Jacques Louis David, "Leonidas at Thermopylae"

We all have natural partialities: for family over non-kin, friends over strangers, fellow countrymen over foreigners, racial brethren over members of other races. Philosophers from Aristotle to Carl Schmitt have recognized that these partialities are the heart of political life.

But most moralists eye these partialities with suspicion. Moral laws, they claim, apply to everyone, regardless of his relationship to us. Murder is wrong, whether we kill a stranger or a friend. Fairness requires that we judge a stranger by the same standards by which we judge a friend. Moral laws are universal, and that universality means that we must be impartial in all our moral judgments and dealings.

For the sake of argument I am willing to grant that moral laws are universal. But I don’t think that implies that all of our judgments and dealings must be impartial. Yes, when we have a case before a judge or arbitrator, we want him to be impartial. But do you want your parents to be impartial when deciding whether to send you or the class valedictorian to college? The most impartial judges are strangers to us. But we do not spend all our time with strangers, and kinship, friendship, and other natural bonds of affection do matter.

I grant that it is wrong to murder both strangers and friends, but surely it is worse to murder a friend. We are saddened to hear of the murder of a child. But we are horrified when we learn that the killer was the mother. We react this way, because we think that mothers should be partial to their children, and a crime that violates such natural partialities seems particularly bad. A moral philosophy that holds all murders equally heinous, regardless of these partialities, is simply absurd.

I look at ethics through a biological lens. A proposed moral principle cannot conflict with the survival of the race. Principles incompatible with survival die out along with their adherents. But there is another consideration beyond survival. There are plenty of bad ideas, foolish principles, and destructive lifestyles whose harm falls far short of killing their practitioners, or impeding their reproductive success. The only way to weed these out is to adopt as one’s standard not mere racial survival, but racial perfection. And from the point of view of racial survival and perfection, impartiality is folly.

Why is my standard the survival and flourishing of the race, not the individual? I am not an individualist, because individualism ignores the fact that we are all parts and products of biological groups: breeding populations. A race is simply a breeding population that has taken on a distinct identity because it has been geographically isolated, endogamous, and subject to unique environmental conditions for a sufficient length of time.

If the individual, not the group, is the highest value, then under no condition is it right for him to risk or sacrifice his life for the group. This means that the Spartans who fought to the last man at Thermopylae were suckers, but the man who would buy a few more years for himself by condemning the whole race to extinction is a paragon of virtue. The individual who lives only for himself, oblivious to the race that produced him and endowed him with the talents he cultivates or squanders, is a mean little creature, ungrateful to those who came before, improvident of those who will come after, if any. The isolated individual has but one life and one death. But the racially conscious individual realizes that countless forebears live on in him, and he seeks a kind of immortality for himself and them in his own posterity.

But why is the standard the survival of one’s own race and not the human race in general? If the races of man lived in harmony and had no conflicts of interest, then of course we should think of the interests of the whole human race. But we are a long way from that point, and haven’t gotten any closer during the past 50 years, despite the claims of the mass media.

The reality is: the races are at war with one another. The different human races are distinct subspecies, with distinct temperaments and talents, some of which conflict dramatically. It is an iron biological law that when two distinct subspecies try to occupy the same ecological niche in the same geographical region, there will be group conflict.

This conflict can be terminated in three ways. First, through interbreeding, which homogenizes the two subspecies into a new, distinct breed. Second, through the extermination of one group by other. Third, through the domination of one group by another.

In the case of humans, all three natural options are highly undesirable. The first two involve the destruction of one or more unique races shaped over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. The last results in a system prone to instability over the long run, as history repeatedly demonstrates.

But since we’re rational creatures, humans also have a fourth option: voluntary separation. This last option preserves racial uniqueness and eliminates interracial competition, allowing each race to shape the course of its own future.

No matter what the outcome, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson about blacks and whites in America: “two races, free and equal, cannot share the same country.” This biological law dooms all experiments in multiracial egalitarianism. The only practicable multiracial societies have been hierarchical segregated ones like Vedic India, South Africa, and the American South. But in the end, even these proved unworkable. The Indian caste system did not prevent racial admixture, while Apartheid and Southern slavery and segregation are long gone.

