The U.S. Senate Chamber, 1850 – Robert Whitechurch
A world is supported by four things…the learning
of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of
the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of
these are as nothing…without a ruler who knows the
art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!
-Frank Herbert, Dune
The Old South was far ahead of the New World Order. What it lacked in technological development, it made up for in a concrete understanding of human nature that was grounded in reality. That reality was firmly rooted in two principles based upon experiential observation: the existence of ineradicable distinctions between different races and the danger of concentrating power in one unitary source that could arbitrarily determine the outcome of local domestic issues from afar. Indeed it may be stated unequivocally, that American civilization cannot truly go forward at all if its interpretation of human relationships and psychology deniesthese two points. It is for this reason that the philosophic fountainhead of resistance to the New World Order in the United States must inevitably begin with an endorsement of Southern rhetoric.
The term “rhetoric” has come to mean one of two things in contemporary culture: artificial speech or dishonest propaganda. This is a sorry state of affairs. It represents, in part, the overwhelming distortion that a purely nominal and positivistic machine age has introduced into human discourse. The ancients had a much more elevated conception of the term, viewing it as a necessary analogue to the process of dialectic. Rhetoric was the high art of persuasion and the power of a particular style. Elsewhere I have addressed the polarization between the scientific and poetic modes of discourse and the need for redressing a balance between the two. The original ideal concept of rhetoric represents another evolutionary component of the poetic mode, a category that I previously dubbed the Bardic Dynamic.
Richard M. Weaver
This is a point of departure where we can begin to explore the philosophy of Richard M. Weaver, an outstanding Southern conservative thinker who published several important texts and gave many valuable lectures, primarily in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, which are relevant to our struggles today as White Americans. There are plenty of essays and books available covering his ideas, However, very few of them explicitly frame Richard Weaver as the racially conscious traditionalist that he most certainly was. Weaver’s thought represents the full flowering of what the Southern Agrarians of the 1930s had first begun with the “I’ll Take My Stand” symposium, which in itself was a continuation of the South’s stand during the American Civil War. This is an important strand of his thought to follow because it suggests that there has been a survival of Old Southern ideas about race up into the modern world of the twentieth century. The trajectory of Weaver’s thought would challenge any who continue to view the Old South as a backward and retrogressive section or phase in American history.
Writing from the perspective of a later generation, Weaver was able to synthesize the impetus of Agrarian thought and channel it into wider applications for White Americans today. Agrarianism was not just a defense of the farm, but contained within its rejection of unfettered industrialism and the monolithic State, the fundamental premises of the defense of any high civilization worthy of the name, especially one that recognized the importance of blood, familial ties, and the continuation of a proud European tradition.
In an essay entitled “‘Defending the Little Platoons’; Communitarianism in American Conservatism,” Thomas E. Woods, Jr. argues that Weaver was one of the chief post World War II traditionalists next to Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. The traditionalists emerged from the war as a distinctive branch of the American Right wing, next to the libertarians and anti-Communists and those who would ultimately evolve into Neoconservatives. Woods defined the basic tenets of the traditionalist stream thus:
Traditionalists believed in prescription over rash innovation, emphasized the importance of private property and social distinctions, and denied the perfectibility of man. They viewed man and his condition in the concrete, and not with reference to an imaginary state of nature (127)…[T]raditionalist conservatives consistently fought the leveling forces, whether federal edicts or business combinations, that threatened to dissolve the organic network or interpersonal relationships that comprised a community.
Weaver was both a Platonic idealist and a political conservative (Language is Sermonic, 15). But he is much more important for our purposes because his conservatism was of the racially conscious sort, as was typical of much intelligent Southern thought prior to the civil rights movement. He is the only one of the aforementioned triumvirate of traditionalist American thinkers who was actually a Southerner. It is thislegacy that offers White racialists a substantial scaffolding and a rhetorical style to build a new platform with traditional roots based in our actual historical experience. It is a version of the American dream that discounts liberal egalitarianism and remains focused on the animating genius of the original republic.
Another reason for concentrating on this thinker is because he effectively sidestepped the aberration that William F. Buckley and the National Review became hostage to, namely, Neoconservatism, which continues to embrace many apostasies which can in no way be considered either conservative or traditional. Woods suggests that the traditionalists would have been exceedingly wary of the Neoconservatives’ belief in Executive hegemony and an adventuresome, aggressive foreign policy. He writes
Coupling moralism and foreign policy, the traditionalists were convinced, virtually guaranteed ongoing American intervention across the globe, the domestic consequences of which could only be disastrous. They saw in war and in ceaseless military intervention not a recipe for national glory but a deadly poison for civil society. War not only leads to still more political and economic centralization, but it also at least implicitly calls on Americans to transfer their primary allegiance from the locality to the central state (140).
Neoconservatism also buys into the liberal elements underlying Civil Rights era assumptions regarding racial equality and forced integration. In my opinion, Weaver’s specific rejection of egalitarian nostrums as a Southern traditionalist therefore elevates his thought above that of Kirk and Nisbet, who could get away with more general Conservative platitudes, though it is clear that they may well have felt similarly.
Consider the following from Weaver’s seminal text, Visions of Order, published posthumously in 1964:
A culture integrates by segregating its forms of activity and its members from those not belonging. The right to self-segregate then is an indispensable ground of its being. Enough has been said to show that our culture today is faced with very serious threats in the form of rationalistic drives to prohibit in the name of equality cultural segregation. The effect of this would be to break up the natural cultural cohesion and to try to replace it with artificial politically dictated integration. Such “integration” would of course be a failure because where deep inner impulse is lacking cohesiveness for any length of time is impossible. This crisis has been brought to our attention most spectacularly in the attempt to “integrate” culturally distinct elements by court action. It is, however, only the most publicized of the moves; others are taking place in areas not in the spotlight, but all originate in ignorance, if not in a suicidal determination to write an end to the heritage of Western culture (21).
Weaver was writing when most people, outside of the South, were encountering the whole idea of racial conflict in their conscience for the first time. For Southerners, it was old hat. Weaver naturally saw the need for an opposing current that did not ignore the history of the conflict. And because these topics had been so deeply ingrained on the native regional mind since even before the Civil War, his analyses almost have an apostolic religious or metaphysical depth that a contemporary White advocate might initially skip over due to naiveté.
Weaver dealt in first principles rather than in appeals to the apparent emergency brought on by the events of the day. He probes deep into the underlying philosophic flaws of the modern world and liberalism. He saw rhetoric as a necessary social and political discipline, with its object being the entire man, his position within history, and a cultivation of the Permanent Things.
Rhetoric seen in the whole conspectus of its function is an art of emphasis embodying an order of desire. Rhetoric is advisory; it has the office of advising men with reference to an independent order of goods and with reference to their particular situation as it relates to these. The honest rhetorician therefore has two things in mind: a vision of how matters should go ideally and ethically and a consideration of the special circumstances of his auditors. Toward both of these he has a responsibility. (Language is Sermonic, 211)
For much of his professional career, Richard Weaver taught English literature at the University of Chicago. However, he was a Southerner to the core. He was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1910. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Kentucky in 1932. He studied under Donald Davidson at Vanderbilt University where he obtained an M.A in 1934. Davidson, as the intellectual leader of the Southern Agrarians, exerted considerable influence on Weaver during his formative years. They maintained a lifelong correspondence. Weaver was even slated to replace his mentor when he was ready to retire in the mid-60s from Vanderbilt’s English department. Unfortunately, he never realized the transition because he had a heart attack and died in 1963. Davidson outlived him by five years.
Weaver received his Ph. D. in 1943, from Louisiana State University, where Cleanth Brooks, another prominent Agrarian, advised him. His thesis, originally entitled The Confederate South, 1865–1910: The Survival of a Mind and a Culture would be published posthumously as The Southern Tradition at Bay. It contains a bold examination and defense of the Old South. It is well worth studying for trustworthy source material regarding White identity in the South in the two generations following the War Between the States.
Weaver’s racial consciousness, when not explicit, is often couched in appeals to the rational structures of hierarchy, the natural inevitability of aristocracy when unimpeded by committee rule or unlimited democracy, the importance of private property, the respect for historical context, and the need for a recognizable scale of values. The connections here to the general thrust of White advocacy are obvious. M.E. Bradford, another one of Donald Davidson’s protégés, made a specific reference to the value of Weaver’s thought to White Americans in his essay, “The Agrarianism of Richard Weaver.”
Richard Weaver never lost interest in defending what survived of the historic Southern order. His political journalism plus certain of his papers in opinion document this devotion. Indeed it was so strong as to move Weaver into a professionally dangerous public support of the South’s position in racial matters. For he perceived from the start that this second Reconstruction had objectives far more ambitious (and perhaps other than) “justice for the Negro”: in a word, abolition of the subculture itself, which could not survive such coercive dislodgment of its “wisest prejudice.” However, the fortune of the Agrarians (and their individual experiences after dispersal) had convinced him that such defendings were in vain – that is, unless the set of mind that made them necessary be discredited at its source: unless liberalism (as we speak of it loosely) be exposed for the pathology it is. The mind informed by memory (history humanized), by literature (rendering the real, including memory), and by rhetoric (bringing memory and its rendering to bear) cannot find in the South only a scandal. The universities were the place for that labor, or most of it. They were a base of power. Since the English Revolution of the 1640s, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Communist triumph in Russia, our wars have been wars of doctrine. They are won or lost on that ground. And what is needed for them is an aristoi, a new version of the old idea called “gentleman”: a body of informed men and women within the Academy – personally loyal to one another, courageous, and indefatigable (Remembering Who We Are, Observations of a Southern Conservative, pp. 81).
In order to do anything positive, therefore, we would do well to redevelop an aristoi or intelligentsia that is able to more effectively communicate with the White folk, whose support we must eventually win, for any long-term turnaround. This is where understanding the higher concept of rhetoric comes into play. For instance, appeals to National Socialism won’t work because they utilize a European rhetoric that goes completely against the tastes and historical experience of modern White Americans. Appeals to a further consolidation of central power are also mistaken because this has generally been the tack of Northern rhetoric as it manipulated the federal mechanism to try and extirpate the Old South in the name of humanitarianism or Equality or the Union etc. The correct angle of white activism in the United States has historically been through the vehicle of a distinctly Southern-derived rhetoric which has consistently aimed at a defense of White interests and the integrity of the local regional entities. Fortunately, this is a portable rhetoric with roots in the original tradition of the country, which is what makes it so completely all-American.
This rhetorical style also involves studying up on the particular tastes and styles of hillbillies, rednecks, crackers, hicks and the average Joes and Micks. Coming off as too rich or too corporate would tend to make enemies of this working class contingent. For the most part, we want to capture the hearts and minds of Middle America, as Sam Francis, another latter day Agrarian, conceptualized it. What do they like? How do they talk? What gets them riled up? How can we punch their buttons? What motivates them to action?
In this context, Richard Weaver’s writing lays an ideal groundwork for a counter movement towards a more authentic American conservative position that is able to embrace the racial concerns of Whites. Weaver teaches us how to persuade without exploiting, in a format conducive to the natural tendencies of a rural conservative.
Richard M. Weaver on Rhetoric and Individualism
Here my main concern is to demonstrate that Richard Weaver’s conclusions about rhetoric indicate an awareness of the difficulty of objectivity in discourse that touches on human interests—a conclusion that would not surprise readers aware of the culture of critique that has dominated intellectual and media discourse at least since World War II.
It seems that one of the big traps that White Americans constantly fall into is the idea that there’s something wrong with, as Michael Polignano phrases it, “taking our own side.” It is well known that Jewish groups have no such hang up. Indeed, Jewish groups are famously self-interested (despite a long series of rationalizations and apologia casting Jews as altruistically working for the good of all mankind; see here). And does anyone think that La Raza and the NAACP have the interests of all Americans at heart?
Pursuing our ethnic self-interest is, theoretically, an unassailable position. But there are many millions of Whites in this country who are a long way from catching on to his excellent analogy. And minority ethnic groups know it and they exploit it. For this reason, another element is needed.
Rhetoric must be viewed formally as operating at that point where literature and politics meet, or where literary values and political urgencies can be brought together. The rhetorician makes use of the moving power of literary presentation to induce in his hearers an attitude or decision which is political in the broadest sense. (Weaver, Language, 225)
That element involves a wider application of the art of rhetoric by those who have leadership abilities. Our advantage as individuals spread out over an immense area, is that we can reach people at an immediate, local level. The bigger and more overextended the establishment becomes, the more it will ignore the subtle nuances of the diverse regional identities and folkways within the White populace. Eventually, this will inevitably cause the citizenry to look for actual, visible people, in their vicinity, who really care about them and who know how to talk their talk.
Then we can focus on the basic issue: showing Whites how to stop nullifying themselves, thereby empowering other minorities. We can reemphasize to them how other groups either feel no compunction about cutting to the front of the line, or are vengeful towards Whites because of historical grievances and thus unlikely to negotiate equitably. In any case, the task involves changing this self-defeating point of view in Whites so that they feel comfortable to stand and deliver a passionate testament on behalf of their own kind. And yet, it is more than that, too.
We should not only want to stand up for ourselves, we should be willing to sacrifice the self to the greater good of the whole. So, it is both a call to self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, properly conceived. This may, at first, seem to be a strange and foreign concept to American Whites, raised on Emersonian conceptions of individualism and the virtue of an atomized self-interest in the context of Adam Smith’s philosophy and the free market mentality. However, there are many areas in this country, the South in particular, where the concept of communal kinship along racial/tribal//familial lines has borne an important meaning and value in the past.
Richard Weaver developed a peculiar combination sometimes referred to as “communitarian individualism” or “social bond individualism” that is pertinent in this consideration. By contrasting the styles and backgrounds of two famous individualists from the North and South, Henry David Thoreau and John Randolph of Roanoke, he establishes an original American alternative form of communal allegiance that avoids the isolated individualism of the Transcendentalists. In his essay, Two Types of American Individualism, he develops the following paradigm.
Light can be shed on our problem by examining two types of American individualism, each of which has had a major prophet. One of the types is not now, and I think never was, a feasible form of individualism, though there is something about it which fascinates a part of our nature. The other is not only feasible but is today very much needed, when the forces of regimentation and the example of totalitarianism are threatening to sweep away every principle of distinction that stands in their path. … Thoreau stood for individual isolation, but failed to see the consequences. Another way of meeting a dilemma is to slip between the horns, which means to find a third alternative without the painful consequences of the other two. The exponent of that method was John Randolph of Roanoke, now a half legendary figure, termed a “political fantastic” by one of his recent biographers and called a dangerous person by another critic, yet a figure of unique interest to one who has studied his career. Randolph stood with equal firmness against imperialism, especially in its disguised form of government welfarism, but he found an alternative to this and to simple withdrawal (p. 2). … As a defender of the dignity and autonomy of the smaller unit, he was constantly fighting the battle for local rights. But it was the essence of his position that the battle must be fought within the community, not outside the community and not through means that would in effect deny all political organization. … Randolph never lost sight of the truth expressed in Aristotle’s dictum that man is a political animal. His individualism is, therefore, what I am going to call “social bond” individualism. It battles unremittingly for individual rights, while recognizing that these have to be secured within the social context … The point I seek to make is that Randolph could not visualize men’s solving political questions through simple self-isolation (p. 4). … Common interest was the final justification of government, the source of the means of operation, the assurance that it would not become perverted or despotic (p. 7). … [I]f we are interested in rescuing individualism in this age of conformity and actual regimentation, it is the Randolphian kind which we must seek to cultivate. Social bond individualism is civil and viable and constructive except perhaps in very abnormal situations. Anarchic individualism is revolutionary and subversive from the very start; it shows a complete despite for all that civilization or the social order has painfully created, and this out of self-righteousness or egocentric attachment to an idea (p. 16).
Weaver’s analysis of Randolph was based on his defense of the sovereignty of states’ trying to come into the Union in the early 19th century. Despite personal misgivings towards the institution of slavery, Randolph was an outspoken defender of Missouri’s right to come into the Union as a slave state. The principle that he operated from was the integrity of a basic common interest at a local level. Thomas Woods further refines Weaver’s development of communitarianism. He suggests that the communal orientation of the American traditionalists has been nearly forgotten in today’s American right wing but that it used to occupy a central spot in our conservative thought.
Traditionalists based their attachments to community life, they insisted, not on a mere sentiment or nostalgia, but on serious reflections on history and human nature,. … Central to the traditionalist’s view of human nature, therefore, was the insistence that the fundamental unit of society was not the individual but the group, that it is only within a social context that the goods of human excellence can be cultivated (130). … Traditionalists therefore insisted that society be viewed not as a mere aggregation of individuals but as a delicate edifice consisting of numerous geographic communities, each with rights and traditions of its own (132)…The existence of myriad autonomous political communities, they agreed, serves to frustrate the would-be reformer who seeks to impose a uniform General Will upon the nation as a whole. A unitary state may originate in the name of freedom, Weaver explained, “but once it has been made monopolisitic and unassailable, it will, if history teaches anything, be used for other purposes(133).
Richard Weaver argues for the cultivation of positive rhetoric in order to accomplish the goal of securing White Western civilization in the United States. He leads us to reject the ostensibly ‘objective’ forms of ethnic and sociological discourse, which dominated the 20th century, and towards a development of a noble defense for our own culture. The spirit of Weaver’s sensibility was well captured by Russell in his foreword to Weaver’s Visions of Order (1964):
According to Gregory the Great, it has not pleased God to save men through logic. Richard Weaver would have assented to this, knowing as he did the nature of the average sensual man and the limits of pure rationality. Yet with a high logical power, Weaver undertook an intellectual defense of culture, and of order and justice and freedom.”
Russell then quotes Weaver’s fundamental idea that there is more to humans cold rationality and that there must be a melding of the rational and the affective side of human nature:
Somehow our education will have to recover the lost vision of the person as a creature of both intellect and will. It will have to bring together into one through its training the thinker and the doer, the dialectician and the rhetorician. Cognition, including the scientific, alone is powerless, and will without cognition is blind and destructive. The work of the future, then, is to overcome the shallow rationalisms and scientificisms of the past two centuries and to work toward the reunion of man into a being who will both know and desire what he knows.
This is the mission of the Southern Point: to facilitate a more comprehensive American front based on the Southern Tradition. The Southern Tradition, correctly understood, is an authentically patriotic American Way that stretches all the way back to the founding generation of this country. And it eventually grew to embrace the Great West. The South became the West. As I’ve mentioned before, we might do well to refer to this side in a more poetic fashion, as the Rest of the West. The Rest of the West opposes the Eastern Establishment and represents its greatest threat in the world. It is up to us, the 200+ million Whites within this country, to restrain our government as we were originally empowered to do by our Constitution and the men who died so that we could be free. If we cannot then we have lost our mandate as a capable and potent people.
For those interested in following up on some other available online Weaver essays and summaries, try here, here, here, here, and here. Those who want to go further should move to his three primary texts: Ideas Have Consequences, The Ethics of Rhetoric, and Visions of Order.
Facing the Future as a Minority
It is striking that Weaver doesn’t call a spade a spade and uses the term “culture” as code for “race”. A few examples :
Replace the words “culture” and “cultural” with “race” and “racial” and it makes sense.
For the rest, in spite of his stress on the importance of rhetoric I am afraid Weaver’s language is too abstract to reach his target group : hillbillies, rednecks, crackers, hicks, and the average Joes and Micks.
@Franklin Ryckaert:
Those hillbillies and rednecks were not his target group.
Communitarian crackpot using the promise of a White homeland as bait (in order to heard Whites towards a technocratic police state). No Thanks!!
The ONLY White country that’s worth fighting for is one that puts individual freedom at its center.
Anyone who is still confused should get familiar with one name – Amitai Etzioni (former MOSSAD agent). He’s the key promoter of communitarianism in America today. Have fun being lead into a dead end street…
You’ll never going to get a White ONLY country by following a formwe Jew/Mossad agent. It’s just a gimmick to get you to move away from the suburbs and the country into the cities.. where you will be a slave of the Jews..
How does 25%/50% sales tax sound and no real property rights?? How about going to your city hall to ask for permission so that you can cut down a tree?? Smart meters anyone?? I can go on and on but the point is this.. Communitrians should be tried for TREASON!!!
