More from Hunter Wallace on the BNP

American segregationists made a fatal choice in mid-1960s when they started backing “sneak up on the liberals” aracial conservatism out of the practical need to stay politically relevant. Lee John Barnes is proposing to take the BNP down the same Culturalist road that turned 1965 Wallace Country into 2005 Bush Country. The inevitable result will be deracialization and eventual GOP-style surrender to liberalism.

It is better to stay politically irrelevant and racialized than powerful and deracialized. If the BNP ever has a Prime Minister like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush it will have been utterly and completely defeated.

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Allow me to restate your [Barnes'] argument from a different perspective:

“The Communist Party USA is a political party. Therefore we must get elected into power, that requires a populist approach. In order to implement Marxist-Leninism, we must be elected. Politics is the art of the possible, not ideological posturing that alienates mass support.”

Your fundamental mistake is identifying power with the ballot box and engagement in democratic politics. In the U.S., the Socialist Party and Communist Party USA were able to get much of their agenda passed in spite of their political irrelevance. In contrast, the Conservatives who support the GOP have 40 years of electoral victories under their belt and almost nothing to show for it. A small minority of ideologues has utterly triumphed over millions of pragmatists.

The Left always wins in the end because it understands that power is about controlling discourse, not winning elections. The Right (like Barnes here) operates on the latter assumption, wins pyrrhic victories, then capitulates and surrenders. That’s why the British Left is trying so hard to force the BNP to change its constitution. In surrendering the language of race, you’re doing exactly what they want you to do; allowing the Left to control the discourse and dominate the national conversation on its own terms.

The inevitable result will be deracialization and a softening of nationalism. The boundry marker of legitimate public discourse will shift to the left. It is better to make a stand and push in the opposite direction even if it is politically expedient to do so.

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[Barnes:] That’s your job. We are politicians who seek power.

Like all conservatives, you have it ass backwards: win the cultural war over discourse and power will follow; securing council seats and MPs is pointless unless you control the culture … you won’t be in a position to change anything without a public uproar.

[Barnes:] We have a great idea – its called GREAT BRITAIN.

You’re not doing a very good job of presenting it.

[Barnes:] Its not our job to act as propagandists for the white race, we are British Nationalists.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

[Barnes:] = Our values are British, our philosophy Ethno-Nationalism.

1.) Define ‘British values’.

2.) It is amusing to see you equate White Nationalism, a version of racial nationalism, with National Socialism, a version of ethno-nationalism.

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[Barnes:] All truly long lasting revolutions are achieved step by step with consent, not with paroxsyms of violence imposed upon an unwilling populace.

Actually, I would argue that “long lasting revolutions” are “achieved step by step” in fights over discourse. In France and America, the rhetoric of liberty and equality triumphed before the first shots of revolution were fired. In the aftermath of World War II, the rhetoric of ‘human rights’ triumphed across the British political spectrum before the full implications of that idea were worked out in later decades. In the 1960s, Americans didn’t know that ‘civil rights’ implied self hating masochism or the worship of ‘diversity’. Ideas are always entertained before their consequences become apparent.

You’re proposing that British nationalists surrender the discourse of race out of short term political expediency. I’m beginning to think you don’t have the stomach for revolutionary political struggle. Persecution by the authorities, going to jail for one’s beliefs, refusing to compromise on principle, enduring hate and violence, even martyrdom come with the territory. It is what creates the necessary sympathy for a vanguardist cadre to metamorphize into a mass movement.

[Barnes:] The word Folk implies an indigenous people with an organic connection to the land, a national culture and a British Constitution.

Is this an accurate description of contemporary Britons, in particular the working class, a majority of whom have lived in urban conditions for almost a century now?

[Barnes:] As Americans you have a connection to the land based on history, but you are not indigenous to America and therefore I understand that you do not have a ‘Folkish consciousness’ – though I suspect those of you with English, Irish etc roots would understand what a Folk consciousness is if you returned to visit your ancestral homelands where your ancestors evolved and took a walk in an English wood or had a pint in a rual Irish pub or visited Newgrange or Stonhenge.

Anglo-Americans are as indigenous to the United States as the Normans or Anglo-Saxons are to Britain. A folk consciousness exists in rural areas of the American South as surely as it does in Britain, probably even more so given the leftward tilt of the British political spectrum, itself a product of urbanization.

[Barnes:] What you define as intellectualism eg Folk, Nation and Culture, are to us the antithesis of intellectualism – they are the organic realities of our everyday lives as opposed to an ideological viewpoint such as race which is rooted in abstract history and the ‘coldness’ of genetic research.

This ignores the fact that White Nationalism was an organic response to the conditions of the American frontier experience: in the wilderness of North America, the racial differences between White, Black, and Red were naturally more salient than the ethnic differences between racially homogeneous Europeans. The ideal that America was a ‘white man’s country’ emerged long before the advent of genetic science or the first attempts at scientific racialism in the late eighteenth century.

[Barnes:] We are rooted to this earth, you were torn from this earth and transplanted elsewhere – therefore you have never felt the power or beauty of an organic connection to the sacred earth of a Heimat, a homeland based on a natural and organic connection as opposed to loyalty to abstractions of history and civic nationalism.

Judging from the whiggers and chavs that now populate your country, I don’t see this organic connection to the land of which you speak so highly. Undoubtedly, it once existed in Britain (prior to the seventeenth century when ‘enclosure’ destroyed the British peasantry), but those days are long since passed. Like the Dutch, the British have been an urbanized people for over a hundred years now.

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Barnes is arguing for inclusion of non-Whites in the BNP on the basis of Culturalism (to conform to the Equality Commission). His talking point about Eastern European immigrants is nothing more than spin meant to distract attention away from the real issue (the litmus test of BNP membership). In fact, he is expanding the definition of ‘Britishness’, not narrowing it.

The neocons whinge endlessly about “culture” and “shared values” when arguing against multiculturalist liberals. They are ideologues, not ethnonationalists. Like the neocons, Barnes associates racialism with Hitler and Nazism. Barnes is saying we should accept non-Whites into our fold who ’share our values’. How is this substantially different from Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity? It’s not.

His proposal essentially substitutes neoconservatism for ethnonationalism. It treats and harps on the symptoms of our decline, not the disease itself. It proposes an electoral strategy (not a cultural one) to ultimate victory. It is founded upon the textbook conservative argument that racialists are unelectable fringe extremists and the ‘pragmatic’ thing to do is to tailor one’s message to reflect (rather than direct) public opinion. It substitutes the ethnic basis of membership for an abstract/ideological one, albeit smuggled in the Halloween costume of ‘folkishness’.

The next logical step is to water down the message even further into Geert Wilders neoconservatism: a full throated embrace of Zionism and philo-Semitism combined with an aggressive posture against Islam in the name of defending liberal values.

From Occidental Dissent, September 8, 2009