriously challenge its power.

The new form into which neo-conservatism is trying to cast itself is “nationalism,” and its guiding spirit is William Kristol of the Weekly Standard. Nationalism, of course, also happens to be the theme of most of the Populist Right, whether it is directed against immigration, which threatens to extinguish the actual people of the nation, or free trade and globalism, which threaten both the economic interests and sovereignty of the nation, or the multiculturalism and multiracialism that neither the mainstream (i.e., dominant) Left and Right now question seriously. Hence, it makes sense that the high priests of the dominant Right would seek to reinvent nationalism and redefine it in terms that will offer no serious challenge to the anti-national forces they really represent.

Mr. Kristol’s main formulation of neo-con nationalism appeared in an article in the Wall Street Journal (September 15), of which he and his colleague at the Weekly Standard, David Brooks, were the co-authors, and Mr. Brooks himself has busily been pounding the pseudo-nationalist drum for some time. In the last few months he has published articles in the Standard praising Teddy Roosevelt as a hero for conservatives and the architecture of the Library of Congress as the expression of what he takes to be high nationalism. One can quibble with either or both, but the kind of nationalism he and Mr. Kristol are trying to sell would have little appeal to Roosevelt, and seems not to have penetrated very far into any library at all.

Their proposed models for the new neo-con nationalism include not only TR but also Hamilton and Henry Clay. “American nationalism,” Kristol and Brooks write, “– the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt — has never been European blood-and-soil nationalism. It’s true that in the absence of a real appeal to national greatness, some conservatives are tempted à la Pat Buchanan, to turn to this European tradition. But this can’t and shouldn’t work in America. Our nationalism is that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called ‘an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.'” It is no accident that these also happen to be among the very figures that Pat Buchanan has cited as exponents of the economic nationalism that has been the norm throughout most of American history.

This pretty much tells us all we need to know about the Kristol-Brooks school of nationalism. It’s a nationalism that takes the main advocates of a centralized state as its heroes but leaves out of its picture of “national greatness” any reference to the real nation — its people (blood), its land (soil), its interests, or its contemporary manifestations (in Buchanan and his following, which happens to be rather larger than that of the Weekly Standard). What is objectively wrong with the Kristol-Brooks version of nationalism is what I argued some years ago was wrong with the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln version of it. Designed essentially to represent the material interests of a particular section (the commercial and industrial Northeast), it always remained merely an instrumental nationalism, designed simply as an instrument or tool to unify the real nation under the dominance of that section and its interests by masking them as “nationalism.” It failed — neither Hamilton nor Clay was able to make it prevail, and Lincoln and his party succeeded only because of the power vacuum generated by the Civil War — because it ignored the interests of the real nation. It is one thing to endorse the economic and trade policies of these leaders, as Buchanan does (and which Kristol and Brookes don’t), but those policies can be and are justified apart from the general vision of the state and nation that Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and Roosevelt I entertained.

The content of the phony nationalism formulated by Kristol and Brooks is enough to tell us how it differs from the kind of organic nationalism that is actually emerging in the Populist Right, the kind they seek to smother in its cradle. “Our pride in settling the frontier, welcoming immigrants and advancing the cause of freedom around the world is related to our dedication to our principles” — the universalist nationalism of Lincoln.

That’s why American nationalism isn’t narrow or parochial. It doesn’t believe in closing our borders or fearing the global economy. It does believe in resisting group rights and multiculturalism and other tendencies that weaken our attachment to our common principles. It embraces a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad. It would use federal power to preserve and enhance our national patrimony — the parks, buildings, and monuments that are the physical manifestations of our common heritage. And it insists that while government should be limited, it should also be energetic.

So, neo-con universalist nationalism is to support continued swallowing of the real nation through mass immigration and continued extinction of the national economic interest through immersion into the “global economy” and to reject multiculturalism, not because it threatens the destruction of the cultural nucleus of the real nation, but because it weakens attachment to “our common principles” — i.e., multiculturalism asserts the particular cultural identities of the groups that espouse it against the universalist principle that informs neo-con nationalism. Like the Hamiltonian instrumental nationalism, it also envisions an “energetic” national state (so does any nationalism that ignores the real nation; since it refuses to affirm the real people or the nation and their real interests, it has no other base of support than the state), at least to become a kind of super-janitor for public buildings and public parks. What is conspicuous by its absence in the Kristol-Brooks vision of nationalism is any reference whatsoever to the Constitution as both the limiting and energizing framework of the national state.

Nor is it an accident that only a few weeks before the Kristol-Brooks discovery of the strong-state nationalism of Hamilton and his heirs, George Will also dropped a column in which he told us, “The challenge is for conservatism to find a place in its pantheon for three great nationalists — Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt.” For Mr. Soulcraft, the invocation of these three as heroes is not surprising, though the occasion and the timing of his column are of interest. The occasion was the Weekly Standard‘s symposium in August on the “Conservative Crack-Up,” and both the Will column and the subsequent Kristol-Brooks piece in the Journal were first shots in the new effort to formulate an ideology for the Right that can manipulate, seize control of, and eventually castrate the radical nationalism of the Populist Right today and at the same time preserve the managerial state constructed in this century by claiming that it is the natural legacy of the pseudo-nationalism of Hamilton, Clay, and the first Roosevelt.