The “racist” professor’s (Kevin MacDonald) job is safe not because he has tenure.. It’s because he is a COMMUNITARIAN. NWO is COMMUNITARIANISM..
The immigration policy that brought about third worlders into our midsts was designed in large part to bring about communitarianism (there were others fundamental things as well but no point to get into it now).. So how many of you WHITE fleers are ready to sign up for WHITES ONLY PRISON STATE so that you can slave with other white sheeple??
@Franklin Ryckaert:
We hillbillies, rednecks and crackers already hold the correct position, it is well educated but befuddled fools he is attempting to target.
Some communitarian colonies that they are pushing for may start out White, but in the end they won’t be.. Once in a cage you will get no say who else will be put in there with you..
Birds of the feather flock together.. We need to fight for our freedom to flock together.. That is the only answer to our predicament..
If you, like our early American ancestors were surrounded by wild semi-cannibals called indians, dangerous animals, disease, and the constant possibilty of stravation—you too would have a strong sense of community.
You would rely on your community for survival. This was the early American experience outside of the large costal cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston.
I would bet, that the majority of those reading here do not have White ancestors in America before, 1848 or even 1870. They have no early American, or even pre-1848 tradition in their family. They have no grasp, or sense of deja vu about pre-1848 America or even pre-1870 America.
Weaver & Mister T. don’t really speak to genetic memory—”the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. LOL
Fico—this ain’t Italy or Poland either.
I found all the verbiage difficult to wade through, trying to get to the heart of the matter. Was this yet another attempt to justify slavery? I hope not, since slavery cannot be justified. Common sense tells us that flooding the South with negroids has destroyed this country. Had slavery never happened there would be no Harlems or Watts or the urban destruction of major cities like Detroit. Blame the South for that.
We need to stop reliving the past, either as Nazi brownshirts or Confederate soldiers because both these eras are indefensible models for a WN ethnostate. The WN cause is not a Southern movement nor a National Socialist movement. Anyone who says otherwise needs to be debated into the ground and then kicked into the gutter.
@fender: There are only two strategies:
1) to truly become an invisible empire.
2) to demographically overrun a space that can support economic and scientific progress.
@Tom:
Yes, it’s why many cease reading here, and if you push it, your comments will be deleted.
This is often ONLY ABOUT co-opting “The South” and its special history for NY-style interests (but pretending not to). “the South” is now ok, because it’s really the “New South” (the product of yankee land grabs, military land seizures, and so on— and a retiring place for public employees most often from military). It is the “new” largely Catholic and first-to-second generation people on public pensions. (Neo-overseers from another perspective.)
NOW— article after article attempts to reposition the south as “traditional” (and this is supposed to mean catholic).
In the traditional South, many places you had to affirm protestantism as your religion in order to hold office until the 1830s. How many of them know that? Or the machinations (such as this) to obscure the real history?
BACK IN REALITY, the south is an important white sub-group with its particular writers, arts, history, people with a unique trajectory to the country, and on and on. These writers care nothing about this (only how they can use it for their agenda).
Which is fine. It is a call to Americans with longevity in the country, and to all real Southerners, to push against this endless attempt at co-option of their own reality, and to write their own papers, elsewhere, and to name themselves, their realities, how it all feels to them.
Words such as genocide come to mind. Displacement in their own country. Dispossession of land and home, traded in for “The New South” —the yankee and largely catholic south, of tract homes, neo-cons, imposition on previously beautiful natural scenery, legions of spandex wearing bike riders on once-rural roads there to ensure the zoning laws are changed, bossy military on public pensions “living the good life,” malls, the new racial violence, the introduction of all the city problems (their violence, their home invasions, their racial grandstanding, overcrowding, etc.) A world —BACK IN REALITY– of women don’t cook, clean, grow things, or have any orientation whatsoever into the world of homemaking, or growing and gardening, or well…anything).
The “New South”—– brings the “ethnic” (code word for catholic/jewish) “Tradition” of just exactly what South Florida, North Carolina, places in Georgia like Atlanta— have all been turned into.
The “New South” people consider themselves “traditional”—- EVEN AS their environment becomes Detroit.
To the “New Southerners”—- they are born and bred believing that EVIL is inevitable. They DO NOT SEE —cannot connect the dots to see— that they, themselves, and their internal way of life (assumptions about living and the world) LITERALLY TURN places into Detroit.
The blacks did not turn Detroit into Detroit. Dependent whites who were just punching time clocks in factories, who waited for their pensions, who worked muscle for the man— and so, who when business left, DID NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO BUT TRY TO FOLLOW THE MONEY— turned Detroit into Detroit.
And that animal —judging from this on TOO— ain’t ever gonna wake up.
They blame blacks… they blame jews… they blame protestant whites…
THIS IS NOT Southern. A real Southerner doesn’t do that. It is against their code of decency and accountability.
Their “traditionalism” seems pretty darn different.
Is there any possibility, at all, that we can get through even one thgread without denigrating some subset of white folks. I take second place to none in my pride at being a white Southerner, with very deep roots in our country. That pride is based on an innate superiority of heritage and accomplishment that does not rely upon belittling others. Try to act like white folks!
I found all the verbiage difficult to wade through, trying to get to the heart of the matter. Was this yet another attempt to justify slavery? I hope not, since slavery cannot be justified. Common sense tells us that flooding the South with negroids has destroyed this country. Had slavery never happened there would be no Harlems or Watts or the urban destruction of major cities like Detroit.
Blame the South for that.
We need to stop reliving the past, either as Nazi brownshirts or Confederate soldiers because both these eras are indefensible models for a WN ethnostate. The WN cause is not a Southern movement nor a National Socialist movement. Anyone who says otherwise needs to be debated into the ground and then kicked into the gutter.
More than a little dry….
@dixie:
Once again, let me say that you, and I must have gone to different colleges together. LOL. I agree with almost all of what you say. I do disagree on Detroit, Cleveland, Gary etc. Many White Southerners particularly from West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, and to a lessser extent from Virginia & northern Alabama, hit the road from the rural and small town South for good high paying union jobs in the Northern industrial cities after WWII. It could be this is what you are attempting to point out? If you are, I agree with you.
It is interesting how many people in the auto, steel or big machinery companies retired back down South, often to property they purchased or to property that had belonged to their families for generations. Maybe these people could have been more engaged in the Northern industrial cities, but, I think they were as engaged as they could be, and there was nothing to hold them in Detroit etc.
Btw, I can’t imagine why Dr. MacDonald would censor you on purpose. I’m sure he didn’t.
@dixie:
Another part of the Southern code of decency and accountability is to refrain from whining about what your neighbor does with the land you sold him. It is time we all grew up and started accepting some accountability for the mess we are in.
It is well and good to analysis all of the factors that contributed to the current unhappy state of affairs. No matter who made it, however, it is ours to clean up. I am so tired of reading folk who claim to be representatives of the most advanced humans who ever lived, blame each other, like children saying, ” Billy did it! It is his fault!”
The excellent reasons that we study our history is to provide an example to the ill educated young. It is helpful to know and acknowledge that there are other opinions , which have been held and respected by better men. It is valuable to look at the reasoning they used. We may be arrayed against the majority in the present, but we are in very good company among our ancestors. Why do I have to say this on a site dedicated to the interests and culture of whites?
Southerners after the Civil War began blaming the Jews but it is true the the Old South was very naive about Jewish perfidy.
Jews dominated the slave trade from the very beginning. Charleston, SC and Providence, RI were the two major slave-trading and Jewish population centers of early America. Ranking gentile Southerners were ensnared in Judeo-Masonry and hobnobbed with the super-wealthy Jewish elite. Even today, most Southern towns are politically dominated by Masons. Detroit-ified parts of the South are run by the Prince Hall Masons.
Jews typically harness out-groups and minorities as temporary allies for seizing power from the majority. Catholics were used this way in America just as the Jews used Protestants to divide and conquer Catholic kingdoms and Europe as a whole. Early Jews certainly foresaw that they would eventually use the blacks they brought over for a civil rights putsch to displace the WASP.
White Christians are capable of uniting across denominational lines to defend morality against Jewish subversion and to support justice for all races, starting with our own. However, no White population compromised by the fifth column of Freemasonry can hope to succeed against the Jew.
@Edward:
Good point. Jews bought most of the slaves to Americas. “Secret relationship between blacks and jews” is a good book. SAM Adshead’s “China in world history” has plenty of material on medieval jewish slave trade and castration factories.
I think it would be a good idea for all of us commentors to do our best to not turn off new readers. It’s very jarring to read a thoughtful and well reasoned article and then find madness in the comment section below. Just an idea but it seems like a good idea to try not to alienate newcomers and investigators. Otherwise we’re just talking to each other in a sealed fishbowl.
@Bob Johnson:
Virtue, excellence, dignity, elitism. This should reflect in our posts. You are right.
We need some of that spartan laconic stuff in our writing.
The posters should try using rhetoric.
Any racially conscious White man can’t help but read Weaver and immediately see his implicit racialism. Credit to Weaver for keeping the conversation on a higher plane, because if he had just delved into race like we do, he would have missed the opportunity to give us his linguistic and philosophical masterpieces.
Regarding the Old South, you won’t find a better piece of rhetoric than this post bellum treasure, delivered by an Old South divine when Yankee troops were still occupying South Carolina, and would be for 6 more years- it doesn’t get any better than this- diagnosis, prescription, feeling, blood, life, death, the future of Whiteness-
http://www.sciway3.net/sc-csa/cemetery/reburyaddress.html
So wrote James. I certainly don’t disagree. I would simply add to his remark that the commenters should reconnect the fingertips to the brain before they begin typing. One must walk before he can run, and all that.
Some readers will have noticed that Jason Speaks deprecated all and sundry for what he deemed the misdirection the commenters gave to the Joe Walsh thread. Without agreeing or disagreeing with his view of the situation there, I think that this thread is far more in need of redirecting before it becomes too late. Richard Weaver, who died three decades too soon, is one of the handful of genuinely original and profound thinkers this country has produced. (I say is because both his named qualities are, if anything, plainer to see now and far more needful of our attention than they were half a century ago.) Before anyone accepts at face value that there is justice in the several attempts to kill him, either with a Calvinesque pyre or a “communitarian” air bubble injected in the brain, before he can be heard, I urgently suggest that Sir Tristram ought to be listened to and the magnificent books he cites ought to be read or at least tasted. (Now with any luck the Suzerain of Linkland, our very own Trenchant, will turn up in these precincts with a bagful of URLs.)
@Pierre de Craon: Can’t help with much except for Farrakhan and the Jewish hand in the slave-trade. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, but he certainly is almost always good entertainment.
http://www.4shared.com/office/MDIIPmmd/the_secret_relationship_betwee.html
@ Sir Tristram: I’m not familiar with Weaver, but I liked everything about this article of yours. Mind you, the tenor of your comments on unrelated threads lead me to expect no less.
It’s only the word n-zi and certain symbols like the swastika that have been given a negative value. The substance of national-socialism is more or less the New Deal plus racial consciousness and public policy based on racial consciousness. That was all very popular at one time in the South.
If you are going to base your rhetoric on whatever goes over well with recent public taste in the South, you can forget criticizing Jews.
The thing about an intelligentsia is that it doesn’t accommodate public opinion: it leads it, which means not accepting all of its pre-existing biases.
I like the fact that Weaver, through reflection, anticipated by several decades what Robert Putnam recently finally concluded in Bowling Alone: yes, forced diversity shatters communities.
I realized that myself when I was in school. Racially mixed groups meant that we couldn’t relax and be ourselves. Apart from that, the general idea of participating in anything that had Blacks in it was distasteful.
@Hadding Scott:
“It’s only the word n-zi and certain symbols like the swastika that have been given a negative value.”
OK, benefit of the doubt. Where do you get this idea from? Is there a survey or some excellent reasoning sitting behind it?
Because it totally flies in the face of common intuition. National socialism is totally hooked up with n*zi , as is Hitler, and all the rest. This is one of the most heavily propagandized items in society. Kids do whole terms on the nazis. Right now in the UK the school leaving exams in History involves two controlled assessments…one on Nazi Germany and the other on the American West. I’ve seen the Nazi Germany one…believe me…national socialism is mentioned rather a lot.
So why are you saying this? Why not instead actually call it “new deal plus racial consciousness” if that is what it is? Or what not just call it something something completely new?
Why sabotage your own professed envisioning by using words like national socialism and making references to that system all the time? Why do that, when it is so unnecessary? What is the payoff from using that word?
@Trenchant: “The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, but he certainly is almost always good entertainment.”
If I could knit, I’d put that line in a sampler and hang it on the wall. As it is, it will simply have to go into a Word doc in which I store insightful and otherwise memorable cracks. It will fit in nicely on the page that now begins with “Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography” (Oscar Wilde) and also contains “It’s easy to be humble when you’re a success. The trick is to be arrogant when you’re a flop” (Nipsey Russell) and “What’s so special about women?” (Mother Angelica).
Neoconservativism is not what lead to coupling of ideas and foreign policy. That was messianic revolutionary fervor and Jefferson had it as much as Dubya.
I like the parts of this essay that talked about the concrete. The traditional European understanding of international law as a real geographic spatial order rather than a regime of universalistic legal ideals is explained in Carl Schmitt’s book Nomos of the Earth. As Americans however we are part of an anti- traditional anti- European political movement from the start. So it is hard to conceptualize alternatives. Read Schmitt’s book if you want to understand international law as it existed and functioned prior to the disastrous 20th century.
@Edward: Superb . This is exactly the problem . The Masons haven’t as yet realised (at least from this outsiders perspective ) that they will get ditched when the time is wright .
Masonry has been going for 600 years and 400 of them have been bankrolled by Jewry . Judaism has been going for 3000 years .When the International Jew stops bankrolling the Masons they will shrivel away . The Masons just can’t see the obvious . Infact I think they refuse to see the obvious because their little ego’s need to be in this ‘in club’ . For Gentiles , Masonry is almost a schoolboy thing that they never got over . The tree house they never had . The secret strength that money gives but more : its a boys secret club , that gives them the power to act nefarious when it pleases : After all I gave all that money (or time) to charity ! I am good , you (who oppose my Jewish masters ) are bad .
I have personally witnessed a fellow in my town , the before and after . Now he’s filled with confidence but the knowledge of the world hasn’t changed on iota. Infact now it never will .
This is one of the Europeans peoples great problem . These foolish Masons can’t see past their own selfish noses because they really believe that they are supporting the brotherhood of man (a mason credo) .
Look at dopes like Bill Gates , running around Africa helping them to breed ! But on the home front Masons acquiesce to all things Jewish , because as I said they are at heart selfish little men , who have learn’t self-interest pays , so they look the other way or cowardly choose to believe the MSM . This has been going on for so long in Anglo Saxon countries ( since not long after Disraeli warned the British about a secret organisation spreading it tentacles throughout Europe) that it is now a socialised way of behaviour . And the Zionist have made their point explicit by deed : oppose us at your own peril .
What person thinks that a Clinton or a McCain could ever hold a view contrary to Israel’s . They are the personification of the Stockholm Syndrome . We would witness a personality breakdown if they were pushed under interrogation to account for the hypocritical double dealings of their masters ! Really ….
Anyway this was a very interesting historical perspective you have cast on this matter . Thanks .
@jeddite:
Thank you so much for this wonderful link. There are so many quotes that stood out it was hard to choose but perhaps this speaks as well as any:
“Let us cling to our identity as a people! The danger is upon us of losing it — of its being absorbed and swallowed up in that of a people which having despoiled us of the rights of freemen assumes to do our thinking, our legislating and our ruling for us. Influences are operating on us with every last breath we draw which, if we be not vigilant, will sooner or later wipe out every distinctive characteristic which has hitherto marked us. Are we prepared for it? “
@Pierre de Craon:
I join you in celebrating Trenchant’s comment, but once again, you poor Yankees fall short. We Southerners have no trouble at all being arrogant when we flop, we excel at it.
@Bob Johnson: Brother Johnson? I have piece of advice for you. If you are addicted to the Cultural Marxist, virulently anti-White, virulently dishonest and deliberately deceptive ideology of ‘Political Correctness’ – whereby the truth is deemed to be off-limits for written or verbal discussion, then stop visiting TOO and other pro-White websites and go back to the prison cell of lies and jewish baloney that you appear to want to persuade the TOO website owners to impose upon it’s readers.
News Flash for Bobby boy: The #1 reason why racially awake and racially proud White men and women frequent The Occidental Observer and other pro-White websites is because we are SICK AND TIRED of jewish Political Correctness and jewish efforts to restrict and control the boundaries of what is considered ‘acceptable discourse’ on a given issue. In this case, the issue is the very survival of White European people and whether or not there will be a future for our White children – and if posters on TOO decide to use provocative and precise language when they are discussing this subject and that gets your panties in a knot, then go elsewhere.
BTW: It is my distinct hunch that White ‘newcomers’ are adult and mature enough to handle the truth, and most are probably ecstatic over seeing and hearing it – after being fed a pile of non-stop jewish lies for most of their lives.
Tip: It is time for the White man to trade in his panties for a pair of boxer shorts. Face the North Wind, White man. And, take your nation back.
@Franklin Ryckaert: @Hadding Scott: We’re already there, bud, and have been for at least half a century…
Those aristocracies of the past, whether bearing titles or merely surrounded by some deference of status, justified their role by both being and doing. They enjoyed status, but when emergencies arose, they took the field and showed that they were not afraid to meet a test. Most importantly of all, their recognized status provided a kind of sanctuary from which they could defy public opinion when they thought that opinion wrong, and the willingness to do this is essential to the idea of leadership.
-Richard Weaver, Visions of Order, p. 26-27
@Franklin Ryckaert: You know, the problem here is that you are coming onto the slide rule from a different, more naive direction. Take a second and consider that the Briar Patch contains a legion of operative intellectuals who have been considering various strategies regarding this subject for well over two centuries.
We’ve been more or less explicit about race since the Civil War. Try reading the speeches of John Calhoun from the 1830s and 40s if you want something more explicit. Been there, done that, as the saying goes.
Periodically, it has served our interests to relate the racial concept to other more general civilization linguistic constructs. We’ve thought to trim back on rude explicit language in order to reach a broader audience that has historically had trouble facing the truth that was so obvious to most of us below the Mason and Dixon.
The consciousness is thus diffusely embedded throughout southern literature. Using rhetoric, we can draw on an elegant tradition which contains all of the mojo of an ingrained historical memory.
It is difficult to motivate an entire body politic on the strength of one’s middle finger. This is a “johnny-come-lately” type of brute strategy that is way too common in White activist circles. It’s a “boorish” sort of wisdom. Study up on American history. There is already considerable depth in a racially conscious American tradition at odds with the powers that be. Weaver is a key entry point.
“Implicit racialism” is both an unconscious state of being and a strategy used by those who are conscious in order to reach out and make allies where there would otherwise not be any. It is meant to operate in a gray zone at a time when many hearts and minds need to be won for our side. It doesn’t help to denigrate it. Don’t be the guy at the nude beach who thinks he is the only one with pride in his family jewels. He demonstrates bad form. Many of us just prefer to wear normal clothes. I think the fact that Weaver unapologetically refers to the benign importance of “segregation” as a cultural concept should more than make up for any blinds he may’ve been using right in the heat of the civil rights movement. The word “culture” was not a choice he made out of cowardice. Race is one component of culture. And while it is important, we are more than just horses bred to run around in a circle.
@Sanjay: Brother Sanjay? Correct me if I am mistaken in this assumption, but from my 3 or 4 decades of being racially ‘awake’ – it would seem to me to be pretty much a foregone conclusion that this ‘elitism’ that you claim we need more of on TOO, coming, I suppose, from the near 100 percent White readers and posters – is a big reason why we are in the mess we are in today.
