Birth of a People, Rebirth of a Nation

One of the major disadvantages American white nationalists face is that American nationality can plausibly be separated from white racial identity.  This is a huge difference compared to the European situation.

As Paul Gottfried notes, European countries are now defining their identity in terms of abstract human rights and some kind of egalitarian universal history.  Nonetheless, whatever the propaganda, few people really believe it in their bones.  When people say “English,” they mean white.  Someone like “Sir” Trevor Phillips, even if he became Prime Minister or somehow heir to the throne itself, will never be a true son of Britain, and at some level, everyone knows this, including him.  European nationalists therefore have a great advantage.  A party such as the Vlaams Belang can appeal to a “Flemish” identity and everyone automatically knows what they are talking about, namely, who is Flemish, and who is not.  In the politically correct modern West, it is also an advantage that Europeans can fall back on national identities that are solely white but not defined by race.  A pro-Flemish group can not be portrayed as racist the same way that a “pro-white” group can.

In contrast, American identity, as painstakingly outlined by Tomislav Sunic in Homo Americanus:  Child of the Postmodern Age, is now almost exclusively defined by an ahistorical narrative culminating in a mythical equality.  Ignoring that equality and liberty are mortal enemies, and that the Founding Fathers were by any modern standard white nationalists, America has been successfully redefined into a sort of club where the price of admission is a belief in a vague concept of human rights and a shared appreciation of contradictory figures like George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Muhammad Ali.

Now this is absurd of course, but people really do believe it.  In some sense, it is plausible because an ethnic identity for Americans, what people like President Teddy Roosevelt called the “American race,” has been abandoned.  The late scholar Samuel Huntington, in his greatest work, attempted to the square the circle and marry the universalistic American creed with the American culture that grew out of the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core.  However, even he admitted that American identity, though dependent on a core ethnicity, was not defined by it.  Once that connection was broken, the only fallback was an American identity defined by white racial identity.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, this essentially existed.  Left wing scholars in “white studies” are ironically close to the truth when they show how a conception of white identity that encompassed non Germanic whites was indispensable in creating the “normal” American identity.  They err of course, in believing that this is some kind of capitalist oppressor plot as opposed to an alliance based on biological and cultural reality.  However, Negroes were still in some sense considered Americans, even if only second class ones.  Eventually, after the so called civil rights movement, this core American identity was opened up to non whites.  This naturally transitioned to the abstract American identity we have today and now even saying that there even is something called an American culture is suspiciously racist.

As always, leftists are actually closer to the truth than conservatives here.  Leftists admit that America was founded as a white country.  White American conservatives, even when they prop up embarassing minstrel acts like Lloyd Martin are essentially conceding that “white” cultural norms are synonmous with American cultural norms.  However, until they are able to make the implicit whiteness explict, this is more reactionary posturing, waiting for Mexicans to care about the Constitution written by white slave owners or urban Negroes to thrill to the sounds of Yankee Doodle.

The Tea Parties are overtly anti-racist, and implicitly non-racist.  Nonetheless, they are overwhelmingly white.  Just the idea of whites gathering in white numbers has leftists scared out of their mind, in the same way that they hate and fear harmless crowds like NASCAR fans, gun lovers, or Sarah Palin supporters.  And now, someone has noticed the implications.  That someone is Pat Buchanan.

It is amazing to think how establishment Pat Buchanan really is, when all is said and done.  He was communications director for Ronald Reagan.  He has lived in Washington DC practically his entire life.  He knows everyone, and is essentially friends with everyone, even the liberals.  If conservatives hadn’t decided to sabotage themselves in 1992 and again in 1996, he could have been President, which would have saved America from mass immigration, 9/11, fiscal collapse, and eventual dissolution.  The rise and fall of Pat Buchanan will go down in history as the last chance the United States of America had to save itself.

Now, however, even Pat knows the writing is on the wall.  In a bracing new column, “New Tribe Rising?,” Pat notes that America is breaking apart along the lines of ethnonationalism.  He knows that whites, and only whites, keep this farce of modern America limping along.  He also sees signs that whites are beginning to react against their constant demonization and degradation by our governing elite.  He writes,

Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other… Palin and Tea Partiers now repeat Obama’s disparaging line about their clinging to Bibles and guns — with defiant pride.  As others have done in our multicultural and multiethnic nation, this people is beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically.

Pat also notes that other peoples have already defined themselves.  “Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.”

There’s the rub.  The hard part is that white Americans, real Americans, still identify with the cultural symbols, governmental institutions, and historical narratives of the United States, even though the United States of America is objectively the most anti-white force on the planet.  One can imagine a Southern secession movement or a Northwest Homeland crushed by Red, White, and Blue waving conservatives who think they are fighting for God and Country when they are really fighting for Goldman Sachs and Lady Gaga.

Any American white nationalist movement will have to accomplish the neat trick of somehow claiming the true American identity (which is historically correct) while denouncing and destroying just about everything the United States of America has come to symbolize today as well as the puerile Enlightenment silliness that led us inevitably to this point.  It will not be easy.

However, step one is simple to define, if not to achieve.  White Americans need to realize that however much they resist it, try to squirm out of it, or try to beg Michael Steele to free them from it, they are a people.  As Samuel Francis stated,

At a time when anti-white racial and ethnic groups define themselves in explicitly racial terms, only our own unity and identity as a race will be able to meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as Robert Mugabe has threatened to do to whites in Zimbabwe, they will do so not because we are ‘Americans’ or ‘Christians’ or ‘conservatives’ or ‘liberals,’ but because we are white.

A number of far left blogs are crying “Oh noes!  Racisms!” as could be expected.  Someone dared to mention white Americans exist and that they may have interests.  Of course, no one is actually opposed to ethnonationalism, not even the “I don’t see race conservatives” who are busy giving money to a party headed by a man cosponsoring conferences with his co-ethnic Al Sharpton.  It is whites, and only whites, who must sit down, shut up, and fund the people who hate them.

Whites are at least beginning to see the double standards.  We shouldn’t be over optimistic or do another “finally, people are waking up” type post.  They aren’t — not yet.  However, the gestation for a new people is at least taking place.

Saul Alinsky noted that you can not speak to people in terms that are outside their own experience.  White nationalists need to step up and start speaking to our people in terms that they understand. Occidental Dissent’s posts on Hitler and esoteric National Socialism and various movement dramas are all very well.  However, we need to start thinking realistically, practically, and politically about how to reach our noble, naive, and so easily abused white American folk.  While thought exercises like the ones today are fun, tomorrow is a new day and that needs to be our primary focus.

Occidental Dissent, April 21, 2010