Author’s Note: Myth and science are tangential to the real issue facing us, which is about politics and preservation. The following is an effort to sharpen (or maybe just to repeat) certain ideas presented in “The Sword.”
One.
The starting point for all discussions of white preservation must begin with the realization that we have entered an Interregnum, a period of unprecedented danger during which we are destined to experience a great transformation. The most conspicuous sign of this came in November 2008, with the advent of the blackest night, symbol not of sleep but of death.
The question that now faces us is: Will it be our death as a people or the death in us of all those things that have led to this most desperate stage of our history?
Two.
The historical antecedents of white nationalism are many: Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party, the First and Second Klans, various state’s rights and segregationist movements of the 1940s and ’50s, perhaps George Wallace’s American Independent Party, as well as a horde of smaller, more sectarian organizations.
For the past generation, however, the racialist movement defending our way of life has ceased to be political and become largely a race-realist affair — which was to be expected, given that the race realists presently dominating white discourse are the heirs of the prewar “scientific racists,” who saw their task in essentially educational terms.
Three.
Scientific racists in the early twentieth century indeed played an important intellectual role in defending the existing system of racial relations.
But that role bears no relationship to the one facing white Americans in this period, however much race realism remains a crucial part of the white-nationalist arsenal.
Then, when scientific racists commanded the center stage of public opinion, America was still a white man’s country, it had a well delineated color line, an established racial hierarchy (which most whites unconsciously accepted), and twice it succeeded in imposing immigration restrictions on a reluctant government (against Asians in the early 1880s and against non-”Nordics” between 1921 and ‘24).
In this context, scientific racists — who came mainly from the upper classes and were often academics or intellectuals — merely needed to popularize their findings to defend the pro-white status quo.
Today, their race realist successors have continued in this tradition, trying to re-educate whites in the knowledge of what their great grandparents once knew.
This knowledge, moreover, is mainly of a scientific kind and aimed primarily at informing elites and influencing public policy — typical Enlightenment forms of metapolitics. Not coincidentally, such metapolitics accepts the liberal supposition that man’s world revolves around the objectively-defined self-interest of rational individuals, whose identities are rooted in materialist considerations rather than in the infinitely less quantifiable ones of history, culture, and kin.
Four.
As Rome burns, the question inevitably arises of how reasonable it is to continue writing cookbooks amidst the flames devouring us. This, though, is what race realists will end up doing if our racially conscious community does not soon break with its naive scientism and assume the shape of a political-metapolitical front to represent the higher collective interests of European America.
Five.
Since state policy has turned against white Americans and come to pose a direct threat to their continuity, our tasks today is a matter of ensuring our collective survival as a people, which means it is a matter of forming organizations and movements to struggle on our behalf.
Six.
To this end, white nationalists will need to break with the exclusively academic/scientific orientation of race realists and start building a nationalist vanguard to lead their people. The question is: How?
This is the question that needs to be addressed and addressed not as an epistemological issue (i.e., as an issue of knowledge), but politically, culturally, socially, and in other ways that intersect our experiences in the world.
Seven.
Science (which too is infused with myth and ideology) is for academic debate, myth and ideology are for popular social movements. There is, though, no hard and fast division between them. Those seeking to make the epistemological difference between them primary seem not fully conscious of the great historical tasks facing white men in the twenty-first century, just as their dismissal of popular political mobilizations as a “misty and idealistic totemism” seems to reflect the typical liberal propensity to avoid engagements that might involve them in real world activity.
Context here is all important. If I need a cancerous growth removed from my body, I’m not going to have a student of myth do it, just as if I want to learn about José Antonio Primo de Rivera, I would prefer to ask a Spanish historian rather than a geneticist.
Similarly, if I want to build a nationalist movement, I know it’s going to take something more than the virtues of Frank Salter to convince whites to abandon their individualistic and materialistic lives (which, incidentally, are usually led under the sign of self-interest) — it will take something bigger and grander that touches them at the core of their being.
That something can only be found in myth, culture, history, and blood — in all those things that transcend the individual, that link him to a higher destiny, and that refuse the safe, sanitized detachment of modernity’s privatized realm.