Exhibit A for the defense: Back during the late 1950s and from the 1960s and beyond – when the anti-White, mostly jewish Cultural Marxists began their racial genocide program against Whites and started pushing integration of our White public schools and enacting policies which were designed to shove blacks and other minorities into formerly safe and tranquil all-white neighborhoods and communities – the Whites who possessed the necessary ‘grit’ to protest those outrages and to vocally expose what the actual jewish subversive agenda was – these Whites were not ‘elites’ in any sense of the word. They were mostly blue collar, average, hardworking Whites of modest means – and a sizable percentage of these Whites weren’t necessarily the most ‘refined’ or ‘polished’ or ‘sophisticated’ members of our demographic group. In other words, these Whites were not burdened with the elitist classes etiquette rules or it’s sanctimonious, farcical and affected politeness. They were very blunt in their protestations and often times, even crude and brutally honest in their descriptions of what sort of irreparable damage would befall the cohesive social order if these Marxist social engineers were not stopped. Did these White elites ally themselves with their less polished, less refined fellow White blue collar kinsmen?
Answer: No, they did not. Instead, what these elites did – was to throw in their lot with the mortal enemies of all White European men, women, and children worldwide. Hence, ever since the 1960s Cultural Marxist revolution to destroy White Western Civilization was launched, our White elites have been our biggest and most treacherous enemy.
Thus, pleas for more elitism, to my way of thinking, equates to pleas for a continuation of the snobbery and elitist betrayal of those Whites who the elites feel ‘superior to’. Which happens to include those of us who are racially awake, racially loyal to our fellow whites and who wish to help our people survive in any way we can.
Heck, its White men and women in our social and economic category who would be far greater and more trustworthy ‘leaders’ than the current crop of White elites we’ve had to endure for the last 60 years.
Oh, and incidentally, some of us like to wear bluejeans and tee-shirts – as opposed to the suits and ties, starched underwear and cufflinks that are mandated at Jared Taylor’s conferences.
@Tom: What is genetic memory but an encoded version of historical experience? Seems to me that this is exactly what we are talking about here. And if you grant that, then we must ask, in the American context, which historical experience? Quem Patrem?
The answer to that question leads to a significant fork in the road and a quiet little eddy where we can net lots of human fish, old and young.
Rhetoric is the way that we speak about this without coming off like a bunch of nerdy scientists who are always the last to get picked anyhow for teams on the playground. How we say something is almost as important as what we have to say. People don’t respond to calculus equations and logical elucidations. If you’re already there, remember that many are not.
Alternative strategies are always welcome but when we start talking about American history, if you get bored with the “Southern thang,” I’m not sure where else you’ll be able to go for solace and support for any version of respect towards a “genetic memory” that takes the past 300 years into account, at least on this side of the Atlantic. I would extend that assertion to just about any individual or group that is trying to plug into an older Indoeuropean mind from a contemporary American matrix. This road leads to Dixieland.
Thanks for reading, though. I’m flattered and honored that you took the time. Can’t please everyone.
@Pierre de Craon:
As always, well said. I hope no one overlooked the wonderful links supplied by Sir Tristan at the end of his article. They make a wonderful introduction to those not familiar with Weaver.
@John Rennick:
This is an interesting post because of the didactic tone that underlies it. I detect some “righteous” puritan rhetoric here.
Should we continue to blame the South for ruling blacks or the Northern merchants for bringing them over? Should we continue to blame the South for being the only region with the guts to impose legal stratifications separating whites from blacks historically or the North for doing everything in its power to annihilate all distinctions?
The Old South certainly had no Watts riots or Harlems or anything comparable to what is entertained and allowed to continue these days. We took care of those issues rather adroitly.
Hmmm… seems to me the burden of proof is on the North and its utopian vision delivered on high from the “white ethnostate” of old Massachusetts.
I apologize for the “verbiage” as you put it, barring us from the heart of the matter. You have to understand, if you don’t already, that southerners have been staring at this issue for 300 years. The insanity of the opposition to our “take” has stupefied us like Medusa’s gaze for so long that many are simply indifferent to all social policy in this regard.
But those who refuse to accept the status quo have dug rather deep in refining our technique. I guess we’ve gotten mighty clever at “justifying slavery.” Uh-oh.
Look. Slavery is and was just a pejorative word for imposing limitations on non-white members of our society who are, generally speaking, inassimilable or at a different operative level of intelligence and culture creation.
You want an all white ethnostate to hatch out of a vacuum. How realistic is that at this stage of the game? And how long will it be before another group of influential white gullivers has lived so far away from other types of people, (as they had in the North for such a long time) that they have forgotten what sets them apart.
We can argue all day about the wisdom of bringing the blacks over here. Fact is, they’re here, and the Mexicans too, and we’ve got to deal with it. The colored peoples of the world are everywhere. Why not take our civilization with us, within us, wherever we are, wherever we go? It’s an inner dignity thing that inevitably translates at the political level unless there is something forcefully preventing its expression.
The Old South didn’t have an ideology or a program or a flawed civilization. It had a “sense of things” and accepted reality as it found it. It did not ignore race and the normal hierarchic structure that nature herself imposes on man. If it couldn’t have things perfect then it would at least have them manageable, which is usually how we find the world.
Slavery existed at a time when manual labor was the only option for cultivating wide expanses of land into profitable agricultural enterprise. It was also phased out of almost every civilized country without an unnecessary aggressive war that killed off over half a million of our best and brightest in the name of Freedom and Equality.
Seems to me like a more sensible strategy, at present, is to work out ways of defining, defending, and incorporating ourselves voluntarily within the pluralistic civilization in which we currently exist. To do this, it helps not to start at ground zero but to draw on something, some common ground, a tradition, a particular historical experience etc. in order to match up to the momentum of the New World Order which continues to draw its justification and sustenance from a perception of American history that is out-of-touch, out-of-context, and hopefully one day, out-of-luck.
Until the establishment stops using its false vision of American History to justify the egalitarian paradigm, we have no choice but to resurrect its antithesis. We’re not the ones who keep going there. We are driven to it.
I’m willing to debate with anyone but I don’t think I’ll be going into any gutter, especially with your boot on my face.
@Mickey Meadows:
Sabotage? No. I am trying to address thinking people, who understand that what most people believe is a muddled mess and will be attracted to clarity.
I am saying that it is not national-socialism per se, but only certain symbols, to which people have been trained to be averse. Since hardly anybody in the United States has a proper understanding of what National-Socialism was or is, that’s just obvious.
How can I distinguish the substance of national-socialism from the Hollywood image without calling it by its proper name?
Clarity is a powerful persuader.
@Sir Tristram:
Already where?
@Alice Teller: I take your point, Alice, and I don’t dispute its truth, even though you make the point with a smile. I was well into my thirties before I realized that what Hollywood had been telling me my entire life about what the South and southerners were like was a lie from start to finish. Indeed, I credit my reading of Weaver primarily, along with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, for opening my eyes to at least some of the relevant truth about the South. That all of these writers are deeply unfashionable in today’s Judaized literary world says all that really one needs to know about the matter.
By the way, are your fellow southerners to blame for teaching the arrogant-flop trick to the Obamas, or did Mr. O. pick it up in one of his native countries and then teach it to the missus?
Addendum: Thinking of Ransom, I wonder whether Sir Tristram omitted his name from the list of Weaver’s mentors and influences for any particular reason. I am under the impression that his MA thesis was written under Ransom’s guidance and tutelage.
@Pierre de Craon:
Personally, I blame it all on those nasty lies told by Tennessee Williams. One of the few benefits of our defeat in The War of Northern Aggression and its consequent unpleasantness it that it forces Southerners to take good, hard look at our true values. We refined a hierarchy of goods which was not dependent on material goods or the renown of the larger world. We made a fine art of both defiance (Think Sawyer on Lost) and genteel poverty, along with an associated etiquette. Harper Lee got a few things right, including the fact that Atticus’s status was not based on wealth. Like many good things, this too is fading.
I would like to thank Sir Tristam again, especially for his links. The first one to an essay on Richard Weaver’s Hierarchy of Argument, would not only improve the conversation around here, it will teach how our people are fooled so easily by unscrupulous voices.
@Hadding Scott: I was responding to these comments:
Weaver’s vision of rhetoric involved the cultivation of a daring intelligentsia, not a pandering committee of media whores. But this also means using some tact. Instead of criticizing Jews in the rhetorical style of a Nazi which will not go over well in the South or anywhere else in the country, see what happens in a group of working class White men when you start talking about “those New York money people” who keep getting the boys killed in useless wars overseas. In my experience, the room starts to get hot at this point. It is such distinctions that make the study of rhetoric a valuable tool of persuasion.
Actually, the New Deal was one of the primary factors inspiring the initial Agrarian reaction in 1930. It extended the bureaucratic power of the Fed to a highly obnoxious level, laying the ground work for what happened in the 60s. For the most part, real Southerners did not like it at all. Concessions and relief coming from the Fed at that point were kind’ve viewed like the food we deliver to places that we have just bombed. Too little, too late but ‘thankee’ sir for the twinkie.
@Pierre de Craon:
That may very well be, Pierre. He took the M.A. at Vanderbilt which leads me to suspect that Davidson had at least as much a hand in some sort of advisory capacity.
I probably should have included some Ransom comments and links. I know that God Without Thunder exerted considerable influence upon him.
@Luke:
>the truth
I’m sure any decent white man can handle the truth. But is THE truth what they’re getting in the comments? Or is it certain poster’s truths? Is it the truth that Kevin Macdonald is secretly in the pocket of an Israeli Mossad agent because a writer on his site uses the word “communitarian” (small-c)?
It cannot be that both Dixie and Pierre de Craon (excuse me, gentlemen, I have no desire to stir up an argument if there isn’t one) are both entirely correct if Dixie (as I surmise from his post) believes that only Protestants should be allowed to hold office in America, and Pierre de Craon is both a sincere white nationalist and an ardent traditionalist Catholic.
Points of contention such of these must be handled without fear, but at the same time without undue rancor, which WILL turn off any reasonable white man, who is looking for an intelligent group of people to fall in with, not a schoolyard argument online.
The way I was raised, you don’t need to wear starched underwear and cufflinks to show a bit of basic politeness.
@Luke: I don’t think we should make you head of recruiting Luke. I think maybe you’re more the sergeant-at-arms type. But seriously, I know it feels good to vent. We’ve all got a lot of pent-up frustration. We live in a crazy world that tells us we shouldn’t exist, that we don’t exist, that the only way be can be heroes is by lifting up non-whites. The Media, Academia, even our own government treats us like we’re a big embarrassment to be forgotten and replaced. But I’m not your enemy, man. We shouldn’t be fighting with each other. In fact, we shouldn’t be fighting at all with violence. We need to persuade our brothers and sisters to join us. Wouldn’t that be better? To create a movement that would appeal to LOTS of white folks? Can you imagine that? I can. That would be beautiful. So I’m not going to lash out at you, brother. I’m just going to ask you to think about your vision of the future. Do you love your people or do you hate your enemies more? I love my people. All I care about is winning this thing, and for me that means bringing our people together so that we can tap the most unstoppable power source on the planet. If we don’t do that, then nothing really matters. If we succeed, it will be the greatest thing the world has ever seen. I’ll even say that it will save the world, or at least civilization. Peace.
.@Bob Johnson: I will confess to the entire TOO community – that the source of my passion, as well as my often repeated impatience and exasperation with my own racial demographic group – is deeply connected to my incredible bafflement over how we are expected to tread ever so gingerly when we are reaching out and trying to persuade our fellow unawakened Whites that ‘survival’ is a better idea to embrace than our own genocide and extinction.
I mean, think about this for a second. In what sort of bizarro world or Twilight Zone episode are we living in these days – when we have to work so HARD to try to convince our fellow Whites that they need to be concerned about their own racial and cultural survival? A world where we, more often than not, will find ourselves being ARGUED with by our fellow whites -who seem to prefer to follow the path to extinction that the jewish enemy has so diabolically laid out for us?
As my favorite Atlanta Attorney, Sam Dickson once remarked: “It is extremely difficult to be a member of a racial group that has so many determined suicidists within it.”
This is a form of mental insanity, Brother Johnson. Sam Dickson went on to comment that every living species in the Universe, all the way down to the amoeba – has, within itself, an instinct for survival. But, we in the TOO community have to talk our fellow White brothers and sisters INTO accepting the notion that survival is better than death?
The same race of humans who are responsible for building the greatest and most successful civilization in world history…….has to have their arms twisted before they can be sweet-talked into worrying about their own survival and the future that their white children will face?
This is why I tend to get so passionate and provocative when I am posting comments that deal with the survival of our people, Brother Johnson. I mean no one any insult or criticism and the last thing I wish to do is stir up division. What we need most is unity and to reach that point, we all must reach some kind of consensus on how those of us who are awake are going to deal with those whites who refuse to wake up. How much time and energy should we devote or waste on these ‘determined suicidists’?
Didn’t the Book mention something about not ‘casting your pearls before swine’?
Time is running short, Brother Johnson. Which means the time we can afford to devote to trying to sweet-talk hardheaded white numbskulls is detracting from the amount of time those of us who are awake have left to save ourselves and those of us who are like-minded.
See my point? The Whites who refuse to wake up and who argue with those of us who are awake are obviously defective and so, do we really need to save people who have allowed their survival instincts to be erased by our mortal enemy?
@Free Thinker: Minutes after I posted this comment last night I came under intense . Psychic (?) attack and then and now microwave brain entrainment attack . I can tell you my house has been entered a few times over the last couple of years while I have been away and food chronically poisoned ! The dog tortured and plants in the garden killed at various times . The town I live in was founded by Scottish Rites Freemasons , anyone heard of the violent butcher called Albert Pike ? One of their leading lights .There is two half stars of david on the local golf club gabble ! Truly . :-)
These Mason organizations need to be put into the light . People who think they can counter the destruction of the European Peoples without looking into Freemasonry are fooling themselves . And it does amaze me how so few people bring up this issue .
Freemasonry like Judaism has a religious belief in Astrological Evolution and it is this understanding that drives there devious behavior to put the whole world under their logical system (!). Some call it Satanism (and after last nights psychic attack they could be right ) a development of psychic skills and powers to manipulated people . Oh and did I mention the honey traps ? Why these people are so intensely interested in my is incomprehensible . Is it the straight talk or is it the news from Australia angle : keeping the European Peoples divided till their obscurity is a reality . Oh and the military chopper buzzing my house after I sent an email to The Economist with their picture of William Hage (running for British Pm at the time ) in stocks when trying to limit UK immigration back in 2004 (?) . Amazing .
As I have mentioned before I have a EEG done when young and these mongrels have got hold of it , because there is no other way that I could be targeted individually ( using the cell phone towers ) . And as I have said I am convinced this technology is being used in the MEast to stir up revolution . Those who have experience this system at full throttle would be amazed at how they can loose control of their emotions .
To post these comments I have to unplug my router and change my MAC address on every connection and while using an ‘anonymous’ server service other wise the line to the server is unplugged (?)–’connection to the server dropped’ .
Also I saw a disturbing documentary by a former CIA interrogation operative ( of 30 years or more ) a couple of nights ago who described the changing of interrogation techniques after 9/11 to the overt use of torture and with the barbaric caveat that if they are not giving us information then your not being rough enough (but no visible scars please !) . The west has taken a dark turn and tell me when the citizens of a country ever escaped from their government when it turned tyranny ? Veiled at the moment .
It shall be interesting to see the usual trolls dumping insult and ridicule on this comment .
@Luke:
Elitism does not mean effitism. By elitism I mean ability, skill, cunning, leadership, excellence, high energy, statecraft.
A little thuggish-ness is actually good. But thuggishness without cunning to infiltrate, read your enemy’s thoughts and intentions is not very useful.
A fusion of Charles Martel, Machiavelli, and Da Vinci.
@Hadding Scott: “The substance of national-socialism is more or less the New Deal plus racial consciousness and public policy based on racial consciousness.”
True. The New Deal was an abomination, loved by all subsequent presidents.
@Luke: I hear you, Brother Luke. I feel a lot of the same frustrations, believe me. And I’m not trying to tell anybody what to think or do. But, as you pointed out, time is running out and these comments can be a tool or they can be impediments. I think we have to make everything a tool. I think that’s a revelation I’ve had recently. I know that white people have an instinct for community and group survival, perhaps not as well developed as other races, but it’s there still. So why don’t they come together? It’s because of the obstacles. They don’t want to be part of something that’s seen as evil or cruel or harsh, even if it’s true. So we can remove those obstacles. We make it all about doing what’s good for our people, not about blaming people or hating. Now I respect Kevin MacDonald very much and I like a lot of the content on this website. I feel the same way about Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow. They are brave men and they do good work. But I think we also need to focus on more positive things, on ways to make it easier for our people to come together. So maybe we could try to self-monitor a little. It’s just an idea, a totally voluntary thing. And maybe we could be more positive and brainstorm a bit more about how to bring in new people. Because time is running out, and right now our people are not flocking anywhere in droves–except toward the cliffs. But there is a vacuum in their lives, I know there is. We just have to find a way to let them know it’s okay for them to be white and to struggle for their group interests like every other people on the planet, that there’s nothing evil in that. Personally, I think it takes a softer approach. In my experience it’s a lot easier to listen and to talk about positive things than to try to convince another human being of ANYTHING if they’re resistant, made to feel foolish or inferior, or if they think their acceptance of it will make them social outcasts. Anyway, I really appreciate your thoughts and feelings. I can tell you love your race too, my brother, and that’s more important right now than any quibbles we might have about what utopia looks like on a sunny day.
@Pierre de Craon: I note that Thomas Woods is quoted in the essay, and that he occupies no special part in your heart. Without hijacking the thread, is this on account of Wood’s unreliability on Catholic doctrine, or as an historian? I have little knowledge of the man.
@Luke:
One more point: Jared Taylor has dug a hole for himself. He ignores the big Jewish elephant in the room and pretends he can attain mainstream respectability for White Patriots.
Not going to happen. Why?
Jews know that once White patriotism goes mainstream, people will naturally ask, “well why are we losing, who is responsible?” and the Jewish question will quickly be front and center.
So Jews will try to crush Jared Taylor’s fantasy just as quickly .
Also, Amren is now infested by Jews, and already an Amren Jew called Weisberg says “there is no point in explicit White patriotism, just remain implicit”.
But implicit we already are.
@Pierre de Craon:
That comments by Jason Speaks on the Joe Walsh and the 9/11 cover-up: Jewish power on display thread certainly was appropriate there (even if I can’t link to the comment directly due to this websites software glitches). On this thread it’s actually a little different. The comments aren’t really off topic, they just aren’t us up to the level of the original Weaver as one might wish (“hope for” would be quite a stretch). It would be great if myself and others could live in a world where we had time to study Weaver’s theories on rhetoric etc and The Southern Agrarians in general, but considering how difficult it is to find posters that are knowledgeable even of Culture of Critique, I doubt that’s ever likely to happen.
@Sanjay: Amen on Amren.
@Free Thinker:
Free Thinker, this is information that you need: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAq9x8JXxSU
@Will Fredericks:
It would be nice to see someone do an audio-book of The Culture of Critique, and release it on Torrents. There might be a drive-time audience – talented but busy – that could be reached. Ideally, someone with a narrator’s voice and mastery of the text. Still, where professionalism fears to tread, goodwill will.
http://jettandjahn.com/audio/JNJCOC1.mp3
http://www.jettandjahn.com/audio/JNJCOCBoas.mp3
@Trenchant: In brief, he’s a world-class opportunist. Alas, I can’t say much else without revealing rather more about my identity to people whom I wish to conceal it from.
Specific to this forum, however, I will note that he is quite an excellent stylist as a writer—give the devil his due and all that—but his sloppy, anachronistic misuse of the term “communitarian” with regard to Weaver has already caused a multicomment explosion near the top of the thread. This is Woodsie all over: he skates when he should dig, and he digs an inch deep when he should dig a yard.
@Sir Tristram: Now there’s a book that you need your broker’s OK to buy at current prices! What our team needs is a reprint press whose interest extends beyond Ernst Jünger et al.
@Pierre de Craon:
Do you have an opinion about Thomas J. DiLorenzo? He’s written critical books on Lincoln. I noticed that Pat Buchanan was favorably disposed toward DiLorenzo’s Lincoln books, but I believe he was a bit critical of his book on Alexander Hamilton (this stems from DiLorenzo’s much stronger libertarian beliefs, from what I could gather – Pat accepted the need for some central government).
