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

Quotes:

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” said Golda Meir. When she said it, she may have been right. But as generations have grown up under the occupation and two intifadas and a Gaza War, the Palestinians are a people today.

Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other.

Obama in the campaign of 2008 recognized that “out there” in Middle America existed another country, far from the one he grew up in, far from the privileged Ivy League community to which he belonged.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and … the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. … So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

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.

Sioux gather at Little Bighorn to celebrate the massacre of Custer’s command. Hawaiian natives demand a new ethnically based government — and receive Obama’s blessing. Hispanics march under Mexican flags in Los Angeles to demand citizenship for illegal aliens.

Now Southerners are proudly commemorating ancestors who fought and fell in the Lost Cause and demanding recognition of Confederate History Month. And state governors are acceding.

In 2004, when Howard Dean reached out to “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” Shelby Steele wrote that this was “absolutely verboten. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America” because of their history and white guilt.

This, Sanneh suggests, is changing. The imputation of racism to Tea Partiers has not intimidated or cowed them.

When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, there was no hesitation in blistering her for showing contempt for the rights of Frank Ricci and the white firefighters of New Haven, cheated of the promotions they had won in competitive exams.

When black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by Cambridge cop James Crowley, most Americans, despite Obama and media suggestions of racial profiling, sided with Crowley.

Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?

First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.

Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Christ. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.

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.

Read the whole article here.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, most Americans likely had never heard of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan.

Yet the ethnonationalism of these Asian peoples, boiling to the surface after centuries of tsarist and communist repression, helped tear apart one of the great empires of history.

There swiftly followed the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Yet, if one knew nothing of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires or the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, one would likely have been surprised by the sudden emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo on the map of Europe.

What the splintering of the Soviet Union and of a Yugoslavia whose baptismal certificate dated to the Paris peace conference of 1919 revealed was the accuracy of Arthur Schlesinger’s insight in his 1991 Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society:

“Nationalism remains after two centuries the most vital political emotion in the world — far more vital than social ideologies such a communism or fascism or even democracy. … Within nation-states, nationalism takes the form of ethnicity or tribalism.”

Ethnic ties, Schlesinger wrote, might prove more powerful and historically important than the forces of globalism and democratism, which then seemed ascendant. He only neglected to mention religious faith as often a “far more vital” emotion than ideology.

. . .

Globalization is no longer on the march, but on the defensive. Economic nationalism is rising. Across the Third World, we see an upsurge of ethnonationalism and fundamentalism, especially among the Islamic peoples. From Nigeria to Sudan to Mindanao, Muslims battle Christians, as Christians are persecuted in Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan.

In India and Thailand, Muslims battle Hindu and Buddhists. In the Northern Caucasus, they fight Russians.

Ethnonationalism, that relentless drive of peoples to secede and dwell apart, to establish their own nation-state, where their faith is predominant, their language spoken, their heroes and history revered, and they rule to the exclusion of all others, is rampant.

In China, Tibetans fight assimilation and the mass migration of Han Chinese into what was their country, as do the Uighurs in the west who dream of an East Turkestan breaking away and taking its place among the nations of the world.

In speaking of the rising tribalism abroad, Schlesinger added, “The ethnic upsurge in America, far from being unique, partakes of the global fever.”

Indeed, separatism and secessionism seem to be in the air.

Read the whole article.

. . . What called the Tea Party into existence?

Some are angry over unchecked immigration and the failure to control our borders and send the illegals back. Some are angry over the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some are angry over winless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are angry over ethnic preferences they see as favoring minorities over them.

What they agree upon, however, is that they have been treading water for a decade, working harder and harder with little or no improvement in their family standard of living. They see the government as taking more of their income in taxes, seeking more control over their institutions, creating entitlements for others not them, plunging the nation into unpayable debt, and inviting inflation or a default that can wipe out what they have saved.

And there is nothing they can do about it, for they are politically powerless. By their gatherings, numbers, mockery of elites and militancy, however, they get a sense of the power that they do not have.

Their repeated reappearance on the national stage, in new incarnations, should be a fire bell in the night to the establishment of both parties. For it testifies to their belief and that of millions more that the state they detest is at war with the country they love.

The secession taking place in America is a secession of the heart—of people who have come to believe the government is them, and not us. . . . Read the whole article.

Nidal Malik Hasan was two men.

One was the proud Army major who wore battle fatigues to mosque; the other, the proud Arab who wore Muslim garb in civilian life.

What brought Hasan’s identities into fatal conflict was his belief that Iraq and Afghanistan were unjust wars, and his shock that he, a Muslim, was to be sent to serve in one of those wars, against fellow Muslims—a sin against Allah meriting damnation.