Everything we have seen since desegregation indicates the futility of multiracialism. Desegregation has not created the harmonious mixing of the races in freedom and equality. It has simply robbed whites of the ability to legally protect their living spaces from the incursions of other races. When these incursions occur, there is racial tension and conflict, which terminates only when whites flee and the neighborhood becomes predominantly black, or Mexican, or Asian. Those whites who remain are slowly destroyed by miscegenation or outright murder—both forms of genocide. Racial warfare will end only when groups separate from one another, or when the groups self-destruct due to miscegenation, or one group exterminates the others, or one group dominates and segregates itself from the others.

And make no mistake: America is in a state of racial war. It is no less a race war because, so far, whites are not fighting back but are in full retreat. They retreat from neighborhood to neighborhood, as one after another reaches the “tipping point” and becomes unlivable for whites. They retreat from cities to suburbs, from suburbs to exurbs, from states like California to states like Idaho and Montana. But at a certain point, there will be no place left to hide. The whole nation will reach the tipping point, and whites will finally have to stand and fight for our survival.

I hope that we stand and fight while we are still more than 60 percent of the population. Our odds of winning would be a lot higher than if we wait until our numbers slip below 50 percent.

In the midst of a race war, there can be no greater folly than impartiality, than the pious rot that “there is only one race, the human race.” Robert Frost once brilliantly described a liberal as a man who will not take his own side in a fight. In a fight to the death, such a policy is suicide.

In every transaction between a partial man and an impartial man, the impartial man is at a disadvantage. When the impartial man has a benefit to confer, the partial man appeals to the other’s impartiality and often walks off with the prize. But when the impartial man needs something from the partial man, his appeals to impartiality fall on deaf ears. As social interactions multiply, so do the partial man’s advantages at the expense of the impartial man. (The essence of the Jewish strategy of dominance is to practice ruthless partiality while urging their victims to be free of prejudice and partiality.)

Once the impartial man has nothing left to bargain with, once he has been reduced to powerlessness and penury, to what will he appeal to preserve his life and freedom? Impartiality? Universal notions of freedom and justice and rights? These are just pleading words unless one has the power to force others to respect them. But the impartial man has bargained all his power away. Pleading alone will not prevent him from being reduced to a slave or a corpse, and that is what we whites will become unless we start taking our own side, and quickly.

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

Read Part 1 here.

Two.
Faye’s Argument

Heidegger’s seminars of 1933 and 1934, in Emmanuel Faye’s view, expose the “fiction” that separates Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics. For these seminars reveal a brown-shirted fanatic who threw himself into the National Revolution, hoping to become Hitler’s philosophical mentor.

At the same time, Faye argues that Heidegger’s work in the 1920s, particularly his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), was already infected with pre-fascist ideas, just as his postwar work, however much it may have resorted to a slightly different terminology, would continue to propagate National Socialist principles.

Earlier, however, when the young Heidegger was establishing himself in the world of German academic philosophy (the 1920s), there is very little public evidence of racial or anti-Jewish bias in his work. To explain this, Faye quotes Heidegger to the effect that “he wasn’t going to say what he thought until after he became a full professor.” His reticence on these matters was especially necessary given that his “mentor,” Edmund Husserl, was Jewish and that he needed Husserl’s support to replace him at Freiburg.

(For those militant Judeophobes who might think this is somehow compromising, let me point out that Wilhelm Stapel [1882-1954], after also doing a doctorate in Husserlian phenomenology, was a Protestant, nationalist, and anti-Semitic associate of the Conservative Revolution who played an important early role in NSDAP politics.)

Faye nevertheless claims that Heidegger’s early ideas, especially those of Being and Time, were already disposed to themes and principles that were National Socialist in nature.

In Being and Time, for example, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian cogito, Kant’s transcendental analytic, Husserlian phenomenology — along with every other bloodless rationalism dominating Western thought since the 18th century — for the sake of an analysis based on “existentials” (i.e., on man’s being in the world).

Like other intellectual members of Hitler’s party, Heidegger disparaged all forms of universalist thought, dismissing not only notions of man as an individual, but notions of the human spirit as pure intellect and reason.

In repudiating universalist, humanist, and individualist thought associated with liberal modernity, Faye’s Heidegger is seen not as contesting the underlying principles of liberal modernity, which he, as a former Catholic traditionalist, thought responsible for the alienation, rootlessness, and meaninglessness of the contemporary world. Rather he is depicted as preparing the way for the “Nazi” notion of an organic national community (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial and anti-Jewish criteria.