@Trenchant: Apropos Woodsie and Traditionalism, I might add that not only did he go soft on resistance to the conciliar church real fast when a modicum of secular fame beckoned, but he was also shockingly disloyal to the people at the Remnant, folks who gave him work when nobody else would, when it was denounced as a hate rag by the $PLC. Far from standing with his old colleagues and editors and openly defying that unspeakable scum, he did quite the opposite: in virtually so many words, throwing up his hands, he cried, “It’s them what’s the haters, not me!!” Or as Orwell famously put it in a somewhat analogous fictional situation, “Do it to Julia!”
The bottom line is that he’s a very smart guy who has been utterly cynical in his multiple strikings and repitchings of camp. What he really believes down deep is anyone’s guess. For that matter, whether there’s a there there is itself an open question.
@Jason Speaks: Yes, I do, Jason; thanks for asking. I think the Lincoln books are both highly recommendable (and in fact I saw to it that they were included as recommended readings in two encyclopedias of American history I was involved with a decade or so ago). Their only “flaw” (many wouldn’t even see it as such) is the absence of a full measure of scholarly dispassion. But then, to give him his due, he was writing for a general audience, not just his fellow economists or historians.
I haven’t read the Hamilton book, but I heard TDiL discuss it for a full hour on C-SPAN. Given Buchanan’s own preferences and political ideals, it’s no surprise that he was less than fully supportive of the overall interpretation offered. Yet DiLorenzo is right to point the finger at Hamilton as a dedicated centralizer with more than a touch of unscrupulousness in his makeup. Nor should it be forgotten that he (i.e., Hamilton) has profited greatly in terms of historical estimation from the mode of his demise, especially from the party responsible for it, a man who has successfully been branded one of the worst scoundrels of American history. Of course, one needn’t be Gore Vidal to wonder about the manure content of that verdict.
@Will Fredericks:
I can assure you that I’ll Take My Stand is an easy, pleasant read. It certainly requires far less of us than any well-informed position on 9/11 would. Admittedly it speaks to a world nearly lost now, unless like mine your parents are buried in the family cemetery that our ancestors carved out of the wildness better than 200 years ago. Despite all the horrors inflicted by modernity, many in the South still have a strong connection to both family and the land.
@Jason Speaks: http://kat.ph/the-real-lincoln-t2698808.html
No seeders, but hope springs eternal.
@Sean: You’ll get no argument from me, not that I believe you genuinely expected one. Your points are well taken, not least the one about underwear.
@Will Fredericks: Mr. Fredericks, if I had not made a sincere appeal that Sir Tristram’s extraordinarily just presentation of Weaver’s significance be given a fair hearing, I would have been scandalously disloyal to a writer—the very first whose lifetime overlapped with mine in whom I discerned qualities of nobility of mind and spirit reminiscent of the great figures of the past—who measurably helped me understand how to think about kinship, intellection, and morality all at once and, more, made me, then quite a young man, see that there was something profoundly wrong with a society where such wholeness of thought was marked out as in some sense eccentric or corny or of merely visionary interest.
Back in the late sixties, a noted British behaviorist philosopher wrote, “You can’t always get what you want.” He didn’t say I couldn’t ask for it, however, now did he?
@Pierre de Craon: Thanks for clearing that up.
Was the South really that great though?
I mean the place had Jews like Judah P. Benjamin running around in high office! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_P._Benjamin )
Lets forget these failed States from centuries ago (the Confederacy and National Socialist Germany), move on, and get more involved in the contemporary state-craft of Ethno-States as conceived by Wilmot Robertson and Harold Covington.
@Sanjay: Ditto, Brother Sanjay. There is another very pro-white and totally politically incorrect, no-nonsense leader in the White Nationalist / White race realist community who’s repeatedly said ‘that is impossible to sneak up on the world’s most paranoid tribe of people’.
I think he probably learned that principle from reading George Lincoln Rockwell’s book, “This Time The World” because in it, Rockwell went into considerable detail about his experiences with these spineless ‘conservatives’ who were always talking about ‘sneaking up on the jews’.
Taylor is a highly intelligent man, and he should know better than to adopt a strategy that has continually spelled defeat for Whites for well over 60 years – and which has spelled victory after victory for the enemy. And, you are dead right – despite Taylor’s efforts to dance around this issue, the jews are smart enough to see what you also have pointed out – and as a result, they will attach as many jewish moles to Taylor and American Renaissance as they can to help them control that wing of the ‘opposition’ and to ensure that it gets virtually zero traction.
Thus, as one savvy white nationalist spokesman has repeatedly stated: Any pro-white organization that allows jews to join it, will either be taken over by jews and steered in jew-friendly directions (status quo) or it will be undermined, subverted and destroyed by jews.
So, as Tanstaafl recently said: jews are not members of the ‘White team’, so why should they be allowed or invited to wear our uniform and pretend that they are?
@Luke:
In short : you cannot make a temporary alliance with your eternal enemy.
@Pierre de Craon:
I think it certainly is a reasonable thing to ask for. Realistically most discussion threads here or on forums I have been on usually don’t amount to much. This seems even more so when they are ostensibly devoted to a serious purpose, such as in discussing a serious article. Very often in my experience it seems the article itself is basically ignored by the discussion, which just seems to be treated as nothing more than a springboard for the posters to return back to their hobbies/pet peeves of choice. This is especially true when the article is not overtly simple to interpret, i.e. is reasonably deep.
In this discussion thread at least the comments did in touch on things a lot of things that the article addressed, albeit in general not very deeply ; things like southern regionalism, Weaver’s concept and treatment of race, and especially his traditionalist communitarianism, (which pushed one poster’s buttons ;)). But the central theme of his essay, rhetoric, was basically overlooked
I think to anyone reading forums today it is fairly obvious that this style of personality we see today on our forums today needs some improvement. It just isn’t suited for a deliberative approach to what to any serious person are some serious problems, including serious defects on our side. I see it as a product of the mentality of our age, but still devastating. All we have left is the internet and the ability to communicate – if we can’t communicate seriously, then what do we have left?
Certain things of course make it easy to hijack communication on the internet. I think that might be why it tends to be dominated by unstable personalities, if not psychopathic ones like Alex Linder. For anyone unfamiliar with Linder this thread on Buchanan Hadding Scott kindly referenced me on his article A Closer Look at What Happened to Pat Buchanan, Part 1. It epitomizes to an extreme the certain degeneracy that seems to have increasingly characterized most traditionalist/WN forums I have experienced. Clearly some people don’t want us to have a discussion, and it isn’t just the overt Abe Foxman types. Types like Alex Linder view the civilized tone that Weaver represents and taught as epitimizing degeneracy, as opposed to his knuckledragging approach of ad hominems . I think Alex Linder probably represents a lot about today’s WN movement. He of course himself came from the neocons, and like many of today’s WN that really sound a lot like him, he has basically adopted the scatological rhetorical style of New York Jews with their hatred of traditionalist, white Christian and rural America. It would be nice if we could learn some lessons from the likes of Richard Weaver on rhetoric and personality, but beyond asking for it it certainly seems to me like you doubtful that we’ll get it.
@Free Thinker:
Yes there are such conspiracies, but the conspirators have successfully fostered a general disbelief in conspiracy by putting put out crazy conspiracy red herrings. Thus, anyone mentioning Freemasons or Jews is subconsciously associated in the minds of hearers with craziness of the red herrings. Diabolically clever!
@Sir Tristram:
A room of conservative philo-semites may “get hot” over denunciations of New York money people, Hollywood, or liberals. However, any progress will be lost as soon as these people reconnect to their TV and radio pacifiers. If necessary, the Jew can supply his own media champion to denounce the New York money people and philo-semites will lap it up.
That is because the Jews have usurped morality by fooling the (ex) Christian population into believing it is immoral to speak truthfully about Jews. Such inverted morality is the opposite of Christianity. Every part of the New Testament (and much of the Old) contains strong denunciations of the Jews. The Catholic Church preached and fought against Jews for almost 2000 years, up until roughly 75 years ago. Martin Luther condemned the Jews. Speaking truth about Jews is not just “Nazi.” More importantly, it is Christian.
To fight a propaganda war effectively, the Jewish problem must be confronted. Do it charitably but with justice and clarity.
@Alice Teller:
That may be true but the Jewish strategy was better than Southern White strategy.
Jews practiced residential, marriage and school segregation, but not business segregation. They extracted resources from non-Jews for Jews.
Southern Whites on the other hand put a sign on their businesses “non-whites not allowed”. So resources did not flow from non-whites to Whites. At the same time Whites faced a lot of outrage for those signs.
@Sanjay:
I believe that you have put your finger on the central issue of our dilemma. While many, many factors play a part, the primary characteristic that prevents us from solving our problem, despite overwhelming numbers, power, and intelligence, is that the best of us will draw the line at how low we will go for money. While we have enjoyed and attained a comfortable standard of living, the adjective money-grubbing expressed real contempt among those I grew up with. Poor but proud had real meaning. Those of us who still hold these values have found ways to survive without selling our souls. Others have chosen to go over to the dark side, and try to justify their sorry lives by wearing the right color ribbon or sending a few bucks to help Africa or raging against the hateful opponents of gay marriage while remaining single themselves , thereby proving to themselves that they are morally superior. It is not a pretty sight.
We are not Jews, and we really do not want to live in a Jewish world. Nor do we want to content in an endless struggle with them. I think it was George Barnard Shaw that said ” I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Jews simply have far more people who have an aggressive personalities who revel in the fight, and the dirtier it gets the more they like it. We do not want eternal war, we want to fight it, win and get it over with.
If the answer were easy, we would have solved it by now. However, as our children find it increasingly difficult to live as their parents did, things may change. No one in America signed up for the deal we have now. More and more people are waking up to that fact.
@Alice Teller:
Southern mothers still tell this to our babies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB58XCqFDkY
@Bob Johnson:
I really like your comments, Bob. Great stuff.
At the same time, I like Luke’s comments. They, too, seem great.
I’m not sure what else to add.
Have a good weekend, T.O.O. visitors.
@Edward: Do you notice how not one person replies to your extremely important comment ?
Convenient brother . Masons call each other brother , and when they die the ad in the paper reads : Brother so&so is starting a new chapter i.e. Being Reincarnated . Killing someone when you believe they will be returning as an improved spirit becomes easier .(I wasn’t able to post this yesterday-’connection unexpectedly disconnected’-
@Luke: Well , you have to play it cool and have some sort of a strategy . This is mine here , spiking the enemies cannons using this website .
You have to deal with what you have in the Zeitgeist at the moment . That means working to leveraging the coming election . Demanding the repeal of Affirmative Action is where to drive in the spike . Make a placard (rollup variety) , go to a Republican convention , turn on the lightbulbs mate .
The powers that be would know this is a tinderbox issue , that could force their hand on immigration control and re-oreintate the election : if the BoobTubers could unplug . They will work feverishly to keep it off the agenda .Unfortunately the enemy have the power (and amorality) to raise a false flag whenever they want . I would give you 10:1 on $100 dollars that Romney is another footnote in history .
You see while the Cretan & Saxon are giving banal languid homilies on youth guidance , the chances slips away .
@Alice Teller:
2000 years together. That is a long time fighting with pigs. the only way to fight and win it is to send the Jew to isreal.
So long as jew is in America and Europe there will be 2 nations in one country. And the 2000 year struggle will go on till Whites dissolve through childlessness, 3rd world invasion, intermarriage.
@Sir Tristram: As the money supply collapsed by around one third from ’29-32, nominal wages should have fallen to compensate for the higher real value of the dollar, otherwise one would have had the perverse effect of increasing labour costs in the midst of a recession. Both Hoover and FDR did their best to stop nominal wages from falling, thereby creating the mass unemployment that so traumatized the country.
@ Sir Tristram – Thank you for your reply to rennick – done much more eloquently than I could, or would, have done. Being basically a Southron hillbilly/redneck/etc , my answer would be more akin to ‘you dont know what you’re talking about, and please accept my invitation to meet and TRY to put a boot on me…’ :)
@Richard: Thanks, Richard. I enjoyed checking out your blog. I’m kind of like you, maybe. I love my own people and it’s my mission to do my part in saving them, but I can love people of other races too. I don’t think loving our own kind means we have to hate anybody. I wrote a story for American Renaissance. Check it out if you get a chance. You might get a chuckle out of it.
This was an interesting article. I read a couple of Weaver’s online articles and enjoyed the power and imagery of his words.
@Sir Tristram: For those like me unfamiliar with Weaver, here’s the PDF of Ideas have Consequences, the preface to his Visions of Order, and a article penned by him for Modern Age.
http://www.alabamapolicy.org/pdf/weaverideas.pdf
http://www.isi.org/books/content/175pref.pdf
http://shawnslayton.com/open/weaver.pdf
You’ve inspired me to read all your archived work on this site.
@Bob Johnson:
great point. loving your people a little bit more than other people is same as loving your family a little more than other families.
Concentric circles of love. me and my family, my people, and next in line other people. no hate towards blacks, browns, asians, but we must love and cherish our own families and our own people, who are really extended family.
I take care of my family, and then my extended family (white people) and once they are all taken care of, I will think of others.
Problem with whites is they do not even take care of their own families, or white people, and rush to help blacks, browns, asians.
This pathology is suicidal.
@Luke: That’s a great turn of phrase -catching the paranoid unawares – to whom is it attributable?
@Sir Tristram:
Linder of course would criticize you for trying to be “Canny” again with such tactics. I am suspecting however there is something more substantive in what some still call Weaver’s “implicit” racial categories. Going back to the section on rhetoric I quoted again
It strikes me that strict reliance on race is part of this “overwhelming distortion that a purely nominal and positivistic machine age has introduced into human discourse.” Race after all is, at least theoretically (the science even by its most convinced defenders really has a great deal to be developed before it truly is determinative by itself of human behavior , as I’m sure even Kevin MacDonald etc. would acknowledge) apart of this scientific mode of discourse. In this sense I’m sure this is why as you note Weaver’s racial consciousness was often not explicit. I think Weaver’s understanding of race was, like Southerners in general, based on cultural experience, and he preferred to frame the issue in those terms, that is poetic rather than scientific. I think he was probably conscious of the poverty in trying to think, use categories, and speak purely in the scientific mode, and that his predilection for the poetic mode was not just rhetorical but philosophic. Correct me if I’m wrong.
@Alice Teller:
If so “many in the South still have a strong connection to both family and the land. ” I wonder why you still say it is a “world nearly lost now”. I know it goes both ways, the South in particular being a variable place. It has these old cemeteries, but it also has places of modernity; huge cities like Atlanta, Dallas, etc, where most of the people seem to view the rural south as part of that “dumb Bubba” part of their heritage they’ve successfully put behind.
@Will Fredericks:
Alas, you are all too right, but I prefer to hope that the glass is still half full. I don’t think it is my imagination that Southerners have received more than our fair share of demeaning caricatures, so it is not surprising that some of our young are confused. It is my hope that articles like this will encourage more people to read our great writers and thinkers and reconsider.
The world that The Agrarians wrote about, in which the land gave us independence, is nearly lost, I know a lot of people who work to support the land rather than the reverse. Never the less, it does keep us grounded (please excuse the pun) and may provide our salvation if the whole system collapses.
If we only focus on the power and success of our foes we will continue to lose ourselves.
@Alice Teller:
“It’s the land that matters, Katie Scarlet.” – Gerald O’Hara
@Gladwyn Hulderic:
The fact that the South was not completely pure and perfect is not adequate cause to abandon our affection for it. You are quite right that failed states should not be our model, but the endless demand that we forget our past is part of our problem. It is much easier to fool those who suffer from cultural amnesia.
@Trenchant:
Thank you. A reliable and resourceful man is a real treasure.
@Mickey Meadows:
@Hadding Scott
“Because it totally flies in the face of common intuition. National socialism is totally hooked up with n*zi , as is Hitler, and all the rest. …”
===
Here is a different, but in my view, largely correct reason of the purpose.
http://www.jbcampbellextremismonline.com/behind-the-holocaust.html
By the way, the courses taught about NS Germany are pure fantasy as it pertains to racial conscience. If it was truly thought that that Germans were the “master race” how could they have had a treaty with the “inferior” Japanese? What of Hitler’s comments Japanese traditions and history that should be a source of pride?
Nationalism by nature contains elements of socialism.
@Curmudgeon: The contributors to the anthology “The Celtic Consciousness” edited by Robert O’Driscoll declared themselves to be socialists; not international socialists, but Irish Socialists, Scottish Socialists, Manx Socialists, et cetera. It seems easier to accept high taxation and regulation if the results benefit your own tribe.
@Sanjay: Well stated, Sanjay. Too many whites are more concerned with helping starving abstractions on the other side of the world than in helping the people who live in their own house.
And while I can love and care about individuals of color, I do hate the political organizations that claim to represent them. They exacerbate the divisions between peoples while fostering hatred of whites and dependency on Leviathan. I feel only disgust for La Raza and the NAACP. I detest the ADL and AIPAC too, though I like some Jewish individuals very much and think many Jews act with sincere, if purblind, good will.
Also, I will never give money to any charity that benefits non-whites, simply because I know that my tax dollars already go to too many of those causes WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. I refuse to pay a penny more than the government already confiscates from me to feed causes that are often overtly anti-white. So I make a distinction between individuals and organizations that seems rational to me. It can be difficult to hold a nuanced position but I think it’s healthier for our people in the long run.
@Alice Teller: It saddens me when I hear educated people talk about the South as though the only thing that defined it was slavery. I think slavery was an abhorrent, inhuman institution that put in place a lot of the problems we find ourselves dealing with now. But most of the young men who fought so valiantly defending Dixie DID NOT OWN SLAVES! In fact, slavery kept a lot of them underemployed. They were fighting for their homeland against the threat of invasion by the kind of state the Founding Fathers would have detested, one that callously slaughtered the cream of white American manhood, both Northern and Southern. To forget their sacrifice would be a sacrilege, and to miss a vital lesson from history: don’t put your trust in the state–it will butcher your children.
@Franklin Ryckaert: Bingo, Brother Ryckaert. You may now approach the podium to collect your grand prize!
@Bob Johnson:
I don’t think that there are many Southerners who do not regret the importation of blacks to this country. You are certainly right that many in the South never owned a slave, but as the descendant of slaveholders I am not prepared to judge them by modern standards. I am neither an apologist nor an expert on slavery, but it is my understanding that when the importation first began there was a dreadful shortage of labor in the colonies. Many white men did not survive the conditions in the South, then plagued by malaria not to mention the heat. Once a sufficient number of blacks had been imported, we had, as Thomas Jefferson observed, a wolf by the ears. We did move to stop the importation of blacks as early as the first decade of the 1800′s.
I certainly agree that much evil was done, as it is in all time periods, but I take some comfort from Muhammad Ali’s remark on his first trip to Africa that he was sure glad his grandparents had caught the ship out. In any event, we have paid dearly for our sins.
Here is a resource on the history of slavery. I must note, however, that this is an area both lost in the mists of time and corrupted by political correctness. My current favorite is that we owe patchwork quilting to slaves who brought it over from Africa!
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/slavery/history-slavery.htm
@Alice Teller: I am the descendant of slave owners too, Ma’am. I meant no offense. I was condemning the institution, its inherent evils and unhappy consequences, not everyone involved. And I understand how good people can participate in bad things when those things are accepted by society or seem somehow necessary.
As the readers of this site certainly know, white birth rates have fallen below non-white birth rates for the first time in American history. That means that nothing William Pierce, Daved Duke, Don Black, Tom Sunic, Kevin MacDonald, Alex Linder, Billy Roper, Tom Metzger, Matt Hale, Jeff Schoep, etc ever did (over the past forty years) has prevented this dark day from happening. So whatever it is they’re doing, it’s not good enough. And if it’s not good enough, then maybe it’s time we stopped listening to them. We need new tactics and more action.
I don’t expect a white ethnostate to form out of a vacuum. Instead, it’s got to form out of the brown muck we’re currently sinking in. And to do that the WN movement needs to start confronting the very thing we wish to be free of – non-whites. Remember: did not MLK directly confront whites across the nation, whenever and wherever he could? Did not Mandela do the same in South Africa? Did not, for that matter, Adolf Hitler repeatedly confront those he saw as enemies in the streets of Germany?