Hasan was conflicted by a dual loyalty—to the country he had sworn to protect, and to his perceived duty as a Muslim. When Hasan told his neighbor that morning, “I am going to do good work for God,” the call of jihad overrode his oath of loyalty as an American soldier.

Hasan proceeded to shoot, wound or kill 44 U.S. soldiers, and die on what he saw as the side of right, the side of Islam, against America. “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great!”—Hasan shouted as he began firing.

An Internet posting by “Nidal Hasan” compared suicide bombers to medal-of-honor winners who throw themselves on grenades to save fellow soldiers. Hasan had decided to become a suicider for Allah.

Though this was an act of treachery against his fellow soldiers, of treason in wartime, of terrorism and mass murder, Hasan must have seen himself as a hero and martyr.

Few ever commit atrocities like this. But conflicts in identities and loyalties are common in the cauldrons of war.

“Let none but Americans stand guard tonight,” said Washington at Valley Forge. Irish Catholics deserted the Union army to fight beside Mexican Catholics in the San Patricio battalion against what they thought was American aggression. Honored today by Mexico, the San Patricios were hanged when captured by Winfield Scott’s army.

In Scott’s march to Mexico City was Robert E. Lee. The hero of Buena Vista was Col. Jefferson Davis, who had married the daughter of his commanding officer, future President Zachary Taylor. Davis went on to serve in the Cabinet of Franklin Pierce and the U.S. Senate.

Yet, in 1861, Davis and Lee would depart the service of their country to wage war against the United States on behalf of their new nation and the kinfolk to whom they belonged and whom they believed had a right to be free of the Union. Were they traitors—or patriots?

This is not to compare the deeds of the San Patricios, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, all of whom declared themselves openly and fought heroically and honorably, with the crimes of Maj. Hasan.

But it is to raise the issue of conflicting loyalties in the hearts of men in a nation that has declared religious, racial and ethnic diversity to be not only a national good but a national goal.

Whence came this idea? No previous generation believed this. . . . Read the whole article.

Put me firmly in the Buchanan camp. This one is a no brainer. I voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primaries, but his campaign was an electoral fiasco. Although he raised millions of dollars over the internet, Paul didn’t win a single state. In contrast, Mike Huckabee won Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Iowa, West Virginia, and Kansas. If Fred Thompson wasn’t in the race, Huckabee would have won South Carolina. He got 41% of the vote in Virginia, 38% in Texas, 12.5% in Mississippi, 12.1% in North Carolina, 8.25% in Kentucky.

Huckabee’s paltry showing in the last five Southern states wasn’t representative of his actual support. McCain had already been crowned by the media as the inevitable nominee after his wins in South Carolina and Florida and his Super Tuesday victories in the North. If Huckabee had won in South Carolina, which he lost only because of Thompson, he would have had the momentum to rout McCain in the other Southern states where he was the favorite.

Huckster presented himself as the “values candidate.” He was the “cultural conservative” in the race. McCain was the hawkish, “tough on defense,” 9/11 conservative. Romney was the fiscal conservative businessman. Guiliani was the social liberal. Fred Thompson aspired to be the Southern candidate. Tancredo and Hunter divided the “seal the borders” constituency. Ron Paul was the anti-state, bring home the troops, “End the Fed” libertarian ideologue.

The only reason Ron Paul succeeded to the extent that he did is because he was the candidate of a broader populist coalition that swelled his support beyond his traditional libertarian base. Paleocons and White Nationalists (myself included) overwhelmingly supported his candidacy. Unfortunately, Paul was never able to gain traction on the issues that would have propelled his candidacy to victory. He spent far more time talking about monetary policy than immigration, identity, or abortion.

I still vividly remember the Huckabee campaign in Alabama. Huckster’s message was simple: “I am one of you. These other guys are not.” It was pure identity politics. It was over-the-top “implicit whiteness.” He played “Sweet Home Alabama” on his guitar and spoke with a Southern accent. He had BBQ and sweet tea at his events (almost exclusively crowds of White people). He exuded a friendly, small town, down home, soft spoken aura. Huckster vowed to fight the culture war on abortion and other issues. He even signed the Jeff Sessions/NumbersUSA immigration pledge before campaigning in the South. I was highly tempted to vote for him after that.

Ron Paul raised $34.5 million dollars. Huckabee only raised $16.1 million. Yet Mike Huckabee handily stomped Ron Paul in every Southern state. What’s even more telling is that Huckster, not McCain, was the Southern favorite. If White Southerners are all ”Red State Fascists,” as Lew Rockwell claims, why were they so reticent about backing the McCain campaign? Even after Super Tuesday, Huck made a respectable showing in Virginia and Texas.

