By Hunter Wallace | 11 Comments | 
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Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics
Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream
The book tracks the evolution of old fashioned Jim Crow “white supremacy” into modern White Nationalism over a thirty year period. In presenting his case, Zeskind draws an analytical division between “vanguardists” and “mainstreamers,” radicals and respectables, reformers and revolutionaries that has characterized the modern pro-White movement since its earliest days.
The “mainstreamers” believe in moderation and an electoral path to victory. The vanguardists believe in creating small, often violent organizations of the elect few and waiting for a general social/economic collapse. Throughout the narrative, Zeskind uses the stories of William Pierce (revolutionary) and Willis Carto (reformer) to illustrate these two conflicting tendencies within the movement.
Blood and Politics is comprehensive in scope. Zeskind runs through every imaginable sector of the pro-White movement: Klan, Neo-Nazi, Creator, Christian Identity (one-seed and dual-seed), Christian patriot, Neo-Confederate, White Nationalist, Council of Conservative Citizens, skinhead, revisionist, militia/paramilitary, underground terrorist, paleocon, race realist, and populist. He does an excellent job of illustrating how racialists drift through one or more of these cross-pollinating subcultures. Everyone from Francis Parker Yockey and Louis Beam to Tim McVeigh and Erich Gliebe is mentioned at some point or another.
For an Ashkenazi Jew, I dare say that Blood and Politics is objective in tone, almost scholarly even. To be sure, Zeskind writes in a Jewish anti-racist voice and can’t resist the occasional humanist quip, but his account of the White Nationalist movement is surprisingly free of the usual boilerplate. I found it informative, profited from reading it, and expect others will as well. If I had to level any specific criticism, I would say that Zeskind sacrifices depth for scope. He skips around from one sector of the movement to another in two or three pages.
The Gen Y racialist will find Blood and Politics somewhat familiar, yet profoundly alien. This is very much the history of another generation of racialists: its leaders, organizations, strategies, rhetoric, feuds, triumphs and tragedies. Over the past few months, I found myself picking it up and putting it back down. I immediately read the few bits that interested me: Duke’s political campaigns, Taylor and Amren, Pierce and the National Alliance, The Bell Curve controversy, Buchanan and Sam Francis. I had to force myself to read the parts that did not. Later, I reflected on my new interest in sectors of the movement I had previously ignored.
Have you ever heard of “leaderless resistance” before? Have you ever seen racialists using strange numeric codes like 14/88 or 33/5? What about acronyms like “Z.O.G.” and “O.R.I.O.N.” or slogans like “White Pride World Wide” and ”RAWOHA?” Have you ever heard vague references to the Fort Smith trial, the Northwest territorial imperative, or a gang of Aryan bankrobbers known as The Order? Can you explain the difference between one-seed and dual-seedline Christian Identity? In Blood and Politics, you will learn all about this and much more.
Be warned. This is not a story about the last decade. The internet hardly figures at all into Zeskind’s narrative. Blood and Politics has sixty chapters, but not a single one about Stormfront, the largest website in the movement. Instead, Zeskind focuses on Don Black in his days as a Klansman, the jail time he served for plotting the invasion of Dominica, and his role in the defunct Populist Party. Alex Linder and VNN are nowhere to be found, but Glenn Miller and the White Patriot Party are discussed at length. There is no mention of Kevin MacDonald. The proliferation of vBulletin discussion forums in the 2000s — the critical nodal point for Gen Y contact with the White Nationalist movement — is also ignored.
Blood and Politics is not about us. We were teenagers in the Clinton years. Under George W. Bush, we went to college, developed political opinions, graduated and entered the workforce. Some of us admired Dr. Pierce and tuned into ADV radio broadcasts. A few of us joined the National Alliance in its final days as a viable organization. We frequently read Pat Buchanan, Steve Sailer and Sam Francis at VDARE, created or joined online racialist forums, tuned into and laughed at Goyfire, subscribed to American Renaissance or The Occidental Quarterly, but never followed the travails of Willis Carto. We tend to be white collar atheists or pagans with an HBD-informed view of racial differences and a Kevin MacDonald take on the Jewish Question.