For starters: Jared Taylor should be organizing mass marches in the streets in the most black/brown infested neighborhoods of America. Rinse and repeat. Do not rest. No costumes, no swastikas, no hoods. MLK ignited civil unrest (aka “civil disobedience”) and all WN leaders need to do the same. Every year the WN movement should be costing taxpayers millions of dollars. Our goal should be perpetual civil unrest from coast to coast, from Miami to LA. This is our only chance to stop our genocide.
My fear is that ten years from now, in 2022, this site will still be here, with basically the same people talking about the same things, with not a single iota of progress made. Because ten years ago, right here*, that was the case.
(*or on a similar site)
@Bob Johnson:
None taken, Sir. Indeed I have been honored to be in the company of such fine gentlemen. Y’all did us proud!
If I seemed a mite touchy it is because I lean toward John’s position that we need to show greater reverence for the concept of fighting words. My apologies.
@Alice Teller: No apology necessary, Ma’am. You are the epitomy of graciousness.
@John Rennick: I don’t think it’s Jared Taylor’s fault that more white people haven’t embraced racial solidarity. He’s spent 20 years trying to inform people. He’s put himself on the line, organized conferences, gone on TV and radio and made larger sacrifices than any of us here. But organizing white people along racial lines is like herding cats, and the forces arrayed against us are some of the most powerful in the world and extremely well funded. If we organize a meeting or a march, they can bus in hundreds of anti-racists to shout us down and push us around–largely with legal immunity. If there’s a failing, I think it’s been that often our message has been too negative and has tended to attract individuals that most people don’t want to be associated with. And many of us are so filled with outrage that we tend to be too extreme. I think we should try to image what it’s like for your average working-class white man or woman. When they see us being shrill or calling for extreme measures or reinterpreting history, it just seems crazy and viscious to them. All their lives they’ve been programmed to believe the world is a certain way and here there’s this tiny community of people who say the exact opposite. Naturally they’re dubious. Then they don’t have the time or the energy of the inclination to buck the billions of dollars of programming they’ve received and find out that their race is being systematically replaced in all of its traditional homelands. But it’s not their fault they balk, it’s largely ours. We have to feed them milk before they get meat. We have to be normal, decent, appealing people that they will want to associate with, not howling savages filled with bloodlust and visions of revenge. If we want to create a viable movement, then we have to be better people than we sometimes appear to be. Sorry for rambling.
@Alice Teller: Not as reliable as I might hope. Visions of Order is the reader, not the actual work. And The Real Lincoln from the torrents is not the di Lorenzo work, but Charles Minder’s. D’Oh!
@Luke:
Good analysis. Inviting Jew into any organization is double trouble. Jew injects subversive ideas, and Jew becomes 5th column informers.
@Bob Johnson:
Hi Bob
I want to share something, in case you or anyone else is interested.
One of the reasons I’m addressing this to you is because you are a good writer, and your comments seem truly great to me.
Anyway, a couple days ago I was thinking that maybe this movement needs some kind of brief manifesto.
(I might use a lot of “maybe’s” and “might’s” in my comment because I’m unsure about my ideas.)
I have in mind something brief, maybe 10 paragraphs or less.
This manifesto should simple, but still very full. Hopefully it will the basics of the beliefs of pro-White people.
Hopefully it could be something that can be read and understood by an eighth grader, and still meaningful and interesting for a college graduate.
The ideal audience for such a manifesto are people who know only the media’s version of what pro-White people believe. A lot of people think of the movie American History X or skinheads or some other negative stereotype. (I’m not making fun of so-called skinheads; I don’t know any, and I don’t feel comfortable judging them.)
There are opportunities on the internet to present our vision and values and beliefs in a respectful way to potential recruits. I’m not sure “recruits” is the most appropriate word, but something like that.
Anyway, you seem like an ideal person to write it. I’m not asking you to write it, of course. I’m not even asking you to respond to my comment here.
But maybe someone could write it and I could make a simple blog for it, free from advertisements or clutter or anything but the simple message of what we believe and why we believe it.
Or if something like this manifesto already exists, someone could point it out to me. That way I can share it with others who have a distorted understanding of our values.
Have a good day/evening, Bob and others.
All these movements were financed by Jews and received critical Jewish media support. MLK’s speeches were written by Jews. Mandela spent most of his life in jail but was used as symbol by Joe Slovo’s ANC. Hitler was financed by Jewish bankers in the early years and maintained a close alliance with the German Zionist party. WWII destroyed the continent-wide anti-Jewish European restoration movement and birthed modern Israel.
White leadership is infiltrated with Marranos and Masons and is corrupted by Jewish memes (mind viruses or heresies). Success will require a cadre of leadership cleansed of Jewish-implanted heresy.
@Richard: I’m working on something like that, Richard. If you will email me at newconverso@gmail.com we can discuss it a bit. I feel I’ve abused TOO’s comment section enough already.
Just two points–
[1] The commentator on exposing Masons is spot on. Thanks to MacDonald, and of course many predecessors worldwide, it’s becoming easier to discuss Jews. But Masons remain very much taboo. As an interface or facilitator between Jews and whites, Masons are very important – in a sense, even more than Jews, since without Masons the facade would have collapsed perhaps centuries ago. Thanks for mentioning the point!
[2] On slavery, I don’t think it’s accurate to dismiss is as being unacceptable, at all times, and all places. Before steam engines and internal combustion engines and electricity – most things depended on human and horse power. Very possibly some sort of slavery was inevitable. It’s a vast topic, including the whole of human history before industrialisation, and the whole set of processes of labour needed in agriculture and towns and industry.
@dixie you have make some interesting comments regarding the difference between Southern/WASP culture and that of Catholics. Months ago you wrote something about the imperialism of Catholic culture and the new gladiator games like football; crowds cheering as a slave class fights each other.
Sadly, while the articles and blog posts on TOO are top notch, the commenters are full of religious fanatics and seemingly traditionalist Catholic types, still fighting the Freemasons (!). Always fighting the last battle, one that they lost 150 years ago. But I’d have to say its the same for those longing for Dixie past.
Neither traditional Catholics, nor traditional Southern culturalists, are going to lead any useful movement for Whites in the future. Religion belongs in the past. It’s been said on this site dozens of times by dozens of posters:
Why is it that the site of an evolutionary psychologist attracts so many religious fanatics?
@Richard Pierce: Is our position in the world so strong that we can afford to quibble about each other’s religious beliefs? I have this horrible image of the last two white people not speaking to each other because one’s a Catholic and the other’s a Mormon. Let’s get our priorities straight here folks. We need to be a bit more tolerant of each other if we’re going to survive into the next century.
@Rerevisionist
That was undoubtedly true 200 years ago. Now, the idea that Freemasonry provides an important interface between Jews and Whites is obviously out-of date. That interface is more likely to be the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, elite colleges, and Hollywood. The Catholic church, Christianity generally, and groups like Freemasonry, are institutionally and intellectual irrelevant today and that’s not likely to change in the future.
@Bob Johnson, if the religious people would stop brining up their religious beliefs in every single conversation in the every thread, and continue to suggest that somehow their religious beliefs are relevant to the pro-White movement as a whole, it wouldn’t matter what they believed.
@Richard Pierce: I get your point. I feel that way about people who bring up National Socialism all the time.
@Richard Pierce:
High-ranking traditionalist Catholic officials have repeatedly warned of Masonic infiltration of the Vatican. The primary composer of the new mass, Cardinal Anabale Bugnini, was eventually exposed and exiled as a Freemason. The Vatican bank was famously embroiled in scandals with the P2 Masonic Lodge. A few years ago, a group of respected Southern Baptists attempted to expel Freemasons from their convention but failed due to the tigtht grip of Masonry.
Ivy League universities are dominated by Masonic clubs like the Skull and Bones. The ADL is run by the Jews-only Masonic group, B’nai B’rith.
Admittedly, loyalty to Jews under the guise of universalism has spread beyond formal Masonry. However, I believe it is still accurate to refer to such principles as Masonic. Nevertheless, formal, degreed Freemasons continue to occupy key positions in the legal profession, law enforcement, the military, and the clergy of various denominations.
@Richard Pierce:
You cannot talk about an interface between an ethnic minority and an ethnic majority if that interface is formed entirely by that ethnic minority itself. Goldman & Sachs and other big banks, academe, Hollywood and alot more are Jewish themselves. If you want to talk about a real interface between Jews and Goyim that is relevant for our time and not obsolete as the Freemasons, then talk about the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs ( Chatham House). Here powerful Jews and Gentiles meet to construct their New World Order, which is in reality a Jew World Order.
Freemasonry is still important in Scotland and England but no more internationally.
The Jews BTW have their own “Freemasonry” in the B’nei B’rith, the mother organization of the ADL.
@John Rennick:
‘And to do that the WN movement needs to start confronting the very thing we wish to be free of – non-whites. Remember: did not MLK directly confront whites across the nation, whenever and wherever he could? Did not Mandela do the same in South Africa? Did not, for that matter, Adolf Hitler repeatedly confront those he saw as enemies in the streets of Germany?’
Actually various sundry White leaders in America have done just that.
1.) Probably the first was James Madole of the National Renaissance Party. If memory serves he and his followers were confronting people on the streets of New York (!) back in the 1950s! I have never seen a photo of it, but he was reputed to have often worn bicycle helmets to protect himself during these confrontations.
2.) Commander Rockwell led a counter-demonstration against MLK in Chicago in 1966.
3.) In more recent times, before he became entrapped by the Zionist Occupied Government, Matt Hale, was leading pretty large rallies in the mid-west. Chances are if he had stayed on the course he was on, eventually some sort of public confrontation with non-Whites would have occurred.
Bottomline: Whites have been trying to do what you have suggested. Now perhaps we need more effort in the area you suggest, but as of yet it doesn’t seem that anyone has found the ‘magic bullet’. My thought: ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’
@Franklin Ryckaert
Agreed, the think tanks are probably better examples.
@Bob Johnson, completely agree on the German National Socialist fans. Historically interesting, absolutely irrelevant going forward (harmful, even.)
@Edward, It’s not the ideology or ritual of P2 and S&B that are relevant, it’s the fact that elite wealthy families like the Bushes and the Berlesconis are members. One might mention Opus Dei and its interface to conservative political groups in the US (Rick Santorum, Antonin Scalia, etc). Is that in any appreciable way any better? Catholics are just as universalist and “anti-racist” as any Freemason or Jewish type. Historically, Judeo-Masonry and Catholicism have both sought to break up local tribes/nations and institute a “one world order” based on universalism. While in the past Catholic elites may have been better at excluding Jews from power, all a Jew had to do was recite some prayers and presto-chango, now he’s a Catholic and invited to the halls of power.
In the modern world, trans-national corporations are far more relevant, and globalist capitalism a much stronger force for anti-nationalism and anti-racism.
B’nei B’rith is probably irrelevant outside of its political pressure group, ADL. I doubt B’nei B’rith means anything to Mark Zuckerberg or Sergei Brin, but ADL might.
@Richard Pierce:
Historically, the Church has defended the national interests of its members and served as the prime engine of regional cultural development. Unlike Freemasonry, the “universalism” of Christianity does not extent to Jews, Muslims, feminists, or free love advocates. Centralization in Rome was tempered by the distributive principle of local control. The traditional Church exercised a very harsh but effective discipline against Jewish infiltration. What modern institution has done a better job of it? Even the German Nazi party was heavily Jewish.
@Richard Pierce: The success of front men Mark Zuckerberg or Sergei Brin is based entirely upon the financing and connections of the Judeo-Masonic elite.
@Trenchant: The first book that tipped me off on the significance of Richard Weaver was The Southern Tradition at Bay. It blew me away. Here it was. A racially conscious white Southerner wielding an ancient sword like an expert. For some time, I had felt surely the pov had to exist somewhere in all of the scholarship between the present and the “late unpleasantness,” but it wasn’t until I hit STAB that I really remember thinking, this is it. He’s got the right take on all of the key issues as well as the broader picture. And he doesn’t yield an inch on the Cause.
Donald Davidson wrote the preface, describing Weaver’s “light” in almost mystical terms. Then I realized that here was possibly the strongest running thread stemming from the original Agrarians.
STAB is pretty expensive these days but well worth the effort to hunt down. It’s a tragedy that such phenomenal intellects continue to suffer under such a constrictive publication blackout. However, I have noticed in some of my travels, that many state universities, older city libraries, and historical societies will have a copy stashed somewhere, if not on the open shelves then possibly in the back reserves. Be on the lookout for those cheap book sales where they get rid of this kind of stuff at bottom line prices.
All of the others are generally available at similar venues. Another good one that I forgot to mention is The Southern Essays of Richard Weaver.
But STAB really is a great read from first to last. Anytime I start pulling out a notebook and have the urge to copy down quote after quote until it’s apparent that I am transcribing the entire work, I know that someone has touched the right nerve.
Somebody, can’t remember who, referred to him one time as the Thomas Aquinas of the South. He wasn’t a member of any active church but wrote towards a defense of a holistic religio-poetic-mythic side of man (while not forgetting tribe/race) as it stood opposed to pure functionalism, nominalism and all of the other reductionist “isms” of the modern world. It’s evident he saw himself as a “doctor of culture” and looked towards an “unorthodox defense of orthodoxy,” a strategy that John Crowe Ransom had advanced in the generation prior.
@Richard Pierce:
You seem almost fanatically opposed to religion; at least not less fanatic than the pro-religion commenters.
(To be honest, I haven’t read many, maybe most, of the comments under this article.)
Regarding evolution and religion:
I think millions of religious people, Christians and non-Christians, are open to the idea of evolution.
I know a Kindergarten through 8th grade school that teaches it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if thousands of others do, too.
Even if some of the commenters do not believe in evolution, it still makes sense that they would come to this pro-White site; because many of the articles do not bring up that particular subject/issue.
Having said that, I understand your concerns about religion. I understand your frustration. I’m not sure I consider myself religious. Maybe I am. I don’t know.
@Edward: My hat is off to you for your persistence and perseverance, bordering on the saintly, in having treated this Z.O.G.-channeling Christophobic blowhard as if he had even a modicum of interest in the truth. His prodigious familiarity with all the best URLs has—he at least is sure of this—bestowed upon him a multifarious knowledge of what is “irrelevant,” what is “anti-white.” (Is there actually such a thing as a credentialed basis for making such a claim? Did I miss or overlook the memo?) Though he has been at some pains to demonstrate his abysmal, evidently irreformable ignorance of Catholicism, Freemasonry, and even Judaism, he knows enough about them all to know what he likes best: the sound of his own cybervoice repeating ADL-sourced slanders and calumnies.
In short, Richard Pierce thinks that what this site really needs is yet another guy who divides his time between open hatred of the Cross and lugging the Tribe’s water for it, free of charge.
Do you think it’s coincidental that he turns up on a thread hanging from an excellent article whose central focus is the work of a guy that the Judaically managed “respectable” Right hated whilst he was alive (as I am old enough to recall, thanks to the instruction of my elders and betters) and has hated for the nearly sixty years since he died? No, I didn’t think you did, Edward.
@Richard:
Looking back on my previous comment, I realize I left out something important.
I meant to add the word “Catholic/Christian” to the word “school”.
From now on, I will try to remember to take more time to proofread my comments before submitting them. I thought I had proofread it, but apparently not good enough.
@Sir Tristram: STAB was my introduction to Weaver, too. Feliciter, I see its spine every time I pass the bookcase between my desk and the comfy chair.
This comment is apropos nothing except the engraving at the head of this article. Many readers, especially those who have visited the Senate chamber in Washington, will already be familiar with it. It famously represents Henry Clay presenting what has become known as the Compromise of 1850 to his fellow senators. Though it is clear that the original drawing, by Peter Rothermel, from which Whitechurch produced his engraving, was intended as a near-photographic representation of everyone depicted, the usual sources identify only the three most famous members of the Senate at the time: Clay, on his feet speaking; Daniel Webster, seated half a dozen figures to the viewer’s left of Clay, resting his head on his left arm; and John C. Calhoun, the elderly man with the leonine head of hair standing off to the right, his head parallel with the left arm of the Senate president’s chair.
When I used this image in a reference set I developed some years ago, I expended a considerable amount of time trying unsuccessfully to find a source that would identify more of the men in the picture. I discovered that infinitely more people were interested in deciphering the words of obscene rap “songs” than wasting precious time over DWMs, especially politicians not named FDR or Abe Lincoln. Fortunately, because the likeness was so good, it didn’t take me too long to figure out that the man in the presiding officer’s chair is the man one would expect to see there: VP Millard Fillmore. Another very famous member of the Senate at that time was Thomas Hart Benton, of Missouri. I am less than fully confident in this guess, but I think that he might be the second figure to the viewer’s left of Clay, only whose head is visible in the engraving. One source mentioned the following as also being in the engraving: William H. Seward, Stephen Douglas, Salmon P. Chase, John Bell, and Sam Houston. Though I have seen many images of Douglas and Houston, I can’t identify them here with anything like certainty.
If Sir Tristram or anyone else can provide more identifications, I for one will be very grateful.
@Pierre de Craon: Richard Pierce has the tribal talking points down indeed.
@Richard Pierce:
Is it my imagination or have the stages of decline of religion over the past 200 years been precisely aligned with the decline of the White race? Bringing the latter back without the former is not a likely prospect. The tribe understands this well and acts accordingly.
@Richard:
Hi Richard. Are you okay? You sound a little down this evening. I can confirm that many Christians do not object to the theory of evolution. I know that I trust that God created the universe, how he did it is beyond my hope of understanding.
@Alice Teller:
I know a lot of people defend the Southern Agrarians as representative of an authentically American blood&soil type of conservatism, but I’ve never read a real critique of them and their thinking for us, analyzing fairly both their strengths and weaknesses. Sir Tristram seems to think they have potential beyond just agrarianism.
I’d really like to see someone explain succinctly what the “beyond the farm” implications of these Southern Agrarian values are. Because particularly from an economic standpoint, agrarianism sounds too much just like Ludditism to me. Economically agrarianism’s time hasn’t just passed it now, its time had passed it by 150 years ago, by the time of the Civil War (one of the main reasons the South lost).
That is one of the reasons the revolutionary conservatives always attracted more interest from me – their issues relate more to the type of society we really live in now. Weimar Germany certainly is a lot more like the America most of us live in than the antebellum South, or anything for that matter remotely emulating it. I’m not sure Moeller would classify the Southern Agrarians as conservatives or just reactionaries. I would like to have a clarification of just what part of their thinking wasn’t just purely reactionary and Luddite.
@Will Fredericks:
I am certainly not an expert in the field, but my personal opinion is that we must return to the values they expressed. It is non-egalitarian in the very real sense that one is judged on their accomplishments. Living in the country exposes one to the immediate consequences of mistakes. We tend to respect real learning and wisdom rather than credentials, In the south the differences between quality and trash is only peripherally related to wealth. It is a pride in being able to produce your own food, even if you don’t have to. We have gardens all over the south, grown by people with full time jobs, because it tastes better. This is in contrast to Michelle Obama’s food deserts Like the one highlighted in the Mississippi Delta, a neighborhood of small houses on large lots of the worlds most fertile land. It had a very high unemployment rate and the children had no vegetables and ate at fast food shops. So instead of giving these shiftless people a couple of packs of seeds we need a whole new government bureaucracy to address the problem.
None of this addresses the questions regarding the larger economy that you raise, except to say I that we must find a way to return to a country that has respect for hard work, for standards, for accomplishment, for family, and tradition. We must admit to ourselves that some people have little to offer beyond a strong back, yet they need honorable work too.
I know very little about international commerce, but I have a metal fan, made back in the 1940′s. It works better than any new one, and I wonder if we could produce these locally from recycled cars instead of importing more plastic junk from China. Perhaps what I want is some variation of Distributism.
I know this answer is woefully inadequate. I hope others who have given it more real thought will weigh in.