Eight.
Myth is not “mystification,” even if our naive empiricists assume it to be; it is simply another way (and at times a more powerful way) of apprehending and communicating a truth.
In one situation it is obviously appropriate, in another situation science is.
A mythic figure like Jeanne d’Arc touches a Frenchman more profoundly than the vast intellectual heritage of Cartesianism because St. Joan evokes a hundred defining emotions lodged in a Frenchman’s heart, doing so in ways that the elegant, yet bloodless postulates of Descartes’ scientific rationalism cannot.
The Cartesians’ powerful heritage is not, as a consequence, unimportant to France; it simply has little role to play in defending the nation from those who seek its destruction. Relatedly, in the numerous assertions of France’s nationalist movement, St. Joan is omnipresent because of all she represents, while Descartes rarely has anything to add, except perhaps in keeping debates at the conceptual level orderly and logical.
If you want, then, to engage in discussions about race and racial differences, you bring in the geneticists and Darwinists. But if you want to build a nationalist movement to ensure the continuity of white America, you appeal to Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, to the Battle of the Alamo and Kearney’s Workingmen, to the Stars and Bars and the sustaining voices of those quintessential representatives of America’s white culture, the Carter family.
Those who think that IQ, JQ, EGI, GSS, HBD, etc., are somehow more important in mobilizing a people than appeals to their spirit or destiny do not seem to know, “empiricists” that they claim to be, anything of history, especially the history of the nationalist and labor movements that shaped much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A preference for scientific demonstration rather than political mobilization is, moreover, the strategy of middle-class intellectuals, whose world is defined by the classroom, the computer monitor, and tedious faculty meetings. Political appeals to a people’s cultural and mythic paradigms, on the other hand, are the meat and drink of militants who associate with workers and soldiers, organize local cells and demonstrations, and, when the time comes, raise barricades in the street — to defend their neighborhood from marauders, or perhaps to do what used to be done, in front of Paris’ Hôtel de Ville.
Nine.
The world is not a debating society.
It’s hardly coincidental that Carl Schmitt characterized the liberal, whose ideology distorts his perception of the real, as someone who thinks debate alone in politics suffices.
The politics of the friend/enemy dichotomy is accordingly irrelevant to the liberal, who prefers to reason with the enemy, as he tries to buy him off.
Life/Death, Friend/Enemy: This primordial polarization poses the great political question — the question that brings us to the point where we are compelled to ask ourselves: How are we going to defeat the enemy who threatens our existence?
Contrary to the contention of certain cyber pundits, this is not a matter of deciding who is more intelligent or who commits the most crimes. My commitment to the white nation wouldn’t change even if we were the least intelligent of the races or the most criminally prone.
To defeat the enemy is, rather, a question of deciding what political options are available to us: Will it be a Great Trek to a new homeland; will it be a matter of reviving the heritage of the Borderland Celts, who settled the Indian-occupied frontier and defended the Alamo with rifle in hand; will it involve parliamentary or extraparliamentary actions that mobilize our people; or will it simply be a waiting game, to see how well we can prepare ourselves for the coming crash, when the wolves will be allowed into the very bosom of the city.
Who knows what course awaits us?
The one thing, though, that I hope we can all agree on at this point is the importance of making ourselves ready — by being as independent as possible, by keeping in good physical and mental shape, by ensuring that we are well-located, by knowing who we are and what we stand for — but above all by doing something, anything, in the real world to prefigure what will become the White Nation.
Very little of this, I’m afraid, will have anything to do with marshaling evidence from biological texts — that’s a diversion better left to the liberal modernity whose racial horrors we seek to escape.
13 Comments
I guess as far as the discussion here is concerned, the terms, issues involved, etc. I am probably still in “Differences between RR/WN – 101.”
But I know an awful lot about what it means to be a White man.
And though I think it would be a very good idea to have a discussion amongst ourselves on that topic, for now I’ll just say this:
Just as it is not enough to limit ourselves to a discussion on the finer points of matters intellectual and philosophical, so too is it not enough to say we must unite as a political force and rescue ourselves from what is now a galloping totalitarianism.