To say the least, this period of movement history (1974 – 2004) is strange, but important seeds were sown in this bleak period. I can’t resist comparing it to the Dark Ages. In a manner of speaking, it followed the Roman Empire but preceded the Renaissance. I think of David Lane who considered himself a latter day Viking, or Robert Miles, Louis Beam and Tom Metzger who thought Whites were over-civilized and could use a little Aryan barbarism. The violent, tattooed, beer soaked skinheads (the barbarians) represented a tremendous decline from courtly Southern segregationists (Roman patricians). Racialist discourse degenerated like Old Latin into dire warnings about black helicopters, the New World Order, and “Z.O.G.” From Race and Reason to the Aryan Nations theory that Jews are the genetic spawn of Satan to The Bell Curve. That’s the theme of Blood and Politics.
But there is another side of the story. In 1972, Wilmot Robertson published The Dispossessed Majority, a path-breaking work that pointed the way forward. In 1992, he published The Ethnostate, a seminal contribution to an emerging White Nationalism. Revilo P. Oliver was active in this period. Dr. Pierce thundered against the Jews from a West Virginia mountainside. David Duke encouraged his followers to ditch their Klan robes and Stormtrooper uniforms. Jared Taylor appeared on the scene and restored a little class and literacy to the pro-White movement. Herrnstein and Murray picked up Carleton Putnam’s baton.
The vanguardists made their own contributions. In Blood and Politics, you will read about the Posse Comitatus and Nehemiah Township, an attempt to carve out a White ethnostate in North Dakota. Bob Mathews and The Order shed blood for the ideal of a Aryan nation in the Northwest. William Pierce and the National Alliance pushed the ideal of an exclusive White ethnostate. In fact, “White Nationalism” owes more to its ruder beginnings in Aryan Nations literature and The Turner Diaries inspired bankrobbers than to Jared Taylor’s polished suit and tie crowd. We can’t ignore this part of our heritage.
If the past was reminiscent of the Dark Ages, White Nationalism has since settled into its High Medieval period. The interregnum is over. We have raised a few institutions that are like beautiful Medieval cathedrals. We have established a small network of discursive spaces that are like the first universities. We have a powerful new genomics based theory of race and and a new general theory of anti-Semitism that draws upon sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
I foresee a period of growth and maturity ahead. The sheets and costume crowd are fading out. The old leaders are aging and dying off. Their version of racial discourse will pass away with them. In the next decade, I think a mass membership White advocacy organization will finally emerge for sane and normal people. The cultural ground has been prepared for it.
The field is wide open to a new generation of racialists willing to make their mark. Three decades from now, the sequel to Blood and Politics ought to prove interesting than the original. I think Mr. Zeskind will be following many of us in the years to come.
Read Jonathan Pyle’s review of Blood and Politics here.
Thank you for this review, I will definitely read the book.
What do you mean by “HBD-informed”?
HBD = Human Bio-Diversity, i.e., biological race and sex differences.
Excellent essay. I particularly liked your analogy with Western history. I have been very impressed with how the WN movement has grown up from something I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole into an intellectually vigourous counterculture.
A few reasons for optimism:
1.) I predict advances in genetics will deepen our understanding of racial differences. The data will undermine the scientific legitimacy of Boasian style anti-racism. This information will continue to trickle down into the minds of educated people. I think HBD could go mainstream. It has the potential to become “common knowledge.”
2.) In the decade ahead, what will Kevin MacDonald do with his time? I can only see him deepening his analysis of Jewish influence in destructive social and political movements. He has a strong foundation to build upon.
3.) Kevin MacDonald has a small staff now. He has created the nucleus of a group with enormous potential. In terms of theory, imagine where we will be in ten years.