Revealingly, this is about as far as Faye goes in treating Heidegger’s early thought. In fact, there is very little philosophical analysis at all of Being and Time or any other work in his book. Every damning criticism he makes of Heidegger is based on Heidegger’s so-called affinity with National Socialist themes or ideas — or what a liberal defending a Communist would call guilt by association.

Worse, Faye lacks any historical understanding of National Socialism, failing to see it as part of a larger anti-liberal movement that had emerged before Hitler was even born and which influenced Heidegger long before he had heard of the Führer.

For our crusading anti-fascist professor, however, the anti-liberal, anti-individualist, and anti-modern contours of Heideggerian thought are simply Hitlerian — because of their later association with Hitler’s movement — unrelated to whatever earlier influences that may have affected the development of his thought. Q.E.D.

Faye, though, fails to make the case that Heidegger’s pre-1933 thought was “Nazi,” both because he’s indifferent to Heidegger’s philosophical argument in Being and Time, which he dismisses in a series of rhetorical strokes, and, secondarily, because he doesn’t understand the historical/cultural context in which Heidegger worked out his thought.

More generally, he claims Heidegger negated “the human truths that are the underlying principle of philosophy” simply because whatever doesn’t accord with Faye’s own liberal understanding of philosophy (which, incidentally, rationalizes the radical destructurations that have come with the “Disneyfication, MacDonaldization, and globalization” of our coffee-colored world) is treated as inherently suspect.

Only on the basis of the 1933-34 and ’34-35 seminars does Faye have a case to make.

For the Winter term of 1933-34 Heidegger led a seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State.” If Faye’s account of the unpublished seminar report is accurate (and it’s hard to say given the endless exaggerations and distortions that run through his book), Heidegger outdid himself in presenting National Socialist doctrines as the philosophical basis for the new relationship that was to develop between the German people and their new state.

Like other National Socialists, Heidegger in this seminar views the “people” in völkisch terms presuming their “unity of blood and stock.”

Faye is particularly scandalized by the fact that Heidegger values the “people” (Volk) more than the “individual” and that the people, as an organic community of blood and spirit, excludes Jews and exalts its own particularity.

In this seminar, Heidegger goes even further, calling for a “Germanic state for the German nation,” extending his racial notion of the people to the political system, as he envisages the “will of the people” as finding embodiment in the will of the state’s leader (Führer).

Faye contends that people and state exist for Heidegger in the same relation as beings exist in relation to Being.

As such, Heidegger links ontology to politics, as the “question of all questions” (the “question of being”) is identified with the question of Germany’s political destiny.

Heidegger’s rejection of the humanist notion of the individual and of Enlightenment universalism in his treatment of Volk and Staat are, Faye thinks, synonymous with Hitlerism.

Though Faye’s argument here is more credible, it might also be pointed out that Heidegger’s privileging of the national community over the interests and freedoms of the individual has a long genealogy in German thought (unlike Anglo-American thought, which privileges the rational individual seeking to maximize his self-interest in the market).

The second seminar, in the Winter term of 1934-35, “On the State: Hegel,” again supports Faye’s case that Heidegger was essentially a “Nazi” propagandist and not a true philosopher. For in this seminar, he affirms the spirit of the new National Socialist state in Hegelian terms, spreading the “racist and human-life destroying conceptions that make up the foundations of Hitlerism.”

In both courses, Faye sees Heidegger associating and merging philosophy with National Socialism.

For this reason, his work ought not to be considered a philosophy at all, but rather a noxious political ideology.

Faye, in fact, cannot understand how Heidegger’s insidious project has managed to “procure a planetary public” or why he is so widely accepted as a great philosopher.

Apparently, Heidegger had the power to seduce the public — though on the basis of Faye’s account, it’s difficult to see how the political hack he describes could have pulled this off.

In any case, Faye warns that if Heidegger isn’t exposed for the political charlatan he is, terrible things are again possible. “Hitlerism and Nazism will continue to germinate through Heidegger’s writings at the risk of spawning new attempts at the complete destruction of thought and the extermination of humankind.”

To be continued . . .

Atlas Shrugged

Her most famous sentence from the esssay is the first one. “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” She goes on to say:

It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.