@Edward
Clearly, that is your imagination. The last 200 years saw the White race conquer the world, advance science to an unimaginable degree, and even engage in space travel. Whites in America and Europe live in splendor that rivals the greatest kings of the ancient world. In the last 200 years, the life expectancy of Whites has increased by something like 20-30 years. We are cracking the genetic code and actually understand for the first time what “white” means without regard to superstitious jew biblical mythology. White technology makes the miracles and magic of the old world look like parlor tricks in comparison.
The internet that allows you to spread your jew religious mythology was created by Whites without the slightest reference to bibles or gods.
This from the crowd that quotes the jew bible, worships a Hebrew god, and spends their lives studing semitic prophets from the ancient world?
In reality, what you object to is that your semitic religion has become irrelevant and your professional priest class is no longer taken seriously.
Whites have a lot of problems, but the fact that priests qutoing jew scriptures are no longer relevant is not one of them. Your Catholic church holds hands with the Protestant liberals and the Jews in promoting mass third world immigration to our countries. Virtually EVERY leader of the Judeo-Christian religion, Jew, Catholic, or Protestant, is 100% on board with the race-replacement agenda, and every Jew, Catholic and Protestant institution is officially promoting it.
Religion is a lie and religious people the most prolific liars. Same as it ever was.
@Alice Teller:
Thanks for your concern.
I don’t think I was down when I wrote my comment. I was trying my best to write something useful.
I’m not sure how to sum up what I’ve been thinking about/experiencing.
@Richard:
I’m glad to hear it. Have a good evening.
@Sir Tristram:
I did read the Weaver article in Modern Age but believe he backed the wrong horse in Randolph instead of Thoreau (the inner anarchist speaking here). Nevertheless, it’s great to see anything that moves the discourse away from centralism and towards localism, strategy to depotentiate the Tribe. (In this vein I always read carefully “Clytemnestra”‘s comments). Jeans on, lederhosen off, and thank you for that.
Interestingly, the National Review of some years back recommended STAB to its subscribers as a must-read.
http://is.gd/C4DiUC
I can’t imagine Jonah Goldberg endorsing that nowadays.
@Will Fredericks: No offense intended, but I simply don’t see why you are pressing for an “explanation,” succinct or otherwise, when you have been given a remarkably long list of books and essay collections, many of them accompanied by links, which you have been invited to peruse. You mention a lack of time in one of your comments; surely you know, however, that the same constraints bind us all. Furthermore, you make and have made, here and elsewhere, reference to site after site, most of which I for one have never heard of, that you frequent, write for, comment upon, or some combination of the foregoing.
In a spirit of fraternal concern, I ask you this: are you sure that you ain’t spreading yourself too thin or misbudgeting the very limited time that all of us are granted in this vale of tears? For example, I am not entirely sure I have a suitably clear idea who the fellow called Linder is, a man (yes?) to whom you refer above, but are you certain the information you get from him is more valuable than that that Weaver or Ransom or one of the other Fugitives might supply (not to mention I’ll Take My Stand, which both Alice and Sir T. have spoken of)? Frankly, had I myself never heard of Weaver before Sir Tristram’s tantalizing article, I wouldn’t be writing this note to you or even sitting at my desk with my computer open now. I’d have had one or two of his books for several days already, and every spare moment would be spent reading first one, then the next.
Put plainly, I believe that half or more than half of the questions you press upon Alice Teller are answerable through your own initiative—and in a matter of six hours or less—and with the information sought coming directly from the horse’s mouth, as it were. And really, is there any more fulfilling way to get it?
Pax tecum.
@Richard Pierce: When speaking of the internet, Al Gore would prefer you call him the Creator. “god” could be misinterpreted as disrespectful.
@Pierre de Craon: It now strikes me that my central point was less than ideally clear in its statement above. It is precisely this: I think the Weaver and Agrarian material is far too important, far too rich, far too remote from present-day modes of thinking, and hence, far too unfashionable to be absorbed in any adequate way via a synopsis or anyone’s “take”—even the take of someone as clever as … [modesty prohibits the insertion of a name here]. In today’s intellectual climate—better, miasma—no synopsis would be very much, if at all, better than that already given by Sir Tristram in this article and his follow-up comments to it. Yet I am sure that he will not take umbrage at my saying that, as good as it is, it is, comparatively speaking, hardly more enlightening than Calvin Coolidge’s fabled answers to his ill wife’s questions when he came home from church one Sunday morning:
[Mrs. C]. What did the preacher talk about?
[CC]. Sin.
[Mrs. C]. What did he have to say about it?
[CC]. He was against it.
Let me give you a single illustration to stand for many. The Agrarians were not Luddites in any sense of that term that I recognize; that is, machinery tout court was neither the enemy nor an enemy. It was simply the business end of a much larger weapon that the enemies of the Old South were bringing to bear upon it. Thus, it was less a threat in se than an emblem or a harbinger of a larger threat.
Like climbing a Rocky or an Alp, reading Weaver is an adventure. Don’t neglect to pack your gear, including ropes, spikes, and axes for the steeper slopes.
@Pierre de Craon:
Why didn’t I think of that? Yeah, what Pierre said!
@Pierre de Craon:
But like you say, without spreading one’s self too thin. This sounds fairly familiar. The right answers are easy to arrive at – if you aren’t getting them, it is because you are looking for the wrong answers. Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. Or just say you’re bringing me solutions, I don’t honestly have time to check out if what you’re saying is really holds water anyway, but I like to feel good.
And this larger threat was – what? I know you think you’d be depriving me of an alpine adventure, but you’re the one complaining I pose questions that would be so simple to find answers to. What is adventure to some is just another wild goose chase to others. Don’t lapse into obscurantism (something in my experience southern partisans are famous for). Let’s just spit it out.
In my experience this larger threat, on analysis this threat was just those undefinable but perhaps for that very reason irredeemably evil Yankees, epitomizing everything foul and bad with the world, and the good was this antebellum South fantasy land, as described in the Wikipedia link Sir Tristram himself included in his article, which neatly summarizes all the reservations I have about southern partisans myself. I know you’ve found you’re intellectual heaven. It’s just in my experience in an intellectual and political sense, southern partisans neatly fit the bill of that anecdote about the Church people who are so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good.
@Richard Pierce:
These were Phyrrhic victories, no? Jews were emancipated throughout Europe after the French Revolution. Since then they have seized ever-increasing shares of power from White governments and religious denominations. Such loss of power was greatly lamented by Whites even 100 years ago. Today, there is scarcely a mid to high level official in politics or religion that is not completely owned by the Jews. Nevertheless, a Christian remnant remains awaiting the proper time, that will surely come if history is any guide, to launch the restoration.
The “semitic” or “Jewish” religion you deride is in fact feared and hated by actual Jews. God made His religion known through the Jews but they neglectfully allowed this “sword” to pass into the hands of Europeans who, thus armed, were able to dominate the Jews and build the highest civilization yet known to man.
@Edward:
“The “semitic” or “Jewish” religion you deride is in fact feared and hated by actual Jews. ”
No, Jews fear and hate Aryans, not Christianity. They are against Christianity only as far as it rallies Aryans. If Buddhism had become the primary religion of White Europeans, the Jews would be against Buddhism and whining about its “intolerance.”
Christianity is every bit as un-Aryan as Islam or Judaism. Not one single person in the Bible, apart from Pilate, is White. Christianity says nothing about us as a people. Christianity was the first bolshevist movement– a bunch of dissident Jews altering Aryan morality to suit their own needs, weakening their Roman masters by raving about the oppressed, poor, sick, etc.
@Will Fredericks:Thanks for reading across the lines and conjoining some of these ideas with points I made in the previous articles. Touching on some of these comments and rebuttals…
Ever hear of the phrase “ride to the sound of the guns”? It means to move directly to the place where the fight can most effectively be joined. Just because one has arrived at the truth of a particular position, dialectically, doesn’t mean that it can just be bulldozed into reality. Weaver argues that we have to be able to wade out and meet common people where they already are living and fighting, not beat them over the head with something in a such a way that will cause them to retreat automatically. My problem with a lot of White activism is that it confines itself to the “weird” corner like the Dungeons & Dragons geek crowd, instead of actively infiltrating all elements of the surrounding culture by any useful means available. In this way, it becomes “the Other” rather than the norm, the thing that we all know to be so, the truth that is its own best defense. This tendency is connected to the sole reliance on the logic of its position, but within a vacuum. Rhetoric is the missing link.
Ridiculing the folk is just as horrible a technique as demanding that our leaders dispense with all guerrilla tactics. Rhetoric takes into account the different filters of human consciousness that any message will have to pass through in order to be received by the intended audience. It also shows a certain deference and respect towards that audience rather than a subversive egotism that must have its way, no matter what.
If one side has the big guns and butter of the lion, the other side should adopt the tactics of the fox. This is basic Machiavellian politics and common sense. Would you have expected the Vietcong to run out into an open field when bombers were flying over? Would you have berated them as cowards for waiting for the strategic moment to strike? Though we won just about every battle in Vietnam, we pretty much lost that war simply because we couldn’t get them to all come out into the open at one time.
Such strategies were also reasons why we were successful in the American Revolution. And in the Civil War, Lee and Davis often discussed the wisdom of retreating into the mountains to carry on the resistance. They should’ve acted sooner. But now we consider such strategies metaphorically because we live in a time when we are fighting a mind war of perceptions more than anything else. Being somewhat elastic with identities and arguments affords enormous facility and camouflage in such an interconnected information environment. The problem with always demanding an open confrontational honesty about race and the jews etc is that you completely lose the advantage of guerrilla warfare, which is an effective style for our people as we confront Leviathan, a monster which gathers itself in folds. It’s useful because it both allows us to dodge the enemy in close proximity and also to reach deeper into our own community in order to connect with those who have been brainwashed and who often react repulsively without thinking, towards overtly explicit expressions of racial identity. Why mow down the vastly diffused tropical rainforest of culture, literature, music etc when there are thousands of talking points that can be used to motivate our people as they make the often difficult inner journey towards consciousness? Every man who is awake should consider where he can best take his chances. Daring acts should be lauded when they result in positive manifestations but recklessness is fatal and not just to that individual, to all of us. Yeah, sure, there will always be pretenders. But there is a difference between diplomacy, tact, and cowardice. Personally, I think that criticizing Israel, the 911 hoax, these ridiculous wars, the concentration of power in Washington and capital in New York are excellent strategies and angles for reaching normal White American males and females in a place where they are currently hurting, unsure, and increasingly distrustful towards establishment reports. The establishment itself is cracking along these lines. And, it is always more than just the jews. Most Whites can’t visibly see the nefarious operations of many of the Jewish activist groups like the ADL and SPLC in their actual vicinity. By immediately going there, one often reinforces the perception that White activism represents nothing more than regurgitated “canards” from the Nazi camp. Once memes are activated, it’s much more difficult to retrieve the consciousness of the audience.
I think you are on the right track there. The basic argument is that it is important to have multiple cultural facets that are ultimately interrelated. Can you talk about anything else but race? The concept is magnetic and can become a tripwire like a broken record. The vision that Weaver and other Southerners were trying to support, in my opinion, really involved three categories: 1) The importance of race, kinship, and historical experience 2) the defense of the political form that facilitated the highest distribution of power amongst the electorate and the multifarious organs of the body politic, and 3) the balance between the scientific and poetic modes of discourse which meant amplifying the poetic to make up the score. The last point is often overlooked but in many ways contains the other two. Poetry represents the spiritual expansion of the man concept without relinquishing his historical or political experience and wisdom, which is exactly where Science is so poorly equipped. Imagine asking a computer to solve human problems. Science tends to move towards a reduction to mere empirical utility. Weaver made the distinction between Status and Function and emphasized that these were “out of whack” in the West. Reason may be our most valuable faculty but nevertheless it is a single faculty amidst a larger holistic entity that subsumes it.
The important thing though is to ride to the sound of the guns.
@fender: Are there any historical examples that back up you assertions?
@Will Fredericks:
Perhaps you will be kind enough to just spit out your position. Other than vague suggestions that you do not approve and find us useless I have no idea where you stand. Are you suggesting that the South was mistaken not to want to be turned into the rust belt? Is Detroit to your liking? The Antebellum south was not a fantasy land, it was a very real geographical area, populated by real, live people who developed a way of life that addressed the real problems they encountered with common sense and a firm attachment to reality. While I do not consider Yankees evil, I cannot say the same of them.
@Edward:
Um, yes. When was the last time some yid attacked black or hispanic Christians, or attacked the Church for delivering medicine in the turd world? They don’t care about Christianity, they care about the ability of Whites to identify as a group.
I’d just like to point something out to everyone. I’ve been following the comments of this article for several days now. The divisions among us are really incredible. We’ll argue over ANYTHING. Well, if our worst enemy was here masterminding this circus, he couldn’t do a better job of pitting us against one another. Now I know some of you are just here killing time or enjoying a vigorous debate, but in a way you’re fighting with each other while the ship is sinking. I think we should allow everyone to have his or her own religious (or irreligious) beliefs. And let’s work with the political system we have instead of arguing utopian theories. Then let’s all join Numbersusa and send out faxes every day, read our websites, and build strong families with a sense of their own heritage. Those are some positive things we can do to help our people.
This will probably be my last commment because I need to use my energies more wisely. TOO is a great website filled with interesting and often useful ideas! But there’s a hopelessness, bitterness and negativity here that’s really depressing. Don’t succumb to it. Live!
@fender: There are endless examples of Jews opposing Christianity among non-Whites including within their own race, but are you challenging me to provide examples? You were the one making historical assertions without examples. You said:
How, prior to anti-Christian liberalism, was Aryan morality altered in a way that benefited Jews?
@Edward:
Yes, I’d like some examples of Jews attacking black and hispanic Christians. Imagine if Rev. Wright were White and had said “God damn America,” he’d be considered a terrorist.
As for my point about morality, you have to read Nietzsche to understand my point.
@Bob Johnson:
You are a wise man. We do, indeed, have a problem here. It is multifaceted but the single central issue, in my opinion, is that the website is one of the last bastions of real free speech. Like all good things it has a shadow side. Some are here simply to vent venom, others to promote their pet ideology without regard to the issue under discussion, some simply enjoy the modern pleasure of blaming all evils on others. Together they often succeed in tainting the conversation even when they cannot drown better thoughts out.
I have often shared your feelings. I have, instead, decided to stand my ground. I was drawn to this site by the wonderful qualities of intellectual honesty and respectability first of Keven Mac Donald’s writing and then by the essays printed here. I think it has great potential to provide a gathering space for our folk who are waking up to the nightmare we face. I intend to do what I can to insure that those who do find the occasional sane voice which they can relate to. I am not a skinhead, Hitler fan, or even a member of the he-man woman hating, no girls allowed boys club. I am a reasonably well educated, middle class white woman who lives in the employed white world. I am not scary at all. I hope others will see that we are not as dangerous or mad as our foes paint us. Sadly, that involves some amount of argument with those who prefer to blame the world. After all, any group of white folks have their fair share of imperfect men, mistakes and missteps. It is clearly much easier and more pleasant to point at them then to take steps to improve our situation. I think that was, in part, what Richard so wisely requested of you. A statement of principles might help us limit the unrelated issues.
I hope you will reconsider your position. We need numbers and that relies on intelligent voices like yours.
@Alice Teller:
To begin with Alice I think it might be good to review one of Moeller van den Bruck’s important distinctions, that between the conservative and the reactionary. His book Germany’s Third Empire is full of them, I’ll just cite a couple.
” Conservatism is not reaction.
The reactionary clings to existing conditions or wishes them back if they have changed. He can conceive of the world only as it was on the day of his birth. His thought is in its way as circumscribed as that of the revolutionary, who can only picture the world as it was the day he overturned it.
In contrast to these the conservative is accustomed to get busy and do something. He has no ambition to see the world as a museum; he prefers it as a workshop, where he can create things which will serve as new foundations.”
“The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again “as it was before”. He has no inclination to compromise with the new. He believes that if only he had the political power it would be perfectly simple to reorganize the world according to the admirable scheme of older days. …………
The reactionary’s reading of history is as superficial as the conservative’s is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again. The reactionary’s policy is no policy; the conservative’s is policy on a grand scale. When policy makes history it is great and enduring.
The reactionary confuses the one with the other and would fain reverse the course of history”
I don’t think the real South didn’t want to be turned into the rust belt. I think it was not able to conceive of it in the beginning (the first 100 pre-civil war years of the republic), or execute it in the middle (the 100 years after the civil war). Now of course much of it, the economically successful parts, are industrialized. The new South is like was always said like the old North.
And yes, Detroit, or Indianapolis, or California, (that is up until to the mid sixties) were all for all but a few greatly superior to the old South. That is why so many southerners moved there.
The old agrarian south, as with agrarian life in general, was really a very hard place, where people would get up before dawn and work till sunset to scratch and eck a measly living from the soil. Most people who left never looked back.
Those days where your granddaddy “walked 10 miles to school every day” are admired only from a sentimental distance, one that most people, at least privately, prefer to keep as great as possible.
As the old saying goes, virtue has more admirers than practitioners.
You mean the real antebellum South, pre-civil war? Where the up country folk lived in extreme backwardness (hillbillies) while the down country folk played elaborate games with their Walter Scott fantasies, and imagined the mint juleps they were drinking on hot days would quench the inevitable conflagration of a Haiti style uprising, where the slaves would all butcher their masters and turn the entire area (places like the Mississippi Delta) into a Haiti style expense ruled by voodoo curses, deprivation, and depravity?
I know I sound like one of those detested Yankees, but I certainly don’t see much common sense or firm attachment to reality at all, at least in the beginning, and only a reluctant coming to grips with reality from their hard experience and mistakes.
@Will Fredericks:
@Will Fredericks:
Oops….here we go.
Are you kidding? It’s amazing how these semantic categories shift back and forth over time. Historically, the Southerner has played the Devil’s Advocate in regards to race and tradition. This was healthy in some ways because it allowed him not to entertain illusions about himself. On the contrary, the North has been the section that has consistently patted itself on the back for being such a do-goodly emancipator and liberator. In fact, it is this rhetoric that still gets trumped up every time our leaders decide to invade and violate the sovereignty of another country.
In more recent times, however, as we see the effect of previous causes set in motion during the Civil War coming to unfortunate fruition, within the context of a growing White racial consciousness, it is the white Southerner who is more in a position to revel that his side at least remained true to its blood. In reality, at the deepest level of implication, it is the side that betrays its own kind that is saddled with the worst cause in the history of civilization, not the other way around.
But outside of the circle of awakening White advocates, the Southerner is still derided for being racist or at least for coming from a bunch of racists. The prejudice in this regard is almost common parlance and I can’t believe that you could not be attuned to it. You should try to qualify the boundaries of your accusation more clearly.
Robert Penn Warren attempted to mediate somewhat on this topic in his book The Legacy of the Civil War by referring to the “Treasury of Virtue” of the North and the “Great Alibi” of the South. Essentially, he said that Americans should avoid both extremes. The North should stop clinging to its ‘virtuous’ and ‘enlightened’ historical record and the South should stop blaming all of its problems on the fact that its civilization had been destroyed.
Warren attempted a form of neutrality that the original Agrarians criticized. There is merit to many of Warren’s arguments and he was very intelligent, no doubt. But I don’t think that he could fully see how, no matter what, he would still be viewed as an evil white reactionary by liberals and that his thrust would have the effect of weakening his fellows.
In the longer view of things, taking a stand is necessary. Forgive us if we are in possession.
@Will Fredericks:
It seems you did not find the time to read the link to Weaver’s Hierarchy of Argument. I identified neither as a conservative nor a reactionary, simply as a Southern woman who holds respect and affection for her land and her people and as an admirer of Weaver.
I mentioned no detestation nor felt the need to rely on slurs. I will simply refute your caricature of the South by pointing out how many of us, even when forced to live and work in the city, love to come home, to the Delta, the Gulf, The Georgia Out Islands , The Outer Banks, the Ozarks or my own beloved Blue Ridge. We have never had either contempt for or fear of hard work. You don’t know us at all.
@Will Fredericks:
Why does she need to do that when we already have all the necessary references and definitions without borrowing something from Germany? Besides, I think your rendering of the dynamic between Conservation and Reaction is incorrect. Reaction is simply Conservation in motion.