It’s doubtful that the nationalist Right will be deluded by the Kristol-Brooks-Will counterfeit. Populist nationalism, if not quite of the blood-and-soil variety, at least proceeds from a more authentic grasp of the organic life and people of the real nation than theirs, and most of the more serious exponents of the nationalism of the Populist Right have long since come to reject the unmitigated statism and globalism that lie at the heart of the neo-conservative agenda. The Right wing of the managerial class will have to come up with a means of ideological manipulation that is a bit more subtle and a lot more persuasive than either the defunct neo-conservatism of their parents or the stillborn neo-nationalism that the Weekly Standard has invented. Until it does the regime on which the American ruling class rests will continue to crumble.

This article was originally published in Chronicles Magazine in December 1997.

What Did the Founders Mean By "Liberty"?

                           By C. B. Robertson

          

If there is a singular, inarguable principle that lies at the heart of America, it is liberty. The “Statue of Liberty” is perhaps our most iconic landmark, and the “Liberty Bell” in Philadelphia is one of our oldest national symbols. There are more High Schools called “Liberty High School” than seems reasonable. And of course, it is acknowledged in our founding document, which lists securing the “Blessings of Liberty” as the final intended goal of the new government.

But like many words, “liberty” suffers from a plethora of definitions. It can be either an absence of something—i.e., the state of freedom from oppression, restrictions, or rules—or it can be the presence of something—i.e., the possession of “liberties,” often in the form of rights. The former is inherently subjective, while the latter is highly contextual, making the use of the word “liberty” a slippery business, particularly when it pertains to law and government.

As perhaps could have been expected, the term has been seized by Libertarians and Liberals, who emphasize that liberty means nothing if not freedom for the individual. While intuitive to the modern ear, this understanding is neither the only possible understanding of “liberty,” nor is it what the Founding Fathers meant by the word.

Consider, by way of explanation, one of the most favored quotes among American Patriots. Benjamin Franklin famously said that “[t]hose who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” This assertion is interpreted as an embodiment of the American attitude which puts liberty (presumably of the individual) above safety (presumably of the collective) in nearly absolute terms.

The only problem is that in context, this famous quote means almost the exact opposite.

The quote comes from a letter written in 1755 by Franklin as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly. The letter was addressed to the Governor, whose loyalty seemed torn between the people of Pennsylvania and the proprietary family (the descendants of William Penn), who in fact lived outside of the province but owned a great deal of land there. Recent conflicts with Natives during the French and Indian War required more military supplies and protection along the border regions, which in turn required raising taxes to fund these common defenses. The only problem was that the proposed method of raising these taxes would have taxed the Penn family’s lands. This is what is alluded to earlier in the letter when Franklin writes:

Indeed all Bills for raising Money for Publick Use, are so far of the same Kind; but this differs greatly from every former Bill that has been offered him, and all the Amendments (of any Consequence) which he proposed to the Bill he last refused, are in this Bill admitted, save that for totally exempting the Proprietary Estate.

The famous quote itself is preceded by an explanatory statement of the predicament the Pennsylvanians faced what they had done so far to protect themselves, and the limitations they would face in preceding further without the land-taxes they are requesting:

In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

“Liberty” in this context refers to the freedom of the citizens to govern themselves and to pass laws as a collective. It is the freedom of the group, and not of the individual, which Franklin is appealing to. In fact, it appears that the freedom of the individual—the governor, that is—was the problem, as Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare and the Brookings Institute explains:

What’s more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes–and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier–as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance–and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.

To summarize, the Pennsylvanians sought the “liberty” of self-governance through raising taxes on everyone via the provincial government. This conflicted with the “safety” of the proprietary family and the provincial governor representing the proprietary family’s interests.

Of course, we can reach this conclusion about intended meaning of “liberty” through the Declaration of Independence itself, which cites as its very first complaints how the King of England has “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” and has variously prevented the Colonists from being able to govern themselves. It would not be overstating things to say that the colonists were not complaining about an excess of government so much as they were complaining of a lack of effective government. This absence of government, not its oppressive presence, was the impediment to liberty and prosperity which our Founding Father fought a war to do away with.

The Founding Fathers were not libertarian individualists. We know this from the fasces they adorned their buildings with, and we know this from their acknowledgment of differences between groups—something which leftists hold as evidence of racism at the very beginning of American history, but which also applies to distinctions between white groups. Benjamin Franklin himself, incidentally, held reservations about the Germans in particular:

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

But most importantly, we know this from their statements about Liberty in our founding documents. Loving liberty does not require one to be an individualist, as an American or in general. To the contrary, the Founding Fathers understood that organizing around the collective interests of the group, rather than those of the individual, is the best way to achieve the most liberty.