Here is a passage from Ortega y Gasset that is wonderfully pertinent to these considerations, and speaks directly to our dilema.
“The opposite of slovenliness is to be in form. To achieve it an individual must first go off by himself and concentrate upon his own development……Everything else is either favorable to his form, or else pulls it down, and with this in mind he goes for one thing and avoids the other.
“Just as individuals, groups too may be in form or out of form, and it is evident in history that the only groups which have ever done anything are those which have achieved form. Compact, perfectly organized groups, in which every member knows that the other will not fail him at the crucial point, so that the whole body may move swiftly in any direction without losing its balance or losing its head. . . . But, a group does not acquire this form unless it has disciplined itself and continues to discipline itself. Unless it sees with perfect clarity what it proposes to do. And it can not see clearly unless the purpose it sees is clear, well thought out, cogent, and as complete as the situation warrants. If not in form, all that may be attempted will come to nothing. . . . Do it in form! Otherwise, the future can be told now with perfect assurance. If you attempt to take part in public life without the proper preparation this is what will happen. . . . The larger mass will crush the smaller.
To exert influence upon a mass, you must be something other than a mass yourselves: a live force, or, in other words, a group in form.”
Obviously, to do what Ortega states here takes time, lots of it. And time is one thing we are fast running out of. What to do? Well, act. But, as many have said, taking action may prove to be more foolhardily and foolish, than brave and wise. In short, it would appear that we are truly up against it.
I see things like Race Realism, White Nationalism, operate more like a Tent than an Organizing Principle, and it is the latter that we need. That is not to say that these ideas are not principled or have no principles worth organizing around. Of course they do. But what we need is an overall principle that properly subsumes everything else.
Lets cut to the chase and call it Survival, and it would appear as if that is what we’re fighting for right now. But, as many of us know, even appeals to our survival still fall flat to many Whites.
I think an appeal to healthy living, physically, psychologically, emotionally and intellectually has and will have a strong appeal, if handled with care and responsibility. Scolding, berating, and lecturing people is never going to work. Along these lines, contrasting a Will to Health with the psychologically and emotionally unhealthy, intellectually unsound, spiritually bankrupt, and morally corrupt worldview embedded deep inside the soullessness of Political Correctness is bound to catch the attention of more than a few people out there.
We might not have a lot of time left, and those of us who do care, all our differences aside, may still be only be connected virtually, but the bright side is that time has not yet run out and virtual or not, we are at least in communication, and working toward a more conscious contact with important issues that, for some, until recently didn’t exist or had no voice.
For this reason Whites, all Whites, are of value and not to be dismissed or marginalized (no, this does not include those who are clearly on a path that is irreversible –- no time to waste on lost causes). But as for those of us who are not “Close by” (what exactly does that mean today?) we are still in contact and should be addressed with respect. Plus, that space can be closed with one plane ride.
In any event, I think that, above all, the most important thing missing here is more human quality. A certain warmth and sincerity that comes from genuine concern. I just do not see much of it anywhere. In the first place there are almost NO gentlemen among us. Let’s at least be honest with ourselves that far.
Many Whites might be afraid to openly separate from the Leviathan, true. But they also feel that they have nothing to run toward as well.
As far as I can tell from our current dilemma we need a hell of a lot more powers of example who can walk the talk. We don’t just need to be smart, or even strong, though we certainly need those two qualities and certainly possess them. We also need to be considerate and humane and demonstrate a genuine concern for and interest in each other. These qualities would be a part of that Will to Health that I mentioned. I am also of the firm belief that what we need first is a critical mass. A critical mass made up of a collective of individuals with varying points of view who have agreed to join around a particular organizing principle could serve as both heart and head of a body that would be sure to follow if it was convinced that the heart and head knew what it was doing and where it was going.
Perhaps this will be the outcome of the sort of discussion taking place among us now. Perhaps the different points of view converging toward a common purpose will be what it takes to sharpen the edge of the sword that we will use to hack our way out of the tangled wood where our enemies conniving, and our neglect, has led us.