M.E. Bradford’s statement handles it much more succinctly:
The rest of your post there I find to be rather simplistic, subjective, and misinformed.
Says who? The Virginia landed aristocracy that won the Revolution? ‘Fraid not. This strikes me as a rather romantic conception based upon your own vision of history rather than a realistic statement. Have you ever been to Charleston or Savannah or New Orleans? These areas boast of some of the most beautiful and largest architectural and garden historic districts in the country because they weren’t so fast in razing their heritage to make room for commerce. I can’t imagine that there really is any comparison to some of the terribly ugly and toxic industrial zones you mentioned. The times are pregnant with a desire to see more eco-agrarian principles reimplemented into our culture.
Come on, Will. You were doing good, man. I liked the original direction we were headed in.
@Trenchant: I did read the Weaver article in Modern Age but believe he backed the wrong horse in Randolph instead of Thoreau (the inner anarchist speaking here). Nevertheless, it’s great to see anything that moves the discourse away from centralism and towards localism, strategy to depotentiate the Tribe.
It might be useful to follow up with Kevin Macdonald’s analysis of Transcendentalism: http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Gura-Transcendentalism.pdf
We have Thoreau and Emerson to thank for that.
@Alice Teller: Thank you, Alice. You’re genteel, rational, thoughtful, and you’ve always been very sweet to me. Come visit my blog now and then and leave a comment if you feel like it. You just have to click on my name there. Keep up the good fight. All the best!
@Bob Johnson:
Thank you, I will and I will recommend it to others.
Erratum, the last line of today’s piece should read “him or herself” – another abomination we owe to feminism.
@Alice Teller: Thank you very kindly for catching that, Ma’am. All the best.
@Sir Tristram:
That’s the way they used to talk about these things in the 50s and 60s. Instead of Jews they said New Yorkers, Northerners, outside agitators, etc.
You seem to think that getting an audience agitated is the same as accomplishing something but it’s not. Until you say Jew, you haven’t told them what they need to know.
@Sir Tristram:
I suppose that what you mean is that saying Jew at all is the rhetorical style of a N-zi.
I like to approach issues in a careful way myself but there is this unfortunate tendency in American political rhetoric always to avoid whatever “will not go over well” and thus to remain permanently stuck in euphemisms. Unclear speech then gives rise to confused thought and confused action.
@Alice Teller:
You mean Richard Weaver’s Hierarchy of Argument:
An Instructional Model for Parliamentary Debate?
Certainly you have a right to enjoy yours and our land, Weaver, and the Southern Agrarians in general. Just as I have a right to my opinions. You asked me for my opinion of the southland , and of the Southern Agrarians, and I gave it to you.
My position is really moderate on the Southland. The South is, like other things, seems to be both ritually praised and condemned based on its symbolic image, as opposed to its real content. Hollywood and New Yorkers love to bash the South of course with movies like Mississippi Burning etc. Southerners in turn often take any criticism, however gentle, of their beloved antebellum home as a slur.
I don’t dispute the right of the South and the Southern Agrarians to “Take Their Stand”. I’m just not sure how much of a model their is for the rest of us and our own stands.
@Sir Tristram:
“Subversive egotism that must have its way, no matter what.” That certainly sounds like certain people we have encountered. In fact a lot of people. Don’t like to name names, but a certain “Alex” comes to mind. ;) (along with all the like-minded groupies and sycophants. )
I think part of rhetoric is just trying to correspond to social reality, and the fact that the terminology we use to describe something is very important. Limiting our ability to adjust our language to the situation puts us in a box. Think of the communists. There are a lot of people in this country really that have crypto-communist beliefs, including our President. Think how prominent they would be if their controllers demanded every time they appeared in public they start addressing each other publicly as “comrade”. I doubt Obama would have kept his job as community organizer, much less he and the Democrats be where they are today. Yet that is basically what a lot of the WN movement insists today, such as Linder’s infamous “Name the Jew” dogma. This is truth to them, and the only way to victory is hold rigidly, as you say, to “the logic of the position”, and attack everyone who refuses to do so as a traitor. Sort of like the D&D people you describe start insisting that they go through all their activities of the day dressed in costume.
I wonder about the origins of this tactic, but wherever it came from, that is unquestionably their tactic now. They say it’s their beliefs. Well Scientology has its beliefs too, but they don’t insists their members go everywhere in public with antenna’s on their head. Anyway, your points here are spot on.
I think you and I are on the same page here. The whole question I have is this; Why are these principles, which you’d think would be just common sense, so hard to grasp by so many? It would be a good study if we had any resources.
Part of it is just the nature of nationalist and right wing organizations in general. They have a natural tendency toward that. But realistically we also know that the federal government along with NGO’s like the ADL and SPLC have studied our characteristics and weakness extensively, and their drive to execute strategies based on this information is well known, such as with COINTELPRO. At some times for instance in the 80′s certain Klan units had more federal informers (up to the level of Bill Wilkinson, the most powerful Klan leader in the nation) and agents than regular members. I almost suspect that any study of White nationalist organizations in the US would be more accurately characterized as a study of the behavior of federal agents posing as White nationalists leaders, if the truth be known.
I’m actually going pretty far afield here. The only reason I’m going here is basically my experience that however good your advice is here, groups that we think would benefit from it aren’t going to listen to it at all. We can defend the principles of our activism, but it may be very hard to set them in motion organizationally.
People need to not only understand what good political theory is, but also understand both how and why many people are going to feed you horrible political theory, and not listen to anything else. They then need to be ready to draw the appropriate conclusions and act on them.
First you’re right, although I think really there are a huge number of good targets out there, if there was an intelligent organization or group capable of acting on them. Anybody looking at our country today could figure hundreds of such targets right off the bat – that’s not the issue.
I think its very good we can study these aspects of our cultural and political situation, humanities types I’ve always felt were more equipped to do so. That is why I can see Weaver and the other Southern Agrarians, can potentially be some extremely helpful, in spite of the rather obvious gaps and cultural limitations in their program, such in certain ways I see with the revolutionary conservatives. After all their programme was published over 75 years ago, for a part of the country that now in a lot of ways doesn’t any more much resemble our country as it is now, even in the South. Still overall for us they are probably the best by far we’ve got.
I think they gleaned great advantage for their role from their academic position in the humanities. Certainly it would be very difficult for academics today with their views to reach any sort of comparable position in the humanities. If the WN movement is more dominated by science today, that may be in some manner why, not just for the leaders like William Pierce and Kevin MacDonald, but for rank and file types like ourselves. Even for students humanities departments today are no place for conservatives of any sort, let alone those with views such as ours.
I agree, but its not just a matter of knowing the direction and distance, its also a matter of knowing the capabilities of your steed, and the terrain he must pass over, not to mention ensuring no one has covertly stuck nails in his hoofs. In today’s environment one must always be careful not to assume too much.
@Will Fredericks: There was once a creepy Greek guy called Plato. In the Phaedo and three or four of his other dialogue-thingies, he wrote, virtually in so many words, that opinion without techné was worthless.
Why are you taking such pains to give folks the idea that this dead creepy Greek guy, who didn’t even own a cellphone, may have known a thing or two? To forestall such idle chatter, allow me this recommendation: if your opinions on the South (on any topic, for that matter) amount to little more than or nothing but generalities, wouldn’t it be far better simply to say something to the effect of “I am, alas, in no position to comment intelligently on that matter”? Only know-it-all fools sneer at people who speak thus.
I have been alive for almost sixty-seven years, and though now largely homebound, I’ve been around. Never once have I met a southerner who took “any criticism, however gentle, of [his] beloved antebellum home as a slur.” (I am sure that a poring man could find several examples, just as my birdwatcher acquaintances will occasionally see the odd lone robin in early December in New York’s Central Park. Dumbness is one of the few true human and avian universals, after all.) My experience, in fact, is that old-stock southerners are, virtually to a man, far thicker of skin than any northerner I’ve ever known (and let’s not even mention Jewish thin-skinnedness). Even in my army days, now long past, when blacks perforce constituted an uncomfortably large proportion of my companions, the southern variety was notably less viscerally irascible than the northern, among which the Detroit and Oakland septs were far the most repellent and dangerous.
In short, here and above, you have spent an inordinate amount of time in your responses to me, Alice Teller, and Sir T. either (1) flogging dead horses or (2) begging far more questions than you answer. Under this second heading I include the many statements a response to which would entrap the responder in the “are you still beating your wife” quicksand.
This has emphatically not been your wont heretofore. I find it passing strange that you have decided to embrace this modus operandi here. Free the old Will Fredericks! Or as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck might have put it, “Gebt mir meinem Fredericks wieder!”
P.S. Apropos reactionary and conservative, among the several things that you or your German source mistakenly assumes is that wide, virtually universal agreement on the meaning of those terms exists. Surely you know that that is ridiculous. As Joseph Sobran and many other Old Rightists used to endlessly repeat, in this country a reactionary was a man of principle, whether or not you liked him or his principle. A conservative was merely someone who urged a return to the Left-imposed status quo of a decade or two earlier. Since virtually every identifiable American conservative now advocates increased devotion to Bolshevik Israel and applauds the manifestations of Judaeopederasty so long as they are not younger than, say, vintage 1994, is any additional corroboration of this position required?
As before, pax tecum.
@Will Fredericks: An excellent comment from the old Will Fredericks. Had it been up when I wrote my last one, I either wouldn’t have posted it or would have modified it almost beyond recognition.
@Sir Tristram: Thanks for the reference, which I’ll go through shortly.
@Trenchant: I’ll be curious to read what you think. As a big fan of KM, I found the article more tantalizing than satisfying. I wanted more detail and less sketchiness. (Could the good professor have had a word limit imposed upon him?) Nor, with all due respect to Sir Tristram (no facetiousness meant here, I insist), is there a distinguishing word about Thoreau, whose name is mentioned but once.
My own critique of the Transcendentalists, were I to do an overarching one, would commence with the fundamental psychic and religious distortion of Unitarianism, which in the homeliest of terms amounts to an attempt to yoke a profoundly contemptuous anti-Christian impulse to architecturally familiar places of (ahem) “worship,” the motive for doing which seemed to be to conceal to the fullest extent possible from their friends and neighbors the degree to which they (i.e., Unitarians) despised everything about those friends and neighbors except the comfort and general civility of their communities and domestic lives, which as usual they immaturely believed could be maintained absent the bedrock on which they had been constructed in the first place. (Anything about this crypto element sound at all familiar?) It is hardly a coincidence that interest in the Transcendentalists experienced a rebirth among the soi-disant hippies of the sixties and seventies, since they, like the Brook Farm crowd in particular, combined self-regard, an indefeasible air of entitlement, and a contempt for the very people who had made their leisure and self-indulgence possible that emerges both from page after page of the scribblings of Emerson and many of the others and a fortiori from their actions and most other aspects of their private lives.
I thought it just a bit of a shame, too, that a reader not already in the know would come away from the article thinking that Orestes Brownson was indistinguishable from his Transcendentalist pals, whereas he had already run away from the movement by the mid-1840s and in the plainest terms denounced it as false and morally destructive. In telling people generally, along with his former comrades and still friends, that were they to fail to renounce it, they would surely go to hell for all eternity, he used language that will of course generate a great many yucks and sneers from the Usual Suspects hereabouts. But say that he did, and he bloody well meant it. If only he had forsworn enthusiasm for the butchery of the Civil War—as did his acquaintances Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne (the greatest writer this country produced before Twain)—Brownson’s reformation and recovery from the disease of Transcendentalism would have been complete.
@Pierre de Craon:
I certainly wouldn’t claim that “virtually universal agreement on the meaning of those terms exists”. As Russell Kirk always noted conservatism was something limited to a time and place, however much it relies on the assumption of the existence of eternal truths.
Moeller really had a very practical and circumscribed interest in this difference between “conservative” and “reactionary”. A reactionary for him (in early 20′s Germany) simply meant those who advocated a complete annulment of the German revolution, i.e. reinstallment of the Kings and Princes and a return to the Second Reich. In other words, the German Nationalists. For him, “a revolution can never be undone”
I don’t think we need to clarify this to much, because we all know seem to know that there are limits to our position, however loudly we proclaim that the good of the logic of our position. The Southern Agrarians themselves understood this.
I doubt many Southerners criticized Tate, even though publishing an article in the left-wing New Republic must have raised a few eyebrows. Typically though Americans take the easy out. When someone goes too far, say advocating the return of slavery for southerners, for religious conservatives advocating a return to Puritan theocracy, for others say advocating a reversal of the American Revolution and the return of a powerful British monarchy, we simply all just denounce them for “caricaturing our position” even though their principles can certainly be defended by Sobran’s and Bradford’s formulae.
@Will Fredericks:
Why does it have to be a model for us all. White people exist in great variety. It seems to me that we have all been maligned and slurred by the powers that be. Surely recovering our heritage, whatever that may be, is a valuable goal. None of us have ever perfected the fine art of living well, that does not mean that all should be abandoned. Southerners have little valuable experience in dealing with Jews, we have a lot of experience with race. Are you sure you have nothing of value to learn from us? We have also retained, better than most, devotion to family, heritage, and tradition, a real regional culture, a genuine relationship with the land and the skills and crafts associated with it, and reverence for the genius loci. Perhaps you do not value these things anymore than you value the South or genuine rather than media produced knowledge of her. That does not render then useless.
I once met a woman who fits many of the hillbilly stereotypes. She expressed her joy in her home by saying that ‘Living in a hollow is like being cradled in the hand of God’. Are you sure you have nothing to learn from her?
For those interested, here is the text of Woods “Defending the Little Platoons’
https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/2669/2628
In trying to remain focused on the subject of the tension between Poetry/Rhetoric/Status and Science/Dialectic/Function and how this polarity has gotten out of balance in the American psyche along sectional lines, I will continue pointing to some of Weaver’s phenomenal writings, at least while there is still heat on this thread. He is much better equipped to handle the deeper elements of the case than I am. In the following excerpt from Visions of Order, I think he is rather fair and balanced in his diagnosis…
@Hadding Scott:
I appreciate your point. However, if you’re not careful, I think you give yourself up immediately to the negative power of the meme and then you’ve lost your audience. You become a cartoon character and no matter what you say thereafter, people are not going to listen. You can get mad all you want and denounce the common mind or others who get further by using more subterfuge etc but it won’t change the fact that they have fallen out of love with you and you must go home alone.
You can’t seek Power, it is Power that must seek you.
There is a certain situational barometric reading that determines what the audience can handle. A leader has a natural instinct or radar for this type of reading. I always refer to it as riding to the sound of the guns or taking the pulse. Either way, the gist is to get out of a predetermined mold of how you are going to act or appear beforehand (that’s ideology), to listen attentively to where the audience is at, and then go there with skill and consideration for their current station and experience.
So, there’s a gray zone you’ve got to take advantage of if you are going to win their hearts. That’s why rhetoric is an art form. There are many truths out there that everyone knows all about but group consciousness is a delicate thing. It requires adept handling, without compromise.
Jewish controlling elements, as we all know, are woven beneath the surface. By explicitly pointing to it before people are properly primed would be like farting in class and then raising your hand to admit that you did it. People are going to clear the area. And there you are, left standing in a cloud of stink, all by yourself. In such a case you’re not playing the game to win, you’re just upset that there is not a quicker way to get around the board. You have demanded that your isolate logic supersedes the body of the world that it must pass through intact before it can be tempered and realized.
@Sir Tristram:
My first impulse was to reply that clearly the South has the most to offer in order to restore balance. I fear, however, that both positions have not only fallen out of balance but have been distorted. The north’s gift for commerce and the benefits society generally receives from it has been reduced merely to profit, with the proceeds often fleeing the community which generated it. The South’s aristocratic preference for and influence on the lasting things has been usurped by the self-declared experts who have no affection for or sense of obligation to the beneficiaries of their wisdom. It begins to look like we are not even in the game, just footing the bill.
@Alice Teller:
Thank you for posting that. There is another Woods article on Weaver over at lewrockwell:
Richard Weaver: Historian of the South
@Alice Teller:
Well it (the South, or at least the relevant portion of it we are discussing) needs to be a model for us all because it is being suggested that it be used in that fashion, not only by Sir Tristram
but by you transparently as well
Sure I agree there is something to be learnt from Southerners. But I think that’s a long way from saying that Southerners don’t have a fair amount they need to learn themselves, especially if their tradition is to serve as a model for us all.
Southerners in my experience (not like others) are better at dishing it out than taking it. When we read about the decline of Detroit, you’ll say, “serves you right Yankees”. But when you point to deficiencies in the South, such as the high homicide rate among southern white, you tend more to say “mind your own business, Yankee meddler” ;)
(Along these lines some southerners on forums where we were discussing Robert Nisbett’s book on white southern murder rates Culture of Honor</i were a bit irked by his favorite anecdotal explanation he ran into during interviews in the region "there are just more people here that need killing")
My wife is brilliant, and beautiful, Southern, and very feminine. A friend admiringly once said of her, “She DOES love being a girl, doesn’t she!” Yes, she celebrates it and she lives it, just as we Southerners DO love being Southern, DO celebrate the Southern cultures and DO live them. We DO the ‘implicit Whiteness” that KMcD advocates and that no one on this thread has even mentioned.
We are still hierarchical, or at least nowhere near as egalitarian as the dominant culture would have. Southrons of Cavalier extraction DO join the DAR, the SAR, the SCV, the UDC, the Masons (there’s a new moon tonight, so all y’all anti-Masons can just chill out), and all sorts of implicitly white organizations. We DO regard active participation in the local historical societies and museums as a cultural duty for the upper crusts of Southern White society. Grady McWhiney’s works celebrate the joys of Cracker Culture, including guns, and Bibles, and killing those who need it.
We DO love being Southern and it’s part of our love of our White race. Whether Cavalier or Redneck, we DO live implicitly White lives. We have not been deracinated (our roots are intact) and they are White. There’s a reason that the tribes that hate Whites most especially hate Southern Whites.
@Alice Teller:
It is evident that we are at an Endtime/Iron Age/Wolf Age/Kali Yuga etc. So, no matter what, there is going to be an accretion of corruption all around, on every side. And who knows for how long. However, in my opinion, that affords us a real thrust block for personal development and hopefully, at some point, towards a sounder cultural cohesion in the future. I am of the mindset that the stronger the poison, the stronger the possible immunological resistance response. More siddhis are available in such a time to those who know where to look. And a little ‘drammer’ is a good thing.
@Pierre de Craon:
Pierre, you’ve already gone much further than I in your analysis of that work. I can name the triumvirate but outside of that, I do not know. I mainly wanted to suggest the time period that it is based upon as well as the more elevated status afforded the statesman, as evidenced in the dramatic posturing of the players.
@Will Fredericks:
It appears that we have no underlying basis for communication. Through out our conversation I have acknowledged shortcomings and imperfections. I am not aware of dishing anything out and your last two paragraphs seem to suggest that there is error in the positions we take when they are self-evidently true.
@Alice Teller:
Your high taste in literature is inspiring. Tell us more about yourself. What are your favorite books? Have you read White Man, Thank Again! and the best of Hinton Rowan Helper?
Your name makes you sound hot. Ready to confess?
@Sir Tristram: Yes, indeed, Sir T. I understood your intent to be just as you stated it. I apologize for the diversion. It’s merely that that image recalled my attention to an old scab that has itched for years!
My ninety year old uncle was one of ten children. He has just entered hospice. Word has gone out to the entire family and when he goes to his reward we will travel from Virginia to Texas to our grandparents home. Four generations, not only of his direct descendents but of his siblings’ as well, will lay him to rest and then we will gather to celebrate his life, tell lies and other good stories. We will admire the new babies and brag on each other’s kids. We will tell the tale about what Great-great Grandma did when the Yankees came and where she buried the silver. We will love each other and reaffirm the bond. If that ain’t white identity, culture and interests than surely do not know what is.
@Pierre de Craon: Thanks for this. Weaver is, and remains for us, a treasure. We must read and learn.
@Sir Tristram: Thanks for this, and for your article. As one who has successfully taught Weaver to undergraduates, I applaud your lucid and compelling introduction to his work.