Conservatives are the Real Anti-Whites: Dinesh D'Souza's Death of a Nation

                         By James Dunphy

       

Going to the movie theater is a religious ritual of sorts for me. My soda is my wine, and the dehydrated corn kernels accented with sludge are my wafers. They are a debauched communion. The largely Jewish-controlled entertainment industry is my church, and on this occasion, D’Souza was my minister. I received a typical sermon telling me that Jews died for my sins of ethnic identity. Like a good goy, I gave my offering to the teenager in the ticket booth beforehand, and she provided me with a program. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sing or follow along like I would with a church hymnal. I simply plopped down in the seat to which it directed me. I simply had to be a receptive, dumb audience member.

Okay, enough of that overdrawn analogy.

Neoconservative Dinesh D’Souza’s new film, Death of a Nation, is another crazy, illogical propaganda piece. However, it got me to think a bit, and I hope the following review will get the reader to think as well.

Summary

The film begins with an overview of Trump’s 2016 victory, where we see many Leftists accusing Trump of being a fascist. D’Souza has a new task: to prove that Trump isn’t a fascist and that the Democrats are the real fascists.

For D’Souza, the Democrat Party today is 100% responsible for everything that people in the party did from its inception, including supporting slavery. We might call this permanent institutional culpability. No matter how much the institution’s ideals, practices, and people change, it is always fundamentally the same thing, in D’Souza’s mind. The Republican Lincoln prevented the Democrat Party from enslaving blacks. The Republicans also created the Freedman’s Bureau to help the blacks. While this institution did many things that LBJ’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal also did, it wasn’t bad because, for D’Souza, only the Democrat Party can be bad. When the Democrat Party doles out aid, it is enslaving people and making them dependent on the government. When the Republican Party does it, it’s helping them to escape slavery. This is D’Souza’s crazy logic.

According to D’Souza, the Democrat Party then substituted progressive ideology for slavery so it could control people on a society-wide level rather than only on plantations. D’Souza’s contention that the slaveowners conspired to become progressives is laughable. He cites no evidence for it whatsoever.

Many progressives admired Hitler, a fact which D’Souza emphasizes. The actor who plays Hitler in the film, Pavel Kříž, is a Jew and looks like a Jew, having a leptorrhine nose, a half-circle skin fold on each side of his mouth, and bulging eyes. He and other National Socialist characters angrily shout all their lines and generally behave like thugs. Indeed, the Old Right was very mafia-like in some ways, and D’Souza is all too happy to show us this. He shows footage of antifa violence and claims it’s “just like the Nazis,” as further proof that the two are somehow the same.

Progressives were eugenicists. Eugenics, for D’Souza, is inhumane and evil. He doesn’t give a reasoned explanation for why this is the case, but rather shows us a horror-film caricature of it, conflating it with Mengele’s experiments.

It’s popular in Conservatism, Inc. to ridicule George Soros, a current Leftist supervillain, for having pretended to be a Christian and worked on behalf of the Nazis to assess the value of properties that were confiscated from Jews in Hungary during the Second World War. For D’Souza, this was a shameful act. However, it’s interesting that Soros’ father paid someone to take him in so that he could survive in secret. Jews have no problem with offering bribes and using crypsis when they feel threatened. It also reminds me of how Greg Johnson has quoted the Bible passage where an ancient Hebrew reduces the odds of his family being wiped out by sending some of his kin as hostages to a clan that is threatening to invade so that, if and when the clan attacks, at least some of them will survive. Maybe Soros’ father was following this idea.

D’Souza links fascism with socialism. The young Mussolini indeed believed in socialism, but recognized that workers would never unite across the world in the way Marx believed they would because of their ethnic and national allegiances, so he created the concept of Fascism, which combined nationalism with socialism. D’Souza claims that fascism is bad because of its alleged socialistic inspiration. He also claims that adherence to one’s ethnic identity causes nations to collapse from within. Hence the title, Death of a Nation, which is a play on the title of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which was instrumental in getting the 1924 laws restricting immigration into America passed. Speaking of immigration, he admits that nations can collapse from external forces as well, but glosses over that bit, for obvious reasons.

D’Souza attempts to debunk the notion that Nixon developed a Southern strategy to get the votes of segregationist whites in the South, but I dozed off during that part. (I mean, it was a boring film.) To make up for it, I watched a few videos of D’Souza talking about the subject. He claims that most blacks switched from the party of Lincoln to Roosevelt’s New Deal party for the welfare benefits, but he never explains why Southern whites switched to the Republican Party following the introduction of LBJ’s Great Society. Regardless, to prove that Democrats are the real fascists, he feels he must deal with the issue.