One wit once described GW as the “Jedi Massa of all WN.” It’s true.
I don’t have any objection to expounding the various truths of ‘race realism’, ‘human biodiversity’ or ‘Salterism’ – GuessedWorker’s “empirical tradition” – as part of an educational campaign targeted at non-specialists. There are plenty of commentators around who specialize in this area.
Like O’Meara, I just can’t see a White Nationalist victory arising out of presentation of empirical data points or philosophical debate. It’s not enough. In a recent post, I mentioned that Carleton Putnam tried that route with little success in the 1960’s with his legal campaign against the Brown decision in the courts.
We’re trying to foster a racially based separatist ethnic identity in the United States. If you delve into the academic literature about ethnogenesis (see Anthony Smith, for instance), you will quickly find that shared myths play a central role in this process.
I honestly don’t see why this claim is so controversial.
I stopped visiting Majority Rights for many of the reasons that O’Meara lists. It is mostly an intellectual debating society based upon a materialistic agnostic paradigm; in short, really boring to everyone except those talking to each other. O’Meara is talking about ‘fire in the belly’, because that’s what we’re going to need in en masse in the future. I work with my hands as a builder, and I study the world around and within me. It took me a while to understand the primacy of race, but I have that now, and it is worth fighting for. And it will be a fight. And in this fight the most important quality is not intellectual knowledge, but rather that numinous quality of ‘Inspiration’ that shows the way, steels the soul and risks itself for its Folk. That ‘quality of soul’ is the key. The ‘problem’ we face cannot be intellectually figured out and solved ahead of time. It cannot be reduced to an intellectual formula that may then be applied as a scientific solution. The ‘problem’ can only be solved and won in a moment-to-moment struggle over a long time. Because it is this very struggle that draws forth the powers and abilities that can bring about victory.
Michael,
All that you claim of the imperfect characterisation of you that I offer is applicable in spades of your characterisation of me. I am not engaged in defending empiricism but in seeking an appropriate application for the evolutionary narrative. You might glean from the confrontational style I adopt and from my mention of Heidegger that I have a destructive interest in common or garden nationalist thought because, like everything else, it is predicated on the forgetting of being … literally on absence. If I do violence to the niceties of your position that’s no bad thing from my standpoint since you have demonstrated by your prioritisation of myth that you are content to offer your people something either unreal or hyper-real but never just real. Of course I am bound to attack that.
You position as an opponent of American empiricism is not better informed or philosophically more coherent than mine as an opponent of teleology. I am not, however, going to resent the intellectual supremacy which you ascribe to yourself. I find it odd that you would employ such methods against someone who has specifically not done so against you. From my point of view the disagreement is over one non-personal issue:
Our intellectuals, among whom I include you but not myself (as those who know me are well aware), are failing totally, completely to offer creative leadership. If one divides up the ideational cake into anti-liberal analysis, the JQ, the scientific elements, and sundry debates about Nordicism, politics and geopolitics, economics, law and so on, it leaves a vanishingly small segment to truly creative thinking, and I mean foundational thinking. Liberalism commands the Western world – our people are dying from it – and I can’t see a single great and potentially world-changing idea on which a revolution of European blood could be launched. By now, we should be way beyond this point.
If you want to critique something, Michael, critique that, not the limitations of empiricism. You are not adding to the sum of knowledge by your current stance.
Oh, and on myth. I sort of suggested that you might care to look at what is romaticisation, what is deceit, and what is great, truth-telling myth. You merely lump them together and say, “Hey, it’s all myth!” It isn’t. Myth is a rare thing, and extremely difficult to position in the public consciousness. Pre-mythification, which is what you called for, is incredibly rare. Can you think of one example in the Western world since Adolf Hitler?
Great article. I especially appreciate the concluding paragraphs in which the author urges us to be ready, as individuals; humans need reminders and regular ’sermons’ to encourage them to get their houses in order. A bit of fire and brimstone helps prod people into taking action.
Indeed, the world is not a debating society. We might think we have the luxury of discussion and rumination, but the hour is getting late.