4.) Four years ago, friedrich braun floated the idea of creating a multicontributor blog that would include daily commentary from the brightest minds in White Nationalism. We now have that in TOQ Online and TOO Blog. Finally, it is a reality.
5.) White Nationalists are taking their first steps into radio. Jim Giles has a regular radio show. Dietrich has Voice of Reason. James Edwards has The Political Cesspool. Ten years from now, I predict WN talk radio will be widespread and taken for granted.
6.) Craig Bodeker has created an excellent documentary about race. This is a model for others to build upon. YouTube can bring WN video and racialist commentary to millions for little cost.
7.) America’s immigration problem will only get worse. The Republicans will be under constant pressure to appease the growing Hispanic electorate. As the mainstream moves to the Left, a huge cross section of the Right will be pushed beyond the borders of respectability. This could possibly give us our first mass constituency.
8.) The internet isn’t going away. The print media is also drying up. Young people rely on the net to get the news. Ten years from now, the young will be middle aged, and the generations that follow will rely even more on the net. White Americans will find themselves in ever closer proximity to our ideas.
9.) Ten years from now, the new rhetoric of race and anti-Semitism will have completely replaced the old within the WN movement. The process is already well underway. The popular stereotypes found in the media will be ever more out of sync with reality. The improvement in our public image will result in more recruits.
10.) The influx of new supporters will reinforce the “mainstreamer” tendency. Suits and ties will be the norm. Costumes will be a thing of the past. The old rhetoric will be gone. Dysfunctional types will be nowhere near as prominent. Many of the issues that are debated today will have long been resolved.
11.) The cultural ground has been prepared for a mass membership activist organization. In the next decade, I predict it will finally emerge. Someone will finally do it. The number of sane and normal people will reach a critical mass and will demand action. The Feds won’t be able to shut it down because everyone involved will be ordinary concerned citizens exercising their rights.
12.) The vanguard or spearhead of this social movement is already emerging. You can see it happening here at TOQ Online and at Occidental Observer. Ten years from now, the movement won’t be divided between “mainstreamers” and “vanguardists.” This will be a thing of the past.
Just a bit of a personal anecdote, I’m 20 years old and became an ardent racialist when I was 14-15 when I stumbled upon SF; it just clicked with me. Obviously I’m part of the Gen Y racialist scene. However, the various wheelings and dealings in the Dark Ages are familiar to me due to the reminiscing of the old fellas on SF. My first impressions of the Movement was that it was full of people that spent all their time behind their screens and oldies talking fondly of the good ol’ days criticising us young’uns.
Take a look at the comments section on the re-post on AmRen of this review… People going as far as saying that anti-Semitism based on sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is pseudo-scientific! Jew appeasers belonging to the last years of the Dark Ages telling us Gen Yers how to get it done… Hrmm, if something hasn’t worked in the past 10-20 years, why will it work now? One thing I can’t stand is for people that have been involved in the Struggle for 30+ years [of failure] telling us, who are seeing results after 5-10 years of activism, how to get things done!
I agree with every one of the above points [by Hunter Wallace]. The division of Mainstreamer and Vanguardist has become an irrelevancy, and most people are catching onto this, mostly. It is like Left and Right, we on the philosophical Right are the political Left. All the old terms are redundant, only those scared of what’s to come still cling to such things.
Great analogy with western culture. I especially liked the cathedral metaphor. I think that metaphor is an apt one for the western mind in general. Many generations sacrificing and building toward their best idea of truth — something “mighty and sublime” to “leave behind to conquer time” as Goethe said. It is a repeating theme in western minds and cultures. We build things which allow us all to benefit and have a greater future.
Western freedom is like this — through the “thing” meeting of equals in viking society to the magna carta to the modern constitution and congress of today… so is western science — where thousands have sacrificed and toiled their whole lives to build a great edifice of shining knowledge. From religious monks with their pea plants to today’s great genome project (the apparent epitome of all science) we build for the future. Before ww2 and the consequent political and special-interest destruction of racial and genetic though, all our nations were beginning programs of eugenics for the same reasons (which I show in my book might be the real reason for and epitome of all science and technology). Our periodic table of the elements is a real, living cathedral to the creator of the universe built by many, whatever the “creator” is in truth.