Huckabee was tarred and feathered as the “big government” candidate on FreeRepublic.com and other conservative websites for his deviations on trade policy. The pro-business GOP establishment relentlessly mocked him. They wanted a Romney vs. McCain primary. Huckster’s supporters were irate at the time and vowed not to support McCain in the general election. I suspect this played no small role in McCain going down in flames in Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina where White evangelicals are a significant portion of voters.

The 2008 Republican primaries clearly show that White Southerners care more about fighting the culture war at home than foreign policy or the relative size of government. Ron Paul’s anti-state rhetoric has far more appeal in the small Mountain West states like Montana and Wyoming than it does here. The majority of Whites dislike affirmative action. It is a winning issue in Blue States like California, Michigan, and Washington. Enforcing immigration laws is highly popular nationally. Most Alabamians prefer to deport all illegal aliens.

Where is the constituency for abolishing the Federal Reserve? Americans haven’t been highly motivated about monetary policy since the “Cross of Gold” days when the Populists fought against the gold standard. Cultural issues are passé for the GOP establishment, but not for the typical Republican voter, especially White Southerners. It is only media mavens who claim the culture wars are over. Gay marriage was defeated in Maine — that’s right, Maine — just the other day.

The Alternative Right would be foolish to swallow Ron Paul’s libertarian kool aid. It was a disaster in 2008. Paul significantly underperformed winning issues — bringing the troops home, ending abortion, enforcing immigration laws, abolishing affirmative action. He talked endlessly about libertarian abstractions — and lost. In contrast, winners like Huckabee and Obama appealed to the identities of their voters.

Obama was the black candidate to blacks, the non-White candidate to Hispanics and Asians, the post-Christian, interfaith candidate to Jews, and the postracial SWPL candidate to White liberals. He built a winning coalition out of cult-like following and identity politics. A successful Alternative Right candidate will have to mobilize the “implicit whiteness” of MARs voters. Ron Paul wasn’t able to do this. Mike Huckabee had a lot more success.

There is nothing wrong with the Pat Buchanan approach. He just had the misfortune of running twenty years too early when the damage done to America by free trade, imperialism, and third world immigration was still theoretical.

In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters.

Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be?

Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.”

Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.

“The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.

“We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you.”

Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.

And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them “un-American,” “Nazis” and “evil-mongers,” one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.

As with Jimmy Carter’s long range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.

Yet, the establishment’s reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality. . . . Read the whole article.

All my life, said Voltaire, I have had but one prayer: “O Lord, make my enemies look ridiculous. And God granted it.”

In awarding the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama, the Nobel committee has just made itself look ridiculous.

Consider. Though they had lead roles in ending a Cold War lasting half a century, between a nuclear-armed Soviet Empire and the West, neither Ronald Reagan nor John Paul II ever got a Nobel Prize.

In 1987, Reagan negotiated the greatest arms reduction treaty in modern time, the INF agreement removing all Soviet SS-20s and all U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles from Europe.

Other than hosting the “Beer Summit” between Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, what has Obama done to compare with what these statesmen did to make ours a more peaceful and better world?

What has Obama accomplished to compare with what the other sitting presidents to receive the Nobel Prize accomplished? . . . Read the whole article.

. . . We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others’ throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature? . . . Read the whole article.

I write these words on September 3, 2009, seventy years to the day since Britain and France declared war on Germany – an occasion observed, if not exactly celebrated by the leaders and opinion-makers of the West, as the beginning of “the good war.” The War Party just loves WWII because it’s the one war where all agree we had no choice but to fight and win a war to the death. Well, not quite all, but on this question dissent is simply not tolerated.

Take, for example, Pat Buchanan, who marks this anniversary with a reiteration of the theme of his excellent book, The Unnecessary War, which makes the case that war was never inevitable, and that only the pernicious idea of “collective security” – the Franco-British “guarantee” to Poland – made it so. Buchanan also makes the indisputable point that if only the Poles had given Danzig back to Germany, from whom it had been taken in the wake of the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, a negotiated peace would have been the result – a much more desirable one than 56,125,262 deaths and the incalculable toll taken by the war in terms of resources and pure human misery.

Oh, but no: to the “bloggers,” left and right, this is a case of “Pat Buchanan, Hitler Apologist.” In the political culture constructed by these pygmies, any challenge to the conventional wisdom – especially one that involves questioning WWII, the Sacred War – is something close to a criminal act, one that separates out the perpetrator from the realm of polite society and consigns him to an intellectual Coventry, where he can do no harm. And of course attacking US entry into WWII is considered a “hate crime” because – well, what are you, some kind of “Hitler apologist”?!