Dear GW,
I apparently repeated myself in vain. For you still don’t seem to understand what’s at stake in our little RR-WN debate, just as you consistently mischaracterize my position and try to turn my rhetoric against me.
Let me try, then, to make it very simple for you.
First: I may have written a book on the European New Right, but I’m not a New Rightist, as you persist in claiming. Ask Alain de Benoist. In fact, I’m not a rightist at all, nor am I the philosophical idealist or mystifier you would like to make me out to be.
It’s true, though, that I was educated in mainly German and French schools of thought, having lived in and learned the languages of those countries, and, through this education, acquired a low regard for Anglo-American empiricism, which is almost universally regarded as the zero degree of philosophical thought. Also like many European anti-liberals, I disdain the uncritical and conformist practices associated with this empiricism not simply because of its naivete, but above all because it has served, beginning with Locke, as one of the principal conceptual bases of liberalism.
For your own sake, it would probably be better for your reputation if in the future you avoid philosophical characterizations altogether, for you seem not to have read any philosophy.
Second: You present yourself as the brave defender of science and label me a “mystifier,” referring to “O’Meara’s misty and idealistic totemism.” I’m surprised you didn’t label me an “animist” — it would have been just as ridiculous. In any case, you see our dispute in essentially epistemological terms, with you defending the concrete truths of science and poor me favoring a hopelessly idealist “mythicisation” (by which I assume you mean “mythification”).
Your view of our dispute, you probably don’t realize, inadvertently supports my contention that race realism has become largely tangential to the tasks facing our racially conscious community.
Though we both wish to serve the higher interests of our people, you think this can be done by propounding and propagating scientific truths that eat away at the reigning liberal illusions. I don’t oppose such endeavors, I only claim that they haven’t worked in the past and are certainly not going to work in what promises to be an increasingly totalitarian future.
The middle-class, college-educated, and conservative (i.e., right liberal) character of certain cyber racialists obviously disposes them to methods centered on the computer keyboard, rather than on the hands-dirtying requirements of racial struggle. But that dog will no longer hunt.
The only way our people are going to liberate themselves from the liberal system seeking their destruction is through struggle in the real world. This struggle may have a scientific, educational, or cultural/scientific component to it; I hope it does. But, preeminently, it will have to orient to social, racial, and national issues that are political in the highest sense: That is, it will have to struggle against the powers of our enemy.
Call me unrevolutionary, uncreative, or unadventurous if you will for thinking that our future depends on political struggle rather than on scientific debate. But perhaps because of my alleged mysticism (and despite my short career as a historian specializing in European revolutionary organizations), I can’t think of a single successful social movement that has ever achieved power through simply postulating its truths.
Once it is accepted that the path to liberating our people is one of struggle in the world of power politics, not a matter of intellectual argument, then political imperatives take the wheel. This means adapting the language of ideology, collective identity, and political myth. If you have trouble understanding this, GW, I would suggest that you read a bit of history, and I don’t mean genetic history.
Finally: You have made a number of outlandish and misleading characterizations about my position on myth. It would take a small book to refute them. But I’ve had a hard day at work and would prefer to open another bottle of Guinness and finish the concluding chapter of Jünger’s Der Arbeiter, rather than continue arguing with someone who refuses even to acknowledge what our argument is about.
To be simple, I’ll just say that the myth I speak of is not some New Age concoction, but social and political myth as it applies (and has historically applied) to movements in the world of time and being. Thus, whenever you attack my notion of myth, you consciously or unconsciously attack the notion of political struggle.
And you wonder why toqonline doesn’t have a link to MR.
I don’t read Majority Rights. I only link to blogs that I read, and I can’t read everything out there, even a lot of really good sites. But I take solace (and so should you) in the fact that there are only a few degrees of separation between TOQ Online and the sites I do not read regularly or link to, so when interesting discussions come up, like this one, I hear about them rather quickly anyway, links or no links.
This discussion thread is already too dependent on what is happening at MR to be understood on its own terms here. Thus I recommend that people follow it there.