Not ascribing moral significance to a man’s genetic line would of course lead one to reject the concept of a family, which the old girl precedes to do.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) — the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) — the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law — the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history — all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”

Rand goes on to bash both white Southerners and blacks who demanded quotas as she calls the civil rights bill “the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.” If a battle against racism is to be waged, it should be through social ostracism or economic boycotts.

I don’t remember Rand ever directly addressing the family. Here she is on page 972 of the hardcover 35th anniversary edition of Atlas Shrugged, as tycoon Henry Reardon parts ways with his collectivist family.

They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached. They did not know — and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge — that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of every doubt, was now turned against them — that the same force that had made him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless — that the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

“Henry, don’t you understand us?” his mother was pleading.

“I do,” he said quietly.

She looked away, avoiding the clarity of his eyes. “Don’t you care what becomes of us?”

“I don’t.”

“Aren’t you human?” Her voice grew shrill with anger. “Aren’t you capable of any love at all? It’s your heart that I’m trying to reach, not your mind! Love is not something to argue and reason and bargain about! It’s something to give! To feel! Oh God, Henry, can’t you feel without thinking?”

“I never have.”

An internet search of “Rand on the family” turned up nothing. Her views on everything are found in the book The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z. The fact that one has to search hard for her opinion about the most fundamental institution in history betrays a weakness in her thought.

If Rand ever admitted to the legitimacy of loyalty to the family, she would be forced to approve of one preferring his own race. Like the family, racialism is justified from the perspective of genetic interests and their manifestation in inherent preferences.

From HBD Books

In a way, libertarianism’s greatest success is in dealing with a very important group — government — by pointing out that social happiness is generally proportional to the extent to which the government keeps its nose out of the business of the citizens. But libertarians virtually ignore the political impact of all other groups, and in particular have failed to heed Lord Acton’s injunction that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And although I am certainly no fan of the Left, it is clear that the Left has a far better grip on reality than the libertarians with respect to Acton’s observation, since the Left long ago recognized the danger which corporations pose to the body politic.

So what then are the groups on the political landscape which libertarians ignore? They include groups with a financial interest in politics (corporations, labor unions), groups with a racial, ethnic, sexual, or similar interest (blacks, Jews, homosexuals) and those with other specialized interests (gun control, gun rights, anti-censorship, anti-porn, medical freedom, etc). Such groups are not limited to lobbying organizations, but include any type of organization that has political clout.

Actually, it is not quite right to say that libertarians ignore these groups, since libertarians probably do direct mail solicitations to many of them. But what libertarians fail to appreciate is that it makes far more sense to view the political game as having these groups as the players, rather than the vaunted “individual” with which libertarians are so enamored. The problem, however, is not just that libertarians organize their political perceptions poorly. Rather it is that their focus on the individual keeps them from seeing how the political process works, and thus prevents them from being an effective part of it, and in addition has caused them to embrace propositions which directly contradict basic libertarian principles.

To explain, we begin by noting that the essence of the American political process — at least as it involves legislative activity — is not what the Founders conceived it to be (and what most libertarians seem to think it is), namely, the reflective consideration of what constitutes the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead, the political process may be summarized in one simple phrase: paying off the (few very wealthy) individuals who supply substantial money and the constituencies who supply both substantial money and substantial votes. And who are the constituencies? Very simply, they are the groups which libertarians ignore, and which constitute the major players in the political process. And what is more, such groups are the driving forces behind the types of legislation that libertarians hate: welfare is driven by the black block vote; the largest recipient of foreign aid is Israel, driven by the notoriously-powerful Israeli lobby; laws hindering business are driven by labor unions; dumbed-down federalized education is driven by teachers’ unions; restrictions on alternative medicine are driven by medical organizations and drug manufacturers; affirmative action is driven by large companies seeking to hurt their smaller competition for whom such programs are a greater proportional burden; drug laws are driven by anti-freedom groups and the enforcement bureaucracies, and so on.

But even more important than the libertarian blind spot on groups is the fact mentioned above that ignoring groups has caused libertarians to violate fundamental libertarian principles. To explain, we note that libertarians are enthusiastic advocates of private property, and apparently have no objection to multiple-owner property such as condominiums or stockholder-owned corporations. So logically it would seem they would agree with the notion that countries are owned by their citizens, and may rightfully be defended by force from invaders and other trespassers. And yet we hear no end of libertarians who sing the praises of “open borders” and unlimited immigration.