I perked up when the film mentioned the Alt Right. He interviewed Richard Spencer. Spencer tried to answer his questions honestly, but D’Souza was not interested in an honest discussion. It’s clear D’Souza was simply trying to entice soundbites out of Spencer to make him look like a cookie-cutter economic Leftist. This would make it easier for the audience to write him off. He followed this with a clip of Spencer saying he supports national healthcare. D’Souza’s message is thus that Spencer, Hitler, progressives, Democrats of all eras, and modern-day Leftists are all the same because they want to enslave humanity in various ways. The film was brusque in its treatment of the Alt Right but correct in asserting that Trump is not like Spencer and the Alt Right. Indeed, Trump is a civic nationalist, who simply happens to be better from an Alt Right perspective than any of his opponents were.

D’Souza then tries to cast pro-whites as anti-Christian, citing how Hitler allegedly secretly believed that the religion undermined the German people. D’Souza offers we goyim a Christian role model: Sophie Scholl, who distributed pamphlets calling for resistance against the Nazis in the Third Reich, citing Bible verses as support. The Nazis executed her for her dissent. D’Souza’s message is thus that pro-white advocates are out to get Christians in a similar manner.

Apart from this, there is a lot of emotional music in the film and several lyrical performances, one of them by black gospel singer Angela Primm, who sings in a church as the camera cuts to various scenes of iconic American cities and landmarks. Her singing consisted of nothing more than low-IQ clichés, but the Americana scenes were nice.

The overall message was that Democrats are the real fascists, and thus we goyim have nothing to regret in supporting Trump. Indeed, we’re as kosher as can be.

My Take

Let’s analyze D’Souza’s claim that Democrats are still slaveowners. One could see how a modern Catholic apologist like D’Souza would ascribe institutional continuity to Democrats because the Catholic Church, as recently as a century ago, taught that all non-Catholics went to Hell and that even a lot of Catholics were going to Hell. Nowadays, they teach that everyone goes to Heaven. This is a fundamental change, yet the Catholic Church sees itself as being the same institution. D’Souza strains to find similarities between the Democrats of yore and modern ones. I must say that despite all its changes, the Catholic Church has changed less since the early twentieth century than the Democrat Party has since the mid-nineteenth century. Believing in the Catholic Church’s continuity is thus not as much of a stretch as believing in the Democrat Party’s.

Regarding D’Souza’s claim that the Alt Right has a lot in common with twentieth-century fascism, I’m probably the wrong person to consult on the matter. Plenty of Counter-Currents writers can offer great commentary on that. I will say that one thing modern White Nationalists have in common with the progressives of yore is in the notion that society is broken. Just as progressives believed that government needed to intervene to make the world a better place, today White Nationalists believe that governments have a role to play in stopping immigration, as well as the white fertility rate from continuing its frightful decline toward extinction. They also believe that governments can be useful in stopping miscegenation and establishing white homelands. White survival is more important than – to paraphrase Greg Johnson – the freedom and livelihoods of the brown people who will replace us.

Most White Nationalists believe that a nation shouldn’t have dysgenic fertility, or a situation where less intelligent and criminally-inclined people outbreed smart, law-abiding people. To stop this, we can simply engage in positive eugenics where we incentivize smart, stable people to have more kids while not resorting to the sterilization of anyone. But only government can make this happen.

White Nationalists aren’t scary people who want to hurt others, nor do they scream and shout all the time like the Nazis in the film. Stupid people tend to be loud. Thus, African-Americans, 85% of whom have an IQ below the white average of 100, tend to be very loud. Whites aren’t nearly as loud on average, and doubtless the National Socialists weren’t, either.

D’Souza acknowledges that George Soros, a Jew from Hungary, and Tom Steyer, who is a Northeast WASP/Jewish hybrid, fund many Leftist groups. Nevertheless, Jews as a group are beyond reproach for him.

Concerning D’Souza claim that a nation which adheres to a particular ethnic identity collapses from within, this is certainly not true of racially homogeneous nations. It is only a problem in multiethnic ones, where several ethnic groups vie for power. And it’s especially a problem when one group dominates another. South Asians like D’Souza don’t dominate whites. I estimate that there are 6 to 7 million South Asians in the US. South Asians are therefore 2.2% of the American population. They are about 1.8% of US billionaires, or 11 out of 585. Whites are equally likely per capita to be billionaires. They are 60% of the US population but around 58% of all billionaires, or 339 out of 585.

Despite only being as numerous as South Asians, Jews are 35% of all US billionaires, or 204 out of 585, making them 16 times more likely to be billionaires than either South Asians or whites. Lest one think this is merely a quirky phenomenon pertaining to billionaires, according to a surname analysis of zip codes cross-referenced with the income levels of residents, Jews make up a quarter of the 1%, and a tenth of all US millionaires. That’s what D’Souza is arguing for in his film. He’s arguing for maintaining an oligarchy split between Jews and others, but which includes Jews as an incredibly privileged minority. That, for him, is freedom.