This has been understood at MR…
No, it hasn’t. The only thing “understood” at “Majority Rights” is how to chant “EGI” “EGI” to explain everything and anything, from bad weather to the price of milk. By this mindless overuse the concept has been degraded…leading people like O’Meara to mock “the virtues of Frank Salter.”
or creative enough.
No, O’Meara is not a self-proclaimed “creative genius.” He’s not a “red roasting rodent” either. For shame!
to which I note the editor of this website does not see fit to link
If Dr. Johnson’s concerns are with white preservationism, why link to a manifestly anti-preservationist blog?
Andrew,
You are wholly confused. It is the very scientism which Michael which critiques explains why “this cause … rings true across generations of cultural, academic, and liberal suppression.”
Have you not read Salter?
And if Michael is “aware of the limitations” of Idealist nationalism why isn’t he critiquing that as well as repeatedly sticking it to Jared Taylor, Phil Rushton, Kevin MacDonald, and Ted Sallis?
Of course, it isn’t fair to make Michael the fall guy for this failing. As far as I am aware, nobody outside of the grouplet centered on majorityrights.com is actively engaged on new thinking that is not faithist in some form or neo-fascist. It is true that Ted Sallis, whom I know well and for whom I have respect, has understood the combinative aspect of such an effort, but not how to do it.
Well, we should ALL be engaged in this effort, and at the center should be a college of our best intellectuals — The Occidental School, perhaps — spearheading the process in the manner of the Jewish Marxists of pre-war Frankfurt. That is how to make a philosophy of the European life, out of which and only out of which a revolutionary politic may emerge.
The rest, including Michael’s free-floating call for myth, is at best lacking in motive power, at worst mere self-indulgence.
In the absence of an Occidental School, I invite any intellectuals reading this who understand the centrality and importance of what I am saying, and who are free to contribute to the debate, to lend their voices to the conversation at MR. It will last as long as is necessary.
“You are prepared to make a repeated song and dance about the limitations of the narrow-focus scientism of the racial right in America but not to acknowledge the profound limitations of the European New Right idealism which you espouse. You will not find the key to revolutionizing our people’s liberal lives in either quarter — that is the truth. The key awaits discovery elsewhere.”
From what I know of the ideas involved, the author is aware of the limitations of these ideas, but not the limitations of this cause, which rings true across generations of cultural, academic, and liberal suppression. That you fail to address why these ideas contain the ability to exist is very revealing and ultimately undoes your argument.
Yes, Michael, it is a repetition. If it is intended to answer my critique you will need to go back to the drawing board. Here are a few points you have missed:
I have NOT dismissed a mythicisation. I have merely explained that you failed to define or characterise myth, and the examples of it that you have given are flawed (actually, most have been given by Prozium, but my criticism stands). Further, you have not guaged the size of the task to the size of the myth – it is a very great task, of course. You have not suggested how that myth be reified and communicated.
More serious than any of these, though they are serious enough, you have not addressed the philosophical gap between myth and political life. You have not provided for a replacement of the existing dominant liberal milieu to support a new life for Europe’s children on the American continent. How do you expect a European society to sustain itself while its ideational form remains liberal?
In a nutshell, you are not revolutionary enough, not intellectually adventurous or creative enough. You are prepared to make a repeated song and dance about the limitations of the narrow-focus scientism of the racial right in America but not to acknowledge the profound limitations of the European New Right idealism which you espouse. You will not find the key to revolutionising our people’s liberal lives in either quarter – that is the truth. The key awaits discovery elsewhere.
This has been understood at MR, to which I note the editor of this website does not see fit to link. Perhaps that is why you have addressed criticisms which have not been made and left aside those that have.
In terms of the English, the anti-Jewish ethnic Jewish convert to Christianity Otto Weininger had them pretty well pegged:
“It must always be remembered against England, that from her there came the soulless psychology. The Englishman has impressed himself on the German as a rigorous empiricist and as a practical politician, but these two sides exhaust his importance in philosophy. There has never yet been a true philosopher who made empiricism his basis, and no Englishman has got beyond empiricism without external help.” – http://www.theabsolute.net/ottow/sexcharh.html#j