But of course WWII was not inevitable, and Hitler was indeed amenable to negotiations: he never wanted to go to war with the British — whom he admired — and the French, whose influential native fascist movement had good relations with their German co-thinkers. . . . Read the whole article.

On September 3, 2009, a debate sponsored by Intelligence Squared, at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster, in London, considered the question: “Resolved: Churchill was more a liability than an asset to the free world.”

Speakers for the motion: Pat Buchanan, Nigel Knight, political scientist and economist at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Norman Stone, historian and professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara.

Speakers against the motion: Antony Beevor, historian and author of the best-selling book Stalingrad; professor Richard Overy, historian, author of many books and articles on the Second World War and the Nazi regime; and Andrew Roberts, historian, who has spent 20 years writing, researching, and broadcasting about Churchill and the Second World War.

We publish below Pat Buchanan’s opening statement:

To borrow from Mark Antony’s funeral oration, we of the affirmative are not here to praise Mr. Churchill — but to bury him.

But, first, let us concede the greatness of the man.

In that finest hour of the British nation, 1940, Winston Churchill was indomitable, an inspiration to men everywhere. He was the Lion who gave Britain’s roar of defiance in the face of Hitler’s Germany. For that, he will be honored by peoples everywhere — and forever.

And if we judged him on that year alone, there would be no debate. There would be unanimity.

But Churchill’s career did not last a single year. It lasted half a century. And, over that half century, no other career of a Western statesman was more calamitous for his country and his civilization than that of Winston Spencer Churchill.

More than any other British leader, in 1914 and 1939, Churchill lusted for war and pushed his country to turn two European wars into world wars, so Germany might be destroyed.

Both times, he succeeded.

And history records that those wars, that together took the lives of perhaps a hundred million Europeans, were the mortal blows that advanced the death of the West.

And it was Winston Churchill who led the West in its advance to barbarism. . . . Read the whole article.

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.

Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.

By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.

What cause could justify such sacrifices?

The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.

Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland’s rescue.

But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?

Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn’t want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.

Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative “to stop Hitler” after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.

If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro‘s, was out to conquer the world? . . . Read the whole article.

. . . In his essay “Decline of the American Male” in USA Today, David Zinczenko, editor of Men’s Health, give us a clue. “Of the 5.2 million people who’ve lost their jobs since last summer, four out of five were men. Some experts predict that this year, for the first time, more American women will have jobs than men.”

Ed Rubenstein, who has written for Forbes, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal, blogs on VDARE.com that if one uses the household survey of job losses for June-July, Hispanics gained 150,000 positions, while non-Hispanics lost 679,000. Guess who got the stimulus jobs.

Going back to the beginning of the Bush presidency, Rubenstein says that “for every 100 Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 122.5. … (But) for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 98.9.”. . . Read  the whole article.

Kevin MacDonald

Pat Buchanan is without doubt the most incisive political commentator that we have. His writings on the death of the West, immigration, the neocon influence in the Republican Party, and the Israel Lobby are brilliant and courageous, and they certainly have won him no friends among the most powerful forces in the Republican Party or among the watchdogs of political correctness.

So it is with a great deal of ambivalence that I must disagree with his recent op-ed “Making a monkey out of Darwin.” The article and the book it relies on, by Eugene G. Windchy, are a compendium of Creationist ideas claiming that Darwinism has no scientific basis and that it has led to great evil. I have discussed some of these issues in a previous article on Ben Stein’s movie Expelled which links Darwinism to the Holocaust and represents the scientific community of evolutionists as an oppressive Inquisition-like establishment bent on squelching heresy (obviously far more true of the $PLC and the ADL).

One particularly objectionable claim is that Karl Marx was inspired by Darwin. Marxism is far more associated with Lamarck’s idea that people can inherit the characteristics that their ancestors acquired during their lives. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is the exact opposite of Darwin’s view that the basic mechanism of evolution is natural selection — the selective retention of genetic variants because they result in increased survival and reproductive success.

Lamarckism, not Darwinism, became official ideology in the Soviet Union — the idea being that it would be easy to reshape human nature and produce the new Soviet Man. Famously, Trofim Lysenko applied this to agriculture, hoping to get plants to change their genetic characteristics by exposing them to harsh arctic climates.