Our personality as a people comes out in these things — ever moving forward to greater works, never backing down off the mountains we climb. We build things which facilitate further building too — we bootstrap ourselves with an uncanny and bold knack for seeing a path to a glorious future, like sir Edmund Hilary assessing a path up Everest… Or Englishmen laying depots for a trek across Antarctica… We MUST preserve this legacy, we MUST defend our people from dissolution on all fronts by the Jewish desire for power and money. WE are the real vanguard of the future, WE hold the torch of the creator in our delicate racial souls and our vision and personality as a people. I expand on this theme in great detail in my book “The Textbook of the Universe: The Genetic Ascent to God”.
As for William Pierce, he was truly a great man. He understood our plight better than most, and was very intelligent, thorough in research, and eloquent. There should be no division of “vanguardists” and the rest of us. He was a leader for all to admire, even if we do not agree 100% with his plans of action. He was a former physics professor who left academia to save his people. We invented the cathedrals of learning we call universities. He knew that his career there was nothing but selfish if he did not try to defend the very soul of the people and their path that made our great school systems toward a better future. A cathedral without the creator, a school without truth, is like a body without a soul. It is all for nothing, it lacks purpose if we build it knowing it will fall because of a serious flaw, if it’s vision or path is compromised by base desire and urges or anything else. All that motivates us in truth is this higher yearning, higher unselfish and self-sacrificial morality of the higher path. It is both a vision and a great love of this universe, this life, and the forces which made it that drives us. Cathedrals all, and pilgrims all are we. There is no division. We are one people, there are soldiers, there are generals, there are women and there are children, but we are ONE.
William Pierce was extremely intelligent and well educated. He was a man of principle and conviction. He was total contrast to the fakery that goes on in mainstream Republican and Democratic circles.
The comparison with the “Dark Age” is particularly inept. Even the use of the concept “Dark Age” is liberal masonic metapolitics. A vulgar view on history is roughly this: Rome=good, Time between Rome and Renaissance=Bad and dark, 1789, constitutions, various splitting wars of independence=Good etc.
Consider instead what actually happened during the so called “Dark Ages”, which were actually quite Light. The European people grow enormously in number, organized and build fantastic empires, monarchies, cities, founded universities, monasteries, organized advanced trade routes, built infrastructure that connected all Europe, conquered territories, cultivated the land, bred fantastic lines of aristocracies. Vigorously defended Europe against all external threats coming from the Mohammedans, the Huns, the Mongolians, the Jews and so forth.
The Jews were not a significant pan-Western player until 1789. (True, they were locally strong in places such as Spain before the Reconquista and they had some influence during the splitting between Catholicism and Protestantism, the Jews helped fund various Protestant revolts of course).
The Old Catholic Europe had no problem keeping them at bay. They know this of course, whence their unrestricted hatred of traditional Catholicism and their active defense of Vaticanum II.
From 1789 and onward we see the rise of Jewish banking families and the mass destruction of hereditary holy empires, preposterous ideas that societies can be axiomatized through constitutions — rather than grow organically: enter the Abstract Individual, and the rise of tribal petty nationalism that culminated with the 20:th century disaster, the Second 30 years war.
Don’t buy into liberal Enlightenment metapolitics and ideas of the “Dark Age”!
Wodinaz,
Your suggestion that the term ‘Dark Ages’ is used to denote the entire time span between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance is unfounded. Mainstream scholarship on European medieval history splits the Middle Ages, roughly, in two parts. Only the first period, between the end of Rome and the coronation of Charlemagne is referred to as the Dark Ages. The second period, between 1000 and 1500 is considered the High Middle Ages. The great accomplishments that you speak of, such as universities, a booming economy and growing population all took place in this second period. Their was actually somewhat of a renaissance in the twelfth century.