D’Souza neglects to mention that Jews were even more privileged in Weimar Germany. One pamphlet claims that in Berlin during the Weimar era, Jews were half of all doctors, lawyers, and medical teachers, a third of chemists, and a quarter of teachers in non-medical schools. They were similarly powerful in business, having made up 58% of those involved with commerce, and far more likely to own companies. Jews seem to inevitably reach a point in any white nation where they share power with whites in an oligarchy. They use this power to undermine and ridicule the culture of whites. When poor whites get tired this, they say to rich whites, “Jews are an alien group occupying positions of power that could be yours,” and then both rich and poor whites team up to expel the Jewish component of the oligarchy. Usually all they do is expel them, but unfortunately, as happened in Nazi Germany, sometimes they are killed. This trend of Jews cozying up to a white elite, wearing out their welcome, and eventually being expelled has been repeated countless times throughout history, dating back to the early medieval period. This is why Jews and whites should always live in separate nations, for the betterment of both.

D’Souza admits that nations also collapse due to external forces. However, he doesn’t admit the glaringly obvious fact that immigrants are causing white America to collapse. Since 2000, the Republican Party has remained 88% white, despite non-whites increasing by 45% during the same period. It is simple math to project that the more non-whites there are, the more the modern Democrat Party will gain power. This is what everybody who’s not selling snake oil believes. This is also why so many whites turned out for Trump. They know they’re on the edge of oblivion, and they want Trump to save them. D’Souza side-steps this question because he knows that non-white immigrants are on the rise, and he hopes that even they can be persuaded to vote Republican. Nevertheless, even non-white Republicans can breed whites out of existence.

D’Souza is not like most non-white immigrants. He is the reverse of Charles Stuart (1758-1828), a white officer in the British East India Company who adopted Hindu culture and earned the nickname “Hindoo Stuart.” Stuart bathed in the Ganges River in Calcutta every morning, amassed a collection of Hindu deities and icons of worship, wore Indian clothes, and praised the ways of Indian women, whom he regarded as more sensible, simple, and elegant than Western women. Most white people who sojourned in India during the British East India Company’s reign did not do as Stuart did, and most non-whites in America will not do as D’Souza has. They will not adopt white religion, political ideology, or societal conventions. They will follow their innate sensibilities, which differ strongly on average from the white average. They will not be “white D’Souza.”

At the beginning of the film, D’Souza admits that he came to America not because of its laws, but because of its people, who according to him are hardworking and individualistic, and yet affirming of their immediate family. I guess they were better than the population of India, where the average IQ is 82 and the population is completely non-white, lazy, and nepotistic.

The country D’Souza likes so much was 80% white when he arrived in 1978. Anthropologist Geert Hofstede devised an individualism index, where he scores Western European nations as the most individualistic. Sociobiologist Kevin MacDonald claims whites emphasize the nuclear family more and their extended family less than other groups, and that this inclination goes back to formative years in the Paleolithic. It’s time for D’Souza to admit that he came to America because of white people.

Regarding Christianity, it’s true that many whites are Christians, but they have more to fear from Jews than they do from White Nationalists. Jews were instrumental in getting prayer taken out of public schools. White Nationalists, meanwhile, are either indifferent to or supportive of it. Jews lobbied to get gay marriage passed and want to force Christians to bake gay wedding cakes. White Nationalists are in fact probably more tolerant of homosexuality than the average Republican, but they don’t seek to celebrate it for its own sake, and instead encourage homosexuals to become supporters of their race rather than fall for the Jewish agenda.

I identify as a Christian. The editors of Counter-Currents tolerate me and my beliefs. In fact, they have a Good Friday Special every year. I’m planning on writing an article for the next one, explaining how Jesus had a white personality in many respects, and how he deviated strongly from the Middle Eastern norm. I could never write that article for another publication, not even any “conservative” one, because the Jews would lobby to have me dismissed from the publication for writing it. So it’s clear that there is a place for Christians in a white movement and a white ethnostate.

America means something to D’Souza. It means something to me as well, but something different: it should be a place where whites can survive and flourish for generations to come. A white ethnostate is my America, wherever it happens to be, and I’m a little more frank about the race I like.

Violence is Golden

                          By Jack Donovan

             

Graphic by Harold Arthur McNeill

A lot of people like to think they are “non-violent.” Generally, people claim to “abhor” the use of violence, and violence is viewed negatively by most folks. Many fail to differentiate between just and unjust violence. Some especially vain, self-righteous types like to think they have risen above the nasty, violent cultures of their ancestors. They say that “violence isn’t the answer.” They say that “violence doesn’t solve anything.”

They’re wrong. Every one of them relies on violence, every single day.

On election day, people from all walks of life line up to cast their ballots, and by doing so, they hope to influence who gets to wield the axe of authority. Those who want to end violence — as if that were possible or even desirable — often seek to disarm their fellow citizens. This does not actually end violence. It merely gives the state mob a monopoly on violence. This makes you “safer,” so long as you don’t piss off the boss.