Which, to put it kindly, is illogical. And also insane.

The insanity springs from what in philosophy is known as reductionism, i.e., the belief that the whole is just the simple sum of its parts. The reductionist, then, holds that a country is just a bunch of disconnected individuals, hopefully libertarians.

But this is foolish. A country is not a disconnected bunch of individuals, no matter how much libertarians think they are disconnected from everything except the Internet. It is a group of people who share a language and culture, with the result that their values are similar, and their desire to live together in the same geographic location is considerable. In Sir Walter Scott’s words:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
“This is my own, my native land”?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned
As homeward his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there be, go mark him well:
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High tho his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power and pelf,
The wretch concentered all in self;
Living, shall forfeit fair renown
And doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored and unsung.

Love of country, like love of one’s mate or one’s family, is often not well-perceived until separation. But it is real and palpable, and it has driven men since the dawn of time, as it drives them today. So for that overeducated clique of highbrow deep-thinkers known as libertarians to simply toss this emotion into the intellectual wastebasket as if it were somehow irrelevant to social order is fatuity raised to the nth degree.

Love of country, like love of family, depends on one element more than any other: likeness. One’s countrymen are like oneself in language and culture, just as one’s family is like oneself in genetic relationship. In fact, this notion is so basic as to be rooted in our very language, and not just once, but twice: we like those whom we are like, and we are kind to those of our own kind.

And one of those elements of likeness is race. It is not the only likeness — language and culture are also likenesses — and it may not be crucial in all cases to regarding someone as one’s countryman, but it is clearly important.

So what, then, is going to happen to a country which allows open borders (particularly coupled with the temptation of such freebies as welfare and Social Security), whose president celebrates the end of history for the white majority, and where the cult of multiculturalism is rammed down employers’ throats and slipped quietly into the minds of youngsters by the New World Orderlies of the Education Establishment? What will happen is very simple: The country, along with its culture and language, and probably its race, is going to dissolve.

And that, as it turns out, does not bode well for libertarians. This is because America, more than any other place on earth, has nourished the idea of individual liberty and brought it to fruition. The culture of America is the culture of liberty. But liberty-loving libertarians seem indifferent to throwing all that away. They are so enamored with corporate profits and so indifferent to the culture which has emerged from the coordinated efforts of the white European race that they are quite happy to flush the American nation down the toilet by allowing swarms of Turd- worlders to intermingle with, and eventually replace, the core American population. And even worse, sending the American nation down the tubes may in the long run turn out not to be as profitable as believed by the calculating Economic Man which libertarians have reduced human beings to; for shipping jobs overseas when American workers are too “inefficient” means the loss of an industrial base and the skills of workers who are employed in that industrial base, a situation which leaves the nation vulnerable in times of war when “free trade” is only a memory. Yes, it is perfectly true that this may result in higher prices for labor, and thus for consumer goods, but pricey goods are a small price to pay for priceless culture. Or to put the matter another way, Do libertarians really want to sell their freedom for a filthy mess of Turd-world free-trade pottage?

Part of the open-borders/free-trade problem is that libertarians recognize that, without the temptation of government handouts, immigrants who come here would be those who want to work, and would therefore — at least from an economic standpoint — be good for the country. But this fact still doesn’t change the culture argument against open borders, or the reality of immigration as it is now going on. Nor does it change the fact that, if the lower-status jobs which immigrants usually take cannot be filled, this will generate pressure for mechanization and automation which will have a long-term beneficial economic effect.

We spoke earlier about the libertarian blind spot about race, and it is only fair to mention that this blind spot is partly the result of the desire on the part of libertarians to be regarded as “tolerant”. And while we may acknowledge this as a nobly-intentioned sentiment, the ugly fact is that we are all racists. We are racists because evolution has made it instinctive for every living thing to love its own kind — and what is racism but the love of one’s own kind? How fatuous it is to think that we are morally obligated to toss out the product of a billion years of evolution in order to keep from being guilty of a sin which was regarded as a virtue till only yesterday!