This set back Soviet agriculture for decades, but the results were far worse for humans. Lamarckians believed that it would be easy to change the culture and train people to be good socialists. Then their children would inherit those traits and voila, it would usher in a golden age where people would not have nasty, capitalist traits like greed, envy, and selfishness. In the meantime, it was eminently reasonable to simply exterminate those who didn’t get with the program and who clung to their pre-revolutionary ways. In the end, the Lamarckians in the Soviet Union rationalized the murder of many millions of their fellow citizens in the name of creating the new Soviet man. Read the rest of the article.

Sonia Sotomayor

When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court—in Barack Obama’s America.

Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks “Latina women,” because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America is all about, that appellate courts are “where policy is made” in the United States.

To those who believe the depiction of our first Hispanic justice as an anti-white liberal judicial activist, hearken to her own words.

Speaking at Berkeley in 2001, Sonia told her audience, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion (as a judge) than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Imagine if Sam Alito had said at Bob Jones University, “I would hope that a wise white male with the richness of his life experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Hispanic woman, who hasn’t lived that life.”

Alito would have been toast. No explanation, no apology would have spared him. He would have been branded for life a white bigot.

Judge Sotomayor will be excused because the media agree with her and she is a Latina who will use her court seat to impose upon the nation the values of the National Council of La Raza (The Race), of which she is a member. . . . More

Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War”
How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
Patrick J. Buchanan
New York: Crown Publishers, 2008

Many reviewers of the respectable class become unhinged upon seeing the words “unnecessary war” in the title of a book dealing with World War II—in their minds, the “Good War” to destroy the ultimate evil of Hitler’s Nazism.[1] And, of course, Buchanan was already in deep kimchi on this issue since he had expressed a similar criticism of American entry into World War II in his A Republic, Not an Empire.[2]

With this mindset, most establishment reviewers simply proceed to write a diatribe against Buchanan for failing to recognize the allegedly obvious need to destroy Hitler, bringing up the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and other rhetorical devices that effectively silence rational debate in America’s less-than-free intellectual milieu. However, Buchanan’s book is far more than a discussion of the merits of fighting World War II. For Buchanan is dealing with the overarching issue of the decline of the West—a topic he previously dealt with at length in his The Death of the West.[3] In his view, the “physical wounds” of World Wars I and II are significant factors in this decline. Buchanan writes: “The questions this book answers are huge but simple. Were these two world wars the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesman responsible for the death of the West?” (p. xi). Early in his Introduction, Buchanan essentially answers that question: “Historians will look back on 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 as two phases of the Great Civil War of the West, when the once Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization” (p. xvii).

Buchanan sees Britain as the key nation involved in this process of Western suicide. And its own fall from power was emblematic of the decline of the broader Western civilization. At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain stood out as the most powerful nation of the West, which in turn dominated the entire world. “Of all the empires of modernity,” Buchanan writes, “the British was the greatest—indeed, the greatest since Rome—encompassing a fourth of the Earth’s surface and people” (p. xiii). But Britain was fundamentally responsible for turning two localized European wars into the World Wars that shattered Western civilization.

Contrary to the carping of his critics, Buchanan does not fabricate his historical facts and opinions but rather relies on reputable historians for his information, which is heavily footnoted. In fact, most of his points should not be controversial to people who are familiar with the history of the period, as shocking as it may be to members of the quarter-educated punditocracy.

Buchanan points out that at the onset of the European war in August 1914, most of the British Parliament and Cabinet were opposed to entering the conflict. Only Foreign Minister Edward Grey and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, held that it was necessary to back France militarily in order to prevent Germany from becoming the dominant power on the Continent. In 1906, however, Grey had secretly promised France support in the event of a war with Germany, which, Buchanan implies, might have served to encourage French belligerency in 1914. However, it was only the German invasion of neutral Belgium—the “rape” of “little Belgium” as pro-war propagandists bellowed—that galvanized a majority in the Cabinet and in Parliament for war.

Buchanan maintains that a victorious Germany, even with the expanded war aims put forth after the onset of the war, would not have posed a serious threat to Britain. And certainly it would have been better than the battered Europe that emerged from World War I. Describing the possible alternate outcome, Buchanan writes:

Germany, as the most powerful nation in Europe, aligned with a free Poland that owed its existence to Germany, would have been the western bulwark against any Russian drive into Europe. There would have been no Hitler and no Stalin. Other evils would have arisen, but how could the first half of the twentieth century have produced more evil than it did? (p. 62)