All governments — left, right or other — are by their very nature coercive. They have to be.

Order demands violence.

A rule not ultimately backed by the threat of violence is merely a suggestion. States rely on laws enforced by men ready to do violence against lawbreakers. Every tax, every code and every licensing requirement demands an escalating progression of penalties that, in the end, must result in the forcible seizure of property or imprisonment by armed men prepared to do violence in the event of resistance or non–compliance. Every time a soccer mom stands up and demands harsher penalties for drunk driving, or selling cigarettes to minors, or owning a pit bull, or not recycling, she is petitioning the state to use force to impose her will. She is no longer asking nicely. The viability of every family law, gun law, zoning law, traffic law, immigration law, import law, export law and financial regulation depends on both the willingness and wherewithal of the group to exact order by force.

When an environmentalist demands that we “save the whales,” he or she is in effect making the argument that saving the whales is so important that it is worth doing harm to humans who harm whales. The peaceful environmentalist is petitioning the leviathan to authorize the use of violence in the interest of protecting leviathans. If state leaders were to agree and express that it was, indeed, important to “save the whales,” but then decline to penalize those who bring harm to whales, or decline to enforce those penalties under threat of violent police or military action, the expressed sentiment would be a meaningless  gesture. Those who wanted to bring harm to whales would feel free to do so, as it is said, with impunity — without punishment.

Without action, words are just words. Without violence, laws are just words.

Violence isn’t the only answer, but it is the final answer.

One can make moral arguments and ethical arguments and appeals to reason, emotion, aesthetics, and compassion. People are certainly moved by these arguments, and when sufficiently persuaded –providing of course that they are not excessively inconvenienced — people often choose to moderate or change their behaviors.

However, the willful submission of many inevitably creates a vulnerability waiting to be exploited by any one person who shrugs off social and ethical norms. If every man lays down his arms and refuses to pick them up, the first man to pick them up can do whatever he wants. Peace can only be maintained without violence so long as everyone sticks to the bargain, and to maintain peace every single person in every successive generation — even after war is long forgotten — must continue to agree to remain peaceful. Forever and ever. No delinquent or upstart may ever ask, “Or Else What?,” because in a truly non-violent society, the best available answer is “Or else we won’t think you’re a very nice person and we’re not going to share with you.” Our troublemaker is free to reply, “I don’t care. I’ll take what I want.”

Violence is the final answer to the question, “Or else what?”

Violence is the gold standard, the reserve that guarantees order. In actuality, it is better than a gold standard, because violence has universal value. Violence transcends the quirks of philosophy, religion, technology and culture. People say that music is a universal language, but a punch in the face hurts the same no matter what language you speak or what kind of music you prefer. If you are trapped in a room with me and I grab a pipe and gesture to strike you with it, no matter who you are, your monkey brain will immediately understand “or else what.”  And thereby, a certain order is achieved.

The practical understanding of violence is as basic to human life and human order as is the idea that fire is hot. You can use it, but you must respect it. You can act against it, and you can sometimes control it, but you can’t just wish it away. Like wildfire, sometimes it is overwhelming and you won’t know it is coming until it is too late. Sometimes it is bigger than you. Ask the Cherokee, the Inca, the Romanovs, the Jews, the Confederates, the barbarians and the Romans. They all know “Or else what.”

The basic acknowledgement that order demands violence is not a revelation, but to some it may seem like one. The very notion may make some people apoplectic, and some will furiously attempt to dispute it with all sorts of convoluted and hypothetical arguments, because it doesn’t sound very “nice.” But something doesn’t need to be “nice” in order for it to be true. Reality doesn’t bend over to accommodate fantasy or sentimentality.

Our complex society relies on proxy violence to the extent that many average people in the private sector can wander through life without really having to understand or think deeply about violence, because we are removed from it. We can afford to perceive it as a distant, abstract problem to be solved through high-minded strategy and social programming. When violence comes knocking, we simply make a call, and the police come to “stop” the violence. Few civilians really take the time to think that what we are essentially doing is paying an armed band protection money to come and do orderly violence on our behalf. When those who would do violence to us are taken peacefully, most of us don’t really make the connection, we don’t even assert to ourselves that the reason a perpetrator allows himself to be arrested is because of the gun the officer’s hip or the implicit understanding that he will eventually be hunted down by more officers who have the authority to kill him if his is deemed a threat. That is, if he is deemed a threat to order.

There are something like two and a half million people incarcerated in the United States. Over ninety percent of them are men. Most of them did not turn themselves in. Most of them don’t try to escape at night because there is someone in a guard tower ready to shoot them. Many are “non-violent” offenders. Soccer moms, accountants, celebrity activists and free range vegans all send in their tax dollars, and by proxy spend billions and billions to feed an armed government that maintains order through violence.

It is when our ordered violencegives way to disordered violence, as in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that we are forced to see how much we rely on those who maintain order through violence.  People loot because they can, and kill because they think they’ll get away with it. Dealing with violence and finding violent men who will protect you from other violent men suddenly becomes a real and pressing concern.