The reason evolution has made racism instinctive is that group membership helps the individual to survive. Groups give the individual members protection against other rival groups — and if you don’t believe it, just arrange for a sojurn in one of our multicultural prisons. So for libertarians to ignore man’s racial nature — to say nothing of the fact that the notion of individual liberty is a product of white European culture — is both unscientific and — if I may say so — suicidal.

In conclusion, if libertarians are realistic enough to admit — and indeed to celebrate — man’s selfish nature, isn’t it time that they admitted and celebrated his racial nature as well? Or maybe all they need to do is realize that an interest in their race is really a selfish interest.

From http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Lbtn/Lbtn-LibertBlindSpot.html. The author’s other writings on libertarianism can be found at: http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Index-Libertarian.html.

Libertarians tend to think in abstract terms. They have all sorts of theories about government, economics, and ethics. I’m impressed less by their abstractions and more persuaded by the empirical results that follow their implementation.

We’ve tried almost everything the libertarians recommend over the course of American history: the gold standard, multiple currencies, financial deregulation, private roads/railroads, absence of the Federal Reserve, absence of the income tax, cutting back government bureaucracy, legalization of drugs, laissez-faire capitalism, international free trade, federalism/small government, expansion of civil liberties, neutering the state, deunionization, no Social Security, no Medicare/Medicaid, no Earned Income Tax Credit, no welfare system, no minimum wage or collective bargaining, no workplace safety standards, dispensing with virtue ethics, private schools, etc. We have a vast well of experience with radical liberty to draw upon. Yet the libertarians always seem to prefer their abstract arguments and deductive reasoning to historical ones. Why is that?

We know how free market laissez-faire capitalism ends: in vast concentrations of wealth (land and capital) in the hands of a privileged few, huge multinational corporations that tower over the remaining small businesses, monopolies and cartels, private transportation systems that suck every penny out of the common man, race replacement through ‘cheap labor’ immigration, a radicalized, uneducated and degraded proletariat constantly engaged in strikes and riots and infected with Marxism, environmental degradation, financial panics and depression, shortage of credit, depressed wages, a plutocratic elite that buys elections and corrupts the political system with its largess. It was a good system for the wealthiest few who didn’t use public services, at least for a while, until the top heavy economy periodically collapsed under its own weight in the inevitable cyclical depression.

The system is inherently unstable for both labor and capital and gave rise to the very social forces which succeeded in undermining and overthrowing it. If by some chance we ever were to return to Gilded Age conditions, history would unfold again in much the same way. It is worth noting that this is the degenerate condition that millions of Jewish immigrants found Americans in when they arrived on our shores. Their arrival in the New World was part of the ‘cheap labor’ glut that flowed out of Eastern and Southern Europe into Northern industry at the time. The Jews would later climb the same ladder into the American plutocracy used by J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford.

Aside from the small faction of libertarian ideologues, there is no constituency for returning to the  days of the Robber Barons. The working class justifiably balks at surrendering the handful of concessions won from Capital over the past hundred years. The middle class, still reeling from ‘free trade,’ clamors for ever more public services (which Obama promises to deliver). Even the wealthy realize that a managed economy is ultimately in their interest. It stifles labor militancy and the growth of radical class-based redistributionist movements. The government is also useful (as in the Panic of ’08) when it pulls their collective chestnuts out of the fire.

White Nationalists support ending non-White immigration and deporting the non-White labor force already in the United States. In doing so, we have earned the implacable hostility of the business community; both small businesses and multinational corporations alike depend on their non-White helots. We’re proposing a permanent and radical increase in the price of labor that will bankrupt any number of businesses. The only way forward to the White ethnostate is through a knife fight to the death with the pro-business lobby and the ethnic grievance organizations that are allied to them. That’s not a fight we can possibly win with a libertarian economic agenda that will alienate the working class and lower middle class.

Once the beast is subdued (the cheap labor lobby and its hangers on), White Nationalists will have to be permanently on guard to ensure it never rises from the dead. As you note, this could involve constitutional measures, draconian penalties for racial treason, a permanent class or religious order of “Defenders” charged with the responsibility of overseeing the culture and economy, a national academy to train the “Defenders,” government control of the media, public schools that indoctrinate our youth in the racial ideal, or some combination the above. Whatever the case, the salient point is that a transition to a White Nationalist ethnostate (a process likely to take generations) will require authoritarian measures which run against the grain of libertarianism, and probably not solely on a temporary basis.