As it was, the four year world war led to the death of millions, with millions more seriously wounded. The utter destruction and sense of hopelessness caused by the war led to the rise of Communism. And the peace ending the war punished Germany and other members of the Central powers, setting the stage for future conflict. The Allies “scourged Germany and disposed her of territory, industry, people, colonies, money, and honor by forcing her to sign the ‘War Guilt Lie’” (p. 97). Buchanan acknowledges that it was not literally the “Carthaginian peace” that its critics charged. Germany “was still alive, more united, more populous and potentially powerful than France, and her people were now possessed of a burning sense of betrayal” (p. 97). But by making the new democratic German government accept the peace treaty, the Allies had destroyed the image of democratic government in Germany among the German people. In essence, the peace left “Europe divided between satiated powers, and revisionist powers determined to retrieve the lands and peoples that had been taken from them” (p. 95). It was “not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace. Wedged between a brooding Bolshevik Russia and a humiliated Germany were six new nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The last two held five million Germans captive. Against each of the six, Russia or Germany held a grievance. Yet none could defend its independence against a resurrected Germany or a revived Russia. Should Russia and Germany unite, no force on Earth could save the six” (p. 98). It should be noted that Buchanan’s negative depiction of the World War I peace is quite conventional, and was held by most liberal thinkers of the time.[4]

Buchanan likewise provides a very conventional interpretation of British foreign policy during the interwar period, which oscillated between idealism and Realpolitik and ultimately had the effect of weakening Britain’s position in the world. Buchanan points out that Britain needed the support of Japan, Italy, and the United States to counter a revived Germany, but its diplomacy undercut such an alliance. To begin with, Britain terminated its alliance with Japan to placate the United States as part of the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. Buchanan contends that the Japanese alliance had not only provided Britain with a powerful ally but served to restrain Japanese expansionism.

Britain needed Mussolini’s Italy to check German revanchism in Europe, a task which “Il Duce” was very willing to undertake. However, Britain drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler by supporting the League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy after it attacked Ethiopia in 1935. “By assuming the moral high ground to condemn a land grab in Africa, not unlike those Britain had been conducting for centuries, Britain lost Italy,” Buchanan observes. “Her diplomacy had created yet another enemy. And this one sat astride the Mediterranean sea lanes critical in the defense of Britain’s Far Eastern empire against that other alienated ally, Japan” ( p. 155).

America, disillusioned by the war’s outcome, returned to its traditional non-interventionism in the 1920s, so it was not available to back British interests. Consequently, Britain would only have France to counter Hitler’s expansionism in the second half of the 1930s.

Buchanan provides a straightforward account of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s and Foreign Minister Halifax’s appeasement policy. The goal was to rectify the wrongs of Versailles so as to prevent the outbreak of war. “They believed,” Buchanan points out, “that addressing Germany’s valid grievances and escorting her back into Europe as a Great Power with equality of rights was the path to the peace they wished to build” (p. 201). Buchanan asserts that such a policy probably would have worked with democratic Weimar Germany, but not with Hitler’s regime, because of its insatiable demands and brutality.

Munich was the high point of appeasement and is conventionally considered one of the great disasters of British foreign policy. Buchanan explains Chamberlain’s reasoning for the policy, which was quite understandable. First, morality seemed to be on Germany’s side since the predominantly German population of the Sudetenland wanted to join Germany. Moreover, maintaining the current boundaries of Czechoslovakia was not a key British interest worth the cost of British lives. Finally, Britain did not have the wherewithal to intervene militarily in such a distant, land-locked country.

Churchill, who represented the minority of Britons who sought war as an alternative, believed that support from Stalinist Russia would serve to counter Hitler. Of course, as Buchanan points out, the morality of such an alliance was highly dubious because Stalin had caused the deaths of millions of people during the 1930s, while Hitler’s victims still numbered in the hundreds or low thousands before the start of the war in 1939. Moreover, Communist Russia would have to traverse Rumania and Poland to defend Czechoslovakia, and the governments of these two countries were adamantly opposed to allowing Soviet armies passage, correctly realizing that those troops would likely remain in their lands and bring about their Sovietization. It should also be added that it was questionable whether the Soviet Union really intended to make war on the side of the Western democracies, because Stalin hoped that a great war among the capitalist states, analogous to World War I, would bring about their exhaustion and facilitate the triumph of Communist revolution, aided by the intervention of the Soviet Red Army.[5]

Buchanan concludes that Chamberlain was right not to fight over the Sudetenland but “was wrong in believing that by surrendering it to Hitler he had bought anything but time,” which he should have used to rearm Britain in preparation for an inevitable war (p. 235). Instead, Chamberlain believed that Hitler could be trusted and that peace would prevail.

While Buchanan faults Chamberlain for not properly preparing for war after the Munich Agreement, he does not believe that Munich per se brought on the debacle of war. What did bring about World War II, according to Buchanan, was the British guarantee to defend Poland in March 1939. This guarantee made Poland more resistant to compromise with Germany, and made any British decision for war hinge on the decisions made by Poland. Moreover, as Buchanan points out, “Britain had no vital interest in Eastern Europe to justify a war to the death with Germany and no ability to wage war there” (p. 263).