A pal once told me a story about an incident recounted by a family friend who was a cop, and I think it gets the point across. A few teenagers were at the mall hanging out, outside a bookstore. They were goofing around and talking with some cops who were hanging around. The cop was a relatively big guy, not someone who you would want to mess around with. One of the kids told the cop that he didn’t see why society needed police.

The cop leaned over and said to the spindly kid, “do you have any doubt in your mind about whether or not I could break your arms and take that book away from you if I felt like it?”

The teenager, obviously shaken by the brutality of the statement, said, “No.”

“That’s why you need cops, kid.”

George Orwell wrote in his “Notes on Nationalism” that, for the pacifist, the truth that, “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf,” is obvious but impossible to accept.  Much unreason flows from the inability to accept our passive reliance on violence for protection. Escapist fantasies of the John Lennon “Imagine” variety corrupt our ability to see the world as it is, and be honest with ourselves about the naturalness of violence to the human animal. There is no evidence to support the idea that man is an inherently peaceful creature. There is substantial evidence to support the notion that violence has always been a part of human life. Every day, archeologists unearth another primitive skull with damage from weapons or blunt force trauma. The very first legal codes were shockingly grisly. If we feel less threatened today, if we feel as though we live in a non–violent society, it is only because we have ceded so much power over our daily lives to the state. Some call this reason, but we might just as well call it laziness. A dangerous laziness, it would seem, given how little most people say they trust politicians.

Violence doesn’t come from movies or video games or music. Violence comes from people. It’s about time people woke up from their 1960s haze and started being honest about violence again. People are violent, and that’s OK. You can’t legislate it away or talk your way around it. Based on the available evidence, there’s no reason to believe that world peace will ever be achieved, or that violence can ever be “stopped.”

It’s time to quit worrying and learn to love the battle axe. History teaches us that if we don’t, someone else will.

Originally published on Arthur’s Hall of Viking Manliness (now offline), Nov 11, 2010.

Source: http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2011/03/violence-is-golden/

The Solution is State Power

                         By Gregory Hood

Jacques-Louis David, “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” detail, 1805

Conservatism is Unrealistic

The Republican Party is useless as a political force. The key battle was not the presidential election of 2012 but the passage of Barack Obama’s health care plan. All of the disparate factions of the American Right joined together to oppose “Obamacare,” and they failed, miserably. Instead of Obama’s Waterloo, as then Senator Jim Demint promised, it was his Austerlitz.

Obama is now cruising into his second term with a Democratic Senate and a compliant media at his back. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is leaderless and rudderless, Jim Demint quit the Senate so he can make money scamming old people for Conservatism Inc., and the Indian-American Republican governor of South Carolina appointed an unqualified black guy so the media won’t call the GOP racist. The next day, a leading political website reported that the Republican Party’s main problem is that it is racist.

If it was not already clear, it should be clear now – there is no longer anything realistic about believing the conservative movement can achieve any of its stated goals. Conservatives frustrated with racial double standards on affirmative action, official multiculturalism, mass immigration, and political correctness are already used to contemptuous treatment by the Republican Party and “the movement.” However, even kosher conservatives worried about limited government, tax cuts, or deficit spending have nothing to look forward to. John Boehner has kept from sobbing and tanning long enough to cave on discussions for the “fiscal cliff,” and nonwhites favor greater government spending by even larger margins than they support immigration liberalization.

The brilliant Republican “consultants” who spearheaded the fearless and inspiring campaigns of John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 are already hastening to sound retreat on guns, perhaps the one issue where the conservative movement has actually accomplished some good. What we are witnessing is the wholesale surrender of the conservative movement. The model to follow is therefore David Cameron’s conservatives, which changed their logo from a torch to a cartoon tree, is furiously attacking to the right, and is even supporting “anti-fascists.” 

None of this should be surprising – conservatism has never won, conservatives don’t want to win, and arguably the movement has been specifically designed in order to lose. In response, secession is once again mentioned in the political conservation, especially in Texas and the states of the Old Confederacy. While this is nothing really new (remember all the talk about seceding from “Jesusland” after Bush 2004?), what is new is the celebration of Barack Obama as symbolic of a new, non-white, and most importantly, explicitly anti-white America. Just like Hollywood, the political class is ripping off the mask and is increasingly comfortable with overt pronouncements that white people should be dispossessed, disarmed, and destroyed. We only have to look to South Africa to see what a “modern, democratic” nation can do once the demographics have shifted.

Whatever the triumphalism of the liberal scribblers, this isn’t some “new America.” It’s not America at all. It’s not even a country. It’s just some Third World freak show that rolls on and on, careening wildly from one disaster and humiliation to another.