Indeed, there is nothing “libertarian” at all about what we are proposing to do: overthrowing civic institutions and replacing them with a new Blut und Boden racial order, mass violations of sacrosanct individual rights and property rights, engaging in ‘aggression’ against sovereign individuals in the name of collectivism, engaging in racial and religious intolerance, imposing ethical and aesthetic standards on a libertine populace, etc. A true libertarian (whose mind is governed by universal abstractions) would never entertain such measures. In many ways, the White Nationalist worldview (based solely on collective self interest, not high-minded universal principles) is the polar opposite of libertarianism and the other species of liberalism.

If you really think about it, libertarianism has no future in a White Nationalist ethnostate. In selecting our form of government, our primary concern must be the nature of our elite, not the ‘rights’ of individuals. After a successful revolutionary struggle, I seriously doubt White Nationalists will want to go back to the days when America was governed by a shallow Judeo-Capitalist plutocracy whose primary qualification to rule was their ability to make money. Social mobility will have to be organized on some other basis than the Horatio Alger myth; perhaps along the lines of the “essentially religious civil servants” you described above. At a minimum, this would require a highly regulated economy, not the laissez-faire free market favored by libertarians.

Most importantly, the status system will have to be forever severed from the market economy, which is another blow against libertarianism. We’ve seen the mischief the advertising industry has caused by creating artificial needs and instilling sick materialistic values in the masses. This is closely linked to the low White birthrate, racial nihilism, and popularity of contraception and abortion in the West. You’ve already mentioned that status must be linked to values like duty, honor, and self-sacrifice in the new system. I would go beyond that and argue for a return to virtue ethics in your Home School curriculum. We need to move beyond the silly expressivist notion that each child should be allowed to nurture his own individuality. From our perspective, some values are manifestly superior to others.

In a White ethnostate, ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ would be knocked off the pedestal they now occupy in contemporary political discourse. More important considerations like community and the preservation of our genetic integrity would rise to the fore and take precedence. I seriously doubt we would break wholly with the tradition of individual rights or basic republican equality before the law. The old values would still have their place, but they would no longer be considered absolute, center stage, or universally applicable to all races. The market economy is also another likely survivor, albeit in a form unrecognizable to the one we are familiar with today.

I will stop short of saying that pro-Whites need an entirely new political philosophy. We don’t need to establish a new set of (false) universal principles which could later be invoked to sabotage our racial interests. Instead, we should take our direction from art and literature that reflect our racial ideals, and adopt a critical posture towards all systemizers and their fetish for abstractions.

The winner of the first TOQ essay contest, on “Secession,” will be announced on August 1st, not July 1st as originally announced. We thank the entrants for their patience.

is section no. 39 of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols.

39. Critique of modernity. — Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good enough for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power: in Human, All-Too-Human (I, 472) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its hybrids such as the “German Reich,” as the form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum. When this will is present, something like the imperium Romanum is founded; or like Russia, the only power today which has endurance, which can wait, which can still promise something — Russia, the concept that suggests the opposite of the wretched European nervousness and system of small states, which has entered a critical phase with the founding of the German Reich.

The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called “freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the word “authority” is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end.

Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband’s sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on “love” — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.

Jared Taylor

Lost in Justin Raimondo’s torrent of mistaken assumptions and wild accusations is one useful question: What do “white nationalists” want? By putting the term in quotation marks, Mr. Raimondo has stumbled onto an important truth, namely, that there is no accepted term for contemporary Americans who still hold some of the views about race that were taken for granted by virtually all Americans until about the 1950s.

Until then, most people believed race was an important aspect of individual and group identity. They believed that the races differed in temperament and ability, and whites preferred the societies built by whites to those built by non-whites. They wanted the United States to be peopled by Europeans because they believed only people of European stock would maintain the civilization they valued. These views were so wide-spread, so taken for granted, so indisputable that there was no term for them. Just as there was no name for people who expected the sun to rise in the East, there was no name for people whose views are today sometimes given the clumsy term “white nationalism.”

The national-origins immigration policy that lasted until 1965 embodied this basic understanding of race. As one of the supporters of that policy, Congressman William Vaile of Colorado explained in 1924, “[the United States] is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different.” I might add that even if this sentiment shocks Americans today, it is exactly the view of their own country held by virtually every Japanese, Israeli, or Mexican. . . . More