Buchanan, while citing several explanations for the Polish guarantee, seems to give special credence to the view that Chamberlain was more of a realist than a bewildered naïf. Buchanan holds that a clear analysis of Chamberlain’s words and intent shows that in the guarantee the Prime Minister had not bound Britain to fight for the territorial integrity of Poland but only for its independence as a nation. “The British war guarantee,” Buchanan contends, “had not been crafted to give Britain a pretext for war, but to give Chamberlain leverage to persuade the Poles to give Danzig back” (p. 270). Chamberlain seemed to be “signaling his willingness for a second Munich, where Poland would cede Danzig and provide a road-and-rail route across the Corridor, but in return for Hitler’s guarantee of Poland’s independence” (p. 270). Hitler, however, did not grasp this “diplomatic subtlety” and believed that a German effort to take any Polish territory would mean war. The Poles did not understand Chamberlain’s intent either, and assumed that Britain would back their intransigence and thus refused to discuss any territorial changes with Germany. Buchanan, however, seems to reverse this interpretation of Chamberlain’s motivation when discussing his guarantees to other European countries in 1939, writing that “Chamberlain had lost touch with reality” (p. 278).

In the end, Britain and France went to war with Germany over Poland without the means to defend her. Poland’s fate was finally sealed when Hitler made his deal with Stalin in August 1939, which, in a secret protocol, offered the Soviet dictator the extensive territory that he sought in Eastern Europe.

Some reviewers have claimed that Buchanan excuses Hitler of blame for the war, but this is far from the truth. Buchanan actually states that Hitler bore “full moral responsibility” for the war on Poland in 1939 (p. 292), in contradistinction to the wider world war, though even here the charge of “full responsibility” would seem to be belied by much of the information in the book. For Buchanan points out that the Germans not only had justified grievances regarding the Versailles territorial settlement, but that, despite Hitler’s bold demands, the German-Polish war might not have happened without Britain’s meddling in 1939. Buchanan’s analysis certainly does not absolve Hitler of moral responsibility for the Second World War (much less palliate his crimes against humanity), but it does show that there is plenty of blame to go around.

Buchanan writes that “had there been no war guarantee, Poland . . . might have done a deal over Danzig and been spared six million dead” (p. 293). It is quite possible that after any territorial deal with Poland, Hitler would have consequently made much greater demands against her. Perhaps he would have acted no differently toward Poland and the Polish Jews than he actually did—but the outcome could not have been worse for the Polish Jews, almost all of whom were exterminated during the World War II. And Polish gentiles suffered far more than the inhabitants of other countries that resisted Hitler less strenuously. In short, a war purportedly to defend Poland was an utter disaster for the inhabitants of Poland. It is hardly outrageous to question whether this was the best possible outcome and to attempt to envision a better alternative.

Buchanan shows how World War II was hardly a “Good War.” The Allies committed extreme atrocities such as the deliberate mass bombing of civilians and genocidal population expulsions. The result was the enslavement of half of Europe by Soviet Communism. “To Churchill,” Buchanan writes, “the independence and freedom of one hundred million Christian peoples of Eastern Europe were not worth a war with Russia in 1945. Why, then, had they been worth a war with Germany in 1939?” (p. 373).

Buchanan holds that had Britain not gone to war against Germany, a war between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany would have been inevitable, and that such a conflict would have exhausted both dictatorships, making it nigh impossible for either of them to conquer Western Europe. Although this scenario would not have been a certainty, a military stalemate between the two totalitarian behemoths would seem to be the most realistic assessment based on the actual outcome of World War II. Certainly, the Soviet Union relied on Western support to defeat the Nazi armies; and Germany was unable to knock out the Soviet Union during the lengthy period before American military began to play a significant role in Europe.

Buchanan contrasts the lengthy wars fought by Britain, which gravely weakened it, and the relative avoidance of war by the United States, which enabled it to become the world’s greatest superpower. In Buchanan’s view, the United States “won the Cold War—by avoiding the blunders Britain made that plunged her into two world wars” (p. 419). In the post-Cold War era, however, the United States has ignored this crucial lesson, instead becoming involved in unnecessary, enervating wars. “America is overextended as the British Empire of 1939,” Buchanan opines. “We have commitments to fight on behalf of scores of nations that have nothing to do with our vital interests, commitments we could not honor were several to be called in at once” (p. 423). Buchanan maintains that in continuing along this road the United States will come to the same ruinous end as Britain.