More importantly, this is likely the best it is ever going to get. There is no possibility spending will be restricted and the burgeoning debt reduced. There is no possibility that illegal immigration will be stopped. There is no possibility that the vast system of funding for anti-white activists will be cut. It’s only going to get worse, and whites increasingly know it.

Secession and State Power

If pussyfooting around with conservatism is no longer an option, even theoretically, secession becomes the last quasi-legal hope for those opposed to unlimited liberal control. Secession cannot be simply the cry of a party out of power, or a frustrated grassroots, or a sign of cultural alienation. It’s the only way out, and it’s more realistic than donating to Rand Paul, vainly hoping that someday he’ll cut foreign aid.

That said, secession can’t just be the only way possible to achieve conservative policy goals. It is, of course, but that isn’t the point. The goal should not be to simply create some corporate utopia where workers can be casually exploited and disregarded. Not only would such a state be nightmarish, but the lust for cheap labor would promote mass immigration, and the pattern would simply repeat itself.

It also can’t just be independence in name. A new state carved out of the federal Leviathan can’t just be another colony of the banks with a pointless flag. Though the financiers are powerful, their control is not infinite. Iceland shows that a state can defy the Masters of the Universe and prosper without being crushed by some mysterious legion sent by the House of Rothschild.

The reason for secession is that we as a people need some kind of mechanism to propel forward positive societal change, financially, culturally, and demographically. This requires state power. Let us have no illusions about “individual freedom,” or “limited government,” or “constitutionalism.” Every negative individual choice made in this country, from the children ripped away from a father, to the white workers thrown out of a job, to the women murdered on the street in yet another “random” attack, is partially the product of an entire system pushing its desired outcomes. A healthy, moral life becomes more difficult every day and will eventually become impossible, and the people making it so know exactly what they are doing.

To reverse this requires force. Let us be clear – we want a state in order to use force to create a superior way of life for our people and protect them from their enemies.

What a white ethnostate can do is transcend Left and Right and reconcile the better elements of our warring parties into an actually functional society. Whatever else one may say about them, one of the most thrilling aspects about the novels of Harold Covington is its portrayal of the mundane details of a white ethnostate. An armed populace and disarmed police, efficient and environmentally friendly mass transportation, healthy food rather than mass produced garbage, intact families living happily in mortgage free houses, and quality goods produced by hard workers paid high wages are the kinds of goals that we can all understand and that are worth fighting for. Even the cultural changes he describes, from revitalized heathen and Christian religious movements, to the return of courtly dating, to fashion that promotes dignity rather than degradation – are only possible if whites are able to carve out a space for themselves.

What Paul Kersey has termed Black Run America is not capable of making the trains run on time or preventing Negroes from attacking people or even throwing their own feces. It certainly can’t do anything about mending the social fabric. Progress towards an even tolerable society requires ripping this monstrosity out of the muck, and placing it, by force, on a different track.

State power allows whites to recapture the sense of building a society, “progressivism” in its best sense. It allows us to create a feedback loop of positive action constantly generating further advances. Today, we are stuck defending the rotting inheritance of our forebears, grimly waging a slow retreat and consoling ourselves we’re making them pay for every step. To break out of that system requires breaking this system.

None of this can happen without a state. All other tendencies and activity – metapolitics, cultural societies, spiritual movements, writing, teaching, politics – are means to the end of a truly sovereign white ethnostate. I am a rebel and an anarchist in this society, because it is beyond reform, and attempting to save it from itself is sick and immoral. I am a pillar of the community in the White Republic of the future.

All societies have hierarchy and compulsion. The only question is what kind of compulsion do we want. With intelligence – and compassion – we can build a society that fits with the best elements of human nature so the hand of government is lightly felt. A sovereign state doesn’t mean an intrusive one. Given minimal support or even benevolent neglect, whites will build good societies. Even with all the forces of the tyrant aligned against them, whites are still doing the best they can, carving out a piece of heaven here and there amidst the malevolent carnival that used to be their country.

However, recognizing this doesn’t mean all white advocates have to do is throw off the yoke and then do nothing. We must set a deliberate direction for culture and society through specific government policies.

If you want strong families, you have to reform family and marriage law and create economic policies that reward good choices. If you want quality education, you have to put through policies that recognize that not everyone should be going to college and that real skills and real curriculum should be taught both at a trade school and at a liberal arts university. If you want responsible financial management by families as well as by government, you need policies that reward saving rather than constant consumption. If you want a white ethnostate to stay white, you can’t just bar nonwhite immigrants and yell racial slogans – you have to create a system that prioritizes quality products over plastic junk and skilled labor over dull-eyed helots.

All this can only come from the top. All of this requires force and state power.

Secessionists and white nationalists have to get real and get together. It’s not about petitions, protest, or proscribing certain actions of the government. It’s not about returning to a Constitution that either is working as intended (and therefore sucks) or failed (and is therefore useless). It’s about acquiring power and using it for meaningful, beneficial ends. We will use state power to make a better life for our people at the ground level and promote the upward development of the race. All the rest is a distraction.