Anyway, Hunter is the real expert here when it comes to European history. I’m just recycling what I learned from him (although I did read Cantor). He could tell it much better.
I have a minor quibble–a quibble of wording and emphasis rather than of ideas–with Hunter Wallace’s list of reasons for optimism. The word “voluntarism” is preferable to “optimism.” Conditions in the future may indeed favour White nationalism, but only if White nationalists are prepared to exploit them.
We should heed the words of Denis Gabor: “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” It is imperative that White nationalists invent futures for themselves by creating a culture that inspires, guides, and supports effective activity.
The development of the media and the changes in media usage that Wallace enumerates should not encourage undue optimism. New media and technologies help to level the playing field by reducing some of the costs of producing and distributing media. However, White nationalists need to play competitively if they are to win the cultural struggle. If White nationalists are not to indulge in vanity publishing, they must use their media in an increasingly professional manner, which means that they must develop strategies, enterprises, and people towards this end. Among other things, this means producing print and electronic media to professional standards. It will be necessary to invest in enterprises and people working towards this end.
Yet professionalism is not enough. I have examined a few newspapers published by various communist sects. The technical quality of these newspapers (by which I refer to the quality of their writing, editing, design, and printing, as distinct from the quality of their ideas) is often quite good and helps explains why some members of these sects have gone on to work as editors and journalists of mainstream newspapers. These newspapers show what an active minority can and cannot do. Despite their small size and small audience, these sects have been able to produce sophisticated media to professional standards (it is not for nothing that one book on journalism is titled “The Daily Miracle”), but they have been unable to make the unmarketable marketable.
White nationalists need doctrines and media genuinely adapted to the times in which they live.
Wallace might want to discuss the culture of White nationalism in his future writings. I think this culture needs to embody the norms described by Eric D. Beinhocker below, namely individual responsibility, social solidarity, creative activity, and a strong future orientation. They are just as relevant to political development as to economic development:
“The multibillion-dollar question then is, which norms support economic development, and which norms don’t? Much research remains to be done in this area, but various researchers . . . have proposed typologies of cultural rules. . . .
“In the first category are norms related to individual behavior. These include norms that support a strong work ethic, individual accountability, and a belief that you are the protagonist of your own life and not at the whim of gods or Big Men. Fatalism greatly reduces personal incentives. It is also important to believe that there is a payoff to hard work and a moral life in this world, and not just in the next. Finally, economically successful cultures appear to strike a balance between optimism that improvement is possible, and realism about one’s current situation.
“In the second category are norms related to cooperative behavior. Foremost is a belief that life is a non-zero-sum game and that there are payoffs to cooperation. Societies that believe in a fixed pie of wealth have a difficult time engendering cooperation and tend to be low in mutual trust. Consistent with our discussion of strong reciprocity, it is important that the culture have norms that value generosity and fairness, but also sanction those who free ride and cheat.
“The third category contains norms related to innovation. Deductive tinkering is much more effective if the deductive part is strong, and those cultures that look to rational scientific explanations of the world rather than religious or magical explanations tend to be more innovative. Likewise, a culture needs to be tolerant of heresy and experimentation, as strict orthodoxy stifles innovation. Finally, it is important that the culture be supportive of competition and celebrate achievement, since overly egalitarian cultures reduce the incentives for risk taking.
“One final norm is important to all three categories: how people view time. Cultures that live for today (or, conversely, are mired in the past) have problems across the board, ranging from low work ethic, to an inability to engage in complex cooperation and low levels of investment in innovation. Why work hard, and invest in cooperation and innovation if tomorrow doesn’t matter? In contrast, cultures that have an ethic of investing for tomorrow tend to value work, have high intergenerational saving rates, demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasures for long-term gain, and enjoy high levels of cooperation.” (Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, London, Random House, 2007, pp. 430-431.)