Buchanan’s British analogy, unfortunately, can be seen as giving too much to the position of the current neo-conservative war party. Although I think Buchanan’s non-interventionist position on the World Wars is correct, it should be acknowledged that Britain faced difficult choices. Allowing Germany to become the dominant power on the Continent would have been harmful to British interests—though the two World Wars made things even worse. In contrast, today it is hard to see any serious negative consequences resulting from the United States’ pursuit of a peaceful policy in the Middle East. No Middle East country or terrorist group possesses (or possessed) military power in any way comparable to that of Germany under the Second or Third Reichs, and, at least, Iran and Iraq do (did) not have any real interest in turning off the oil spigot to the West since selling oil is the lifeblood of their economies.

Another important aspect of the book is Buchanan’s attack on the cult of Winston Churchill, who has served as a role model for America’s recent bellicose foreign policy, with President George W. Bush even placing a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. Buchanan maintains that Churchill, with his lust for war, was the individual most responsible for the two devastating World Wars.

In contrast to the current Churchill hagiography, Buchanan portrays the “British Bulldog” as a poor military strategist who was ruthlessly indifferent to the loss of human life, advocating policies that could easily be labeled war crimes. Churchill proposed both the incompetent effort to breech the Dardanelles in 1915, ending with the disastrous Gallipolli invasion, and the bungled Norwegian campaign of April 1940. Ironically, the failures of the Norwegian venture caused the downfall of the Chamberlain government and brought Churchill to power on May 10, 1940.

Churchill supported the naval blockade of Germany in World War I, which in addition to stopping war materiel prevented food shipments, causing an estimated 750,000 civilian deaths. Churchill admitted that the purpose of the blockade was to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission” (p. 391). He successfully proposed the use of poisonous gas against Iraqi rebels in the interwar period and likewise sought the use of poison gas against German civilians in World War II, though the plan was not implemented due to opposition from the British military. Churchill was, however, successful in initiating the policy of intentionally bombing civilians, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Equally, if not more, inhumane, Churchill’s support for the forcible “repatriation” of Soviet POWs to the Soviet Union and the “ethnic cleansing” of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe involved the deaths of millions of people. And, of course, Churchill was willing to turn over Eastern Europe’s millions to slavery and death under Stalinist rule.

Overall, the Buchanan thesis makes considerable sense—though in some cases it assumes a foresight that would not be possible. For example, the pursuit of containment by the United States in the Cold War period, which Buchanan praises, was a policy largely rejected by the contemporary American Right, of which Buchanan was a member. The American Right held that the policy of containment was a defensive policy that could not achieve victory but instead likely lead to defeat—a position best expressed by James Burnham. And, at least up until Reagan’s presidency, the power of the Soviet Union greatly increased, both in terms of its nuclear arsenal and its global stretch, relative to that of the United States. While Buchanan touts Reagan’s avoidance of war, what most distinguished Reagan from his presidential predecessors and the foreign policy establishment was his willingness to take a harder stance toward the Soviets—a difference that terrified liberals of the time. Reagan’s hard-line stance consisted of a massive arms build-up, and, more importantly, an offensive military strategy (violating the policy of containment), which had the United States supporting a revolt against the Soviet-controlled government in Afghanistan. (The policy was begun under President Carter but significantly expanded under Reagan.) Perhaps, if the United States had launched such a policy in the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet Empire would have unraveled much earlier and not been such a threat to the United States. The Soviet Union was obviously the first country that could destroy the United States, and it achieved this lethal potential during the policy of containment. To this reviewer, it does not seem inevitable that everything would have ultimately turned out for the best.

While Buchanan makes a good case that the two World Wars were deleterious to the West, it would seem that they were only one factor, and probably not the primary one, in bringing about the downfall of Western power—a decline that was observed by astute observers such as Oswald Spengler prior to 1914.[6] (Buchanan himself is not oblivious to these other factors but gives a prominent place to the wars.) Moreover, it is questionable if Britain would have retained its empire any longer than it did, even without the wars, given the spread of nationalism to the non-Western world and the latter’s greater rates of population increase compared to Europe. Also, the growing belief in the West of universal equality obviously militated against European rule over foreign peoples.

In sum, Buchanan’s work provides an excellent account of British diplomacy and European events during the crucial period of the two world wars, which have shaped the world in which we now live. It covers a host of issues and events that are relatively unknown to those who pose as today’s educated class, and does so in a very readable fashion. While this reviewer regards Buchanan’s theses as fundamentally sound, the work provides a fount of information even to those who would dispute its point of view.

Forthcoming in TOQ vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 2009).