@Will Fredericks: Two small points about your extended reply. (1) The history of the New Republic is, certainly, almost the history writ small of the several strands of American leftism. During the period in question (midthirties), however, the editor was Bruce Bliven, and both Jewish influence and warmongering internationalism in the ultimate service of Bolshevik Jewish ends were far less in evidence at the rag then than they were before or since. Tate was not the only true American unashamed to write for it. (2) I am not a little surprised that you would reflexively accept the Pretend Encyclopedia’s characterization of Allen Tate’s “critique of fascism” at face value—or have you read it? I just concluded a fruitless ninety-minute search for the essay itself or at least some reasonable and trustworthy summary of its contents. What I was able to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt is that (a) Tate and Collins remained on friendly terms, and (b) Tate and other Agrarians continued to publish essays, verse, and fiction in Collins’s rag through at least 1939.
Comparing this “distancing” with, for example, the venomous attacks that the vulgar whore Norman the Pod launched, over the course of his lamentably long career, upon everyone whose servility ceased to be sufficient to his wants yields a diptych showing how honorable southerners and unprincipled “cosmopolites” (who not coincidentally loathed the South and southerners, certainly those pre-1992 or thereabouts) functioned in far more spheres and senses than one.
@Sir Tristram:
I think you only become a cartoon character if you comport yourself as one. This is largely a matter of tone. It is hard to be portrayed as some Hollywood caricature if your tone is calm and rational and you look normal.
This inhibition that keeps us stuck in euphemisms is something that we needed to overcome decades ago.
@Pierre de Craon:
That’s interesting about the mid 30′s TNR. That may explain why its editorial policy differed during this period from that other leftist rag The Nation. A friend told me that TNR went along with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, whereas The Nation denounced it. After the war my friend said it was the opposite with respect to communism, TNR supported containment of the Soviets, whereas The Nation went along with Wallacite appeasement. Apparently TNR was a much less New York Jew/trotskyite rag then than The Nation.
Thanks for your insight. I certainly don’t claim Pretend Encyclopedia as infallible, but unlike Hadding I don’t think we can isolate ourselves from all resources verifiably free from “war propaganda” etc. IMO you just have to use it while taking it with a grain of salt Maybe the Collins ties are one of the reasons the Southern Agrarians are still suspected by NY Times sorts as being “fascist leaning”. It’s actually certainly not unreasonable that some like Collins might see some natural overlap between the two camps; The Third Reich also had as an important part of its programme an emphasis on agrarianism. That was behind the push for
lebensraum and drang nach osten (push to the east), which was supposed to allow the Reich to entitle every SS member with his own farm. Although in practice the necessities of war production moved the Reich in the opposite direction – towards urban expansion and industrialization.
@Will Fredericks: I am with you re Wikipedia, within the limits imposed by what I call the Bradley Smith Rule: “Wikipedia is the first place to go if you want it quick, do not want much, and there are no ethical or moral issues involved” (Bradley Smith’s Blog, 11/19/2009).
@Spectator: Very kind of you to say so, sir. If in replying you wouldn’t be disclosing more about yourself than is prudent to do so, may I ask whether I am right in assuming that you don’t teach at a public college?
@Hadding Scott:
You’ll become a cartoon character if you don’t listen to the vibe of your intended audience, no matter how you comport yourself. There’s no one rule for how one should be because there’s a potentially negative interpretation of every style. If you’re calm and rational, then you’re cold and impersonal. If you’re animated and passionate, then you’re a zealot or a fanatic.
The point is to be humble and elastic enough to regroup your presentation if necessary in order to find the means to be a turn-on rather than a turn-off. Every speaking encounter is a courting event.
But I don’t think we’re that far apart. What I don’t like is the deprecation of the common mind coming from our so-called intelligentsia. You don’t win converts by attacking the folk’s ability to evolve its mindset or getting frustrated at “where we should be by now.” Says who? Says you. This reeks of imposing a uniform will across the board according to your own perceptions.
The slowness of things can also work in our favor. I like to try and emphasize the value of further hamstringing the central power unit by perching on countless sidetracks, Woods’ conception of a “myriad of autonomous communities.” By having more stamina and finding ways to frustrate the establishment we can cause it to implode through overextension. This is also why I assert that you should avoid an N-S rhetorical style. It’s not just about saying the word “Jew.” It’s also about not trying to impose an ideological/totalitarian vision of political power.
N-S was really just a form of state sovereignty but it offered no interpretation of federal relationships with other states or a general binding entity between them.
So, that’s why I advocate importing the Southern style of rhetoric, political theory, and historical legacy because it gets into these other areas and also is closer to the experience of our people. It’s historically pregnant. Have you seen the Hunger Games? Despite a couple of concessions to multiculturalism, It’s all about the Confederacy versus the New World Order. And it’s at the top of the charts.
Obviously, the general stream of humanity is going to get waylaid by more general memes and platitudes or euphemisms, to use your term. But rebuking them for not moving fast enough or not being wise enough is just going to move them further away. So, I say, if you choose to rebuke them, and there is a place for an inspiring rebuke, then what do you have to show for it?
While things do move slow, a lot of important groundwork has been accomplished in the past 50-60 years. Millions of White voters were motivated out of the Democratic party which is an irretrievable mess. Mistakes were made and we certainly lost control of the GOP but nonetheless a larger concentration of like-minded White voters emerged as a voting bloc. Now, we’ve either got to hammer the Republican party into something manageable or crack it apart from the inside if the RJC continues to maintain its hegemony in the face of increasing hostility to the establishment.
Or maybe they’ll get their war and run themselves over the cliff so that we can be rid of their noxious influence and start to rebuild things.
Either way, it’s a good time to be alive.
@Spectator:
I wish someone had introduced Weaver to me as an undergraduate. Thanks for reading.
@Anty ep: Neoconservativism is not what lead to coupling of ideas and foreign policy. That was messianic revolutionary fervor and Jefferson had it as much as Dubya…
As Americans however we are part of an anti- traditional anti- European political movement from the start.
I disagree. This is one reading of American history, to be certain. And it has received the endorsement of the current establishment. However, it is completely out of step with the original genius of the republic, as it actaully existed. There is much scholarship available that refutes the victorious Northern interpretation of our legacy and destiny.
And there is a world of difference between Jefferson and Dubya. Really. There is no comparison to be made here. Dubya could not even think for himself without Cheney whispering into his ear. Jefferson was a dynamic political genius on the order of those who established Greece and Rome. It is true that some of his rhetoric was infected with Enlightenment era bombast. But, even with the notorious line regarding equality from the Declaration of Independence, his meaning is taken out-of-context. He wasn’t referring to the equality of the races but to the equal “rights of an Englishman,” which the colonists were being denied.
Think about it for just one second. The man owned slaves. He wasn’t a hypocrite. His rhetoric had meaning and inspiration for the particular audience to which it was addressed. Period.
But even so, the Declaration of Independence is not the binding document to which we owe allegiance. The Constitution is our “social contract.” And it has the flavor of a distinctive political tradition that represents the flowering of hundreds of years of English common law and prescription. Nothing universalist at all about the Constitution of the United States as it was originally written.
For more in this direction, I would recommend M.E. Bradford’s Founding Fathers and Original Intentions. Both give ample ammunition against the neo-abolitionist vision of America that crypto-marxist historians like Eric Foner and the postbellum Yankees/Israeli dual-citizens in our government continue to advance.
@Will Fredericks:
Again, let’s allow Weaver to show us…
Are we far enough “beyond the farm” yet?
@Sir Tristram:
You forgot to add that we are more fun, better looking and have much better manners!
Truer words were never spake. And, surfing through the Mensa Membership Directory, it appears that we are smarter, too. ;0)
@Sir Tristram:
Who is it that had “an ideological/totalitarian vision of political power”? Can you give me an example? There are passages in Mein Kampf that sound like Thomas Jefferson. This is the national-socialist view of the state:
Glorification of the state as such is a feature of Fascism, not National-Socialism. National-Socialism is fundamentally populist, but a state is necessary to accomplish certain ends.
You cannot, for example, quickly solve massive unemployment without giving power to a government. The political party that is willing to use government that way will have a very great electoral advantage over the one that has inhibitions about so doing.
Nor can large demographic problems be addressed without using the power of government as did President Martin Van Buren for the Cherokee Removal.
So, it seems to me that what you would like to call “an ideological/totalitarian vision of political power” is not exactly that, but what it really is, is something that has a lot of precedent in U.S. history.
This less-government ideology that has passed for conservatism since Ronald Reagan is ultimately self-defeating. This is part of the poison that has been fed to us, which we must overcome.
@Pierre de Craon: “But that a man is born a member of the state which protects and nurtures him is a practically
universal concession. There is no original ‘social compact’ which he signs for admission to citizenship. His living under the laws and customs of the state is regarded as evidence of his membership, of his participation in the social union.”
Weaver’s criticism of Thoreau, as laid out in the Modern Age article, can be extended logically to: “Don’t like any of the adventures in Mesopotamia, Obamacare, or whatever else falls under the rubric of social covenant? Hand over the passport and “¡adiós, amigo!”
@Hadding Scott: If there are no bread stockpiles – prices are adjusted to clear the surplus – why should there be mass unemployment?
Southerners are so polite:
Atlanta ATC: “Tower to Saudi Air 911 — You are cleared to land
eastbound on
runway 9R.”
Saudi Air: “Thank you Atlanta ATC. Acknowledge cleared to land on infidel’s runway 9R – Allah be Praised.”
Atlanta ATC: “Tower to Iran Air 711 –You are cleared to land westbound on runway 9R.”
Iran Air: “Thank you Atlanta ATC. We are cleared to land on infidel’s runway 9R. – Allah is Great.”
Pause…
Saudi Air: “ATLANTA ATC – ATLANTA ATC”
Atlanta ATC: “Go ahead Saudi Air 911.”
Saudi Air: “YOU HAVE CLEARED BOTH OUR AIRCRAFT FOR THE
SAME RUNWAY GOING IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS. WE
ARE ON A COLLISION COURSE. INSTRUCTIONS, PLEASE.”
Atlanta ATC: “Well bless your hearts. And praise Jesus. Y’all be
careful now and tell Allah “hey” for us — y’a hear?”
@Sir Tristram:
Thanks Sir Tristram. Fascinating passages from Weaver, where his discussion of myth suure seems to echo Pareto and Moeller, among others. At the very least, I can see how perhaps how agrarianism, per the intro to l’ll Take My Stand
Is not just about the eternally redeeming virtues of home cookin, ‘coon huntin, and cotton pickin, among others (not Alice that I’m denigrating these fair virtues ;) )
The South Looks at Its Past….click on First Pages
http://tinyurl.com/6wsnsyx
@Will Fredericks:
That’s okay Darlin’ , you just feel that way cause you have never tasted my cooking.
@Gladwyn Hulderic:
This mentality is shallow.
You’re not going to knock out the Southern Tradition by pointing to Judah Benjamin. That’s a real cheapshot and will only scare off those who don’t take the time to go past the surface of a wikipedia entry.
Jefferson Davis was criticized roundly for including Benjamin at such a high political level but from every angle that I’ve been able to fathom, the man was an outstanding Southerner and a highly capable political strategist who was able to subordinate his particular ethnic psychology and inclination into the service of something much larger, the traditional order of the Old South, which maintained a civilized level of White racial consciousness at the top of the hierarchy. He had a lot more going for him than all of the victorious White Northerners who betrayed their brethren in a disgusting and unnecessary bloodbath.
This brings up a very important question, perhaps the oldest one around on the subject of Jews and White Christians – how do we deal with exceptional Jewish intellects when they enlist in the service of White Christian dominated cultures?
The answer is an obvious one – we should have a semi-permeable membrane of tolerance. Careful discretion should be maintained unless the absolute necessity of subordinating the rival culture arises if it begins to “attribute immanence to its forms.” We may be quite close to that point.
Weaver gets into this as well in Visions of Order…
I would argue that Judaism is both peculiarly oriented to display this aberration of worshiping its own forms (the “chosen people” mentality) and also to guard against it (traditional religious prohibitions against worshiping idols and images etc). We may soon reach a breaking point between the tension of “chosen” groupthink and the power of individual examples to the contrary but who is to say when the semi-permeable membrane of tolerance will or should seal up completely. I’m not sure any one of us could punch that button with absolute certainty or wisdom.
To be honest, I’m not familiar with these writers. Generally speaking, I have found a fair number of intelligent White activists and thinkers to be woefully ignorant of the depth of the Southern Tradition. That’s why I write here.
There’s always something to be said for moving forward, as long as the two points that I mentioned, from the memory of the Old South, are kept in mind: 1) the ineradicable distinctions between different races and 2) the danger of concentrating power into one unitary source which can arbitrarily determine the outcome of local domestic issues from afar.
We still haven’t been able to incorporate those into our contemporary culture so I’m not sure that we can go anywhere new yet.
From Davidson’s preface to The Southern Tradition at Bay:
I wonder if these contemporary thinkers that you mentioned are cognizant of all that has gone before. I have yet to see someone fully encompass and surpass the political implications of the theories of Jefferson, Taylor, Randolph, Calhoun, Fleming, Davidson (et al.), Weaver, and Bradford for the modern world of American Whites. I think Kevin Macdonald’s scholarship offers an excellent filter through which one can understand and appreciate the older Southern stuff in a newer context. Contemporary Southern thinkers also continue to defend and further a distinctive partisanship closely aligned to their actual historical experience rather than science fiction. But their additions are largely more of a custodianship.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, current ethnostate theories built upon or emergent from the National Socialism model tend to remind me simply of varieties of the older “state sovereignty” concept that we’ve already been tossing around for three centuries. The main difference, in my opinion, is that the newer models (just like NS) lack any theoretical structure for handling confederal relationships between different States or the nature of the binding entity between them. Southern political theory covers all of this. The newer models also have the negative meme value of growing from the thing we were fighting against in WWII, which is important when considering the sensibilities of the White American folk. There is some element of effective strategy to consider here.
Yet I’m open to reading new works all the time as long as they don’t encourage me to forget who I am and who I come from.
@Hadding Scott: Thanks for such thoughtful engagement. This is a worthwhile debate.
Right. And here is Richard Weaver, the State Rights philosopher par excellence touting a form of centralized tyranny…
So, what gives? Well, you just quoted a Nazi but I quoted an American. Therefore, I win! If you can’t appreciate that blunt statement then you are not going to get far with the Average Joes out there. Maybe such distinctions are trite between academics but when we consider public debate/rhetoric and an actual folk mentality in a particular time and space, this makes all the difference. Why not stick to Thomas Jefferson, when you can, at least when addressing those over here?
Again, trust me, I know of the many similarities inherent within National Socialism or Fascism and Populism, especially of the Southern sort, here in the US. But, as I also mentioned, these latent 20th century European explosions of nationalism or state rights, if you will, do not provide us with theoretical structures for confederal relationships between different States or for the nature of a binding entity that at times emerges above them to act for general purposes of common welfare or planetary defense:) Maybe Metternich would be more useful to study from a European context.
Anyhow, that’s why I say that the Southern Tradition contains 1) more developed kernels for reorganizing the republican or even imperial concept in contemporary times and 2) a more potent rhetorical style for inspiring American Whites to do something about the situation here and now.
From my readings of Mein Kampf, I would say that Hitler demonstrated a pretty simplistic conception of American constitutional theory. But he can’t be blamed for that. After all, after 1865, the Northern Press would’ve been in a position to tout its apostasy worldwide, as it still does.
The antebellum Southern aristocracy, with particular emphasis on those under John Calhoun’s leadership, existed in a pressure cooker on the race issue, so they went further in political theory development than areas in completely White areas of central Europe or the Northern or Midwestern part of the United States.
This goes against common wisdom. Most people think of Southern slaveowners as being woefully ignorant and brutal. But, on the contrary, the opposite is true. They had significant leisure time to develop a legitimate theory of their civilization and not all of them were lazy drunkards with a penchant for dueling.
And if there ever comes a time when we shall be able to “fix” things, we’ll need Calhoun’s superior understanding of the federal mechanism a bit more than a Nietzschean will to power because we’ll still have to live with many other types of people who may not be as developed as we are but with whom we must nevertheless abide in some form of harmony even when they live beyond our borders.
@Sir Tristram:
I can heartily recommend Wilmot Robertson’s The Dispossed Majority
http://archive.org/details/TheDispossessedMajority
@Hadding Scott:
There is a possibility other then government force. The Cotton Mills industry in the south was developed by the cooperation of business and community leaders to provide poor whites with employment that need not compete with black workers.
http://www.ibiblio.org/sohp/laf/overview.html
@Sir Tristram:
I can see there may be a lot of subtleties in “The Southern Point” and The Southern Tradition”. I basically have associated all this about the Southern Agrarians as being associated with I’ll Take My Stand, but as you note, Weaver, who wasn’t one of the writers in ITMS, represents the full flowering of what the Southern Agrarians of the 1930s had first begun with ITMS.
So what he thought and wrote as what seems to be generally agreed on as the maturation of the Southern Agrarians certainly seems as your excerpt here pays witness too, worth studying. I as with most other paleoconservatives are mostly familiar with the Southern Tradition through the writings of Samuel Francis, who you call a latter day agrarian, as well as other writers at Chronicles such as Thomas Fleming.
It just seems worth noting that when we are talking about the “use of the Southern Tradition” to facilitate “a more comprehensive American front” that these experts on the Southern Agrarians, who were all well acquainted with Weaver and the other Southern Agrarians, to the extent I’d think that you might categorize them all as latter day Agrarians, didn’t particularly agree among themselves. Fourteen of the fifteen editors of Chronicles for instance were members of The League of the South. Sam Francis was not, and thought the whole notion “An Infantile Delusion” (turning an the old Leninist phrase). Francis beat the drums for his “Middle American Radicals” till he died, while Fleming and co seem to have drifted off into traditional Catholic obscuritanism.
So I’m not sure exactly what happened to these modern Southern Agrarians, but whatever their fate, it seems certain that knowledge of Weaver’s STAB and
Visions of Order by itself is not enough to set the world on fire. Personalities probably play a role, Fleming’s legendary prickliness being one example. But all in all its I’ll admit its not easy to keep track of their peregrinations. Perhaps that might be a worthy study for another article Sir Tristram, what’s happened to all these latter day Agrarians, whose also at one time seemed to have some ambitions of creating this “more comprehensive American front” with the Southern Tradition as an inspiration?
@Trenchant: As you say,
but ought it to be? I think that doing so amounts to a bridge, perhaps several bridges, too far. I don’t see how any fair contextualization—whether within the article or the larger body of Weaver’s work—of the passage you quote can be teased out to mean that the membership in the “state” he writes of is in any way identifiable with even a pared-down Johnsonian vision (that’s LBJ-ish Johnsonian) of the state (let’s say pro argumento that we mean these here United States), let alone the Obamanoid nightmare that we daily wake to find ourselves mired in. Weaver’s well-documented utter disinterest in any government that isn’t strictly as local as possible seems to me to get him off any and every such hook. Weaver is the sort of guy who would not in the least have been surprised to learn that something like 80 percent of the Americans of his day died within fifty miles of the place they were born. The largely inexplicable attachment to home, be it ever so humble, is something I for one can’t explain, being as I am someone who lives four miles from the hospital where he was born, in a city he has detested with a moral fervor for almost forty years.
As for whether Thoreau or Randolph of Roanoke is the guy one should turn to for public virtue, I would, if pressed for an answer, invite you to look over there at the lovely sunset before it’s over. I have never, since my youth, been comfortable with Thoreau, who early on struck me as virtually a caricature of the self-absorbed-personality type of guy, albeit a writer of rare grace (perhaps an equally early sense of such a tendency in myself is at the root of my reaction, though I have to admit an equally profound and deep-seated admiration of many decades’ standing for Henry Adams, who takes Thoreau’s temperamental detachment and not always easygoing contempt for his fellow man and doubles down on it).
As for R of R, my sympathies for his brand of thinking are at least as old as … well, my first reading of this essay forty years ago, though I later decided that one who likes his whisky old, unblended, and neat would do better to go straight for the bottled-in-bond tipple called Calhoun. My ultimate “problem” (to use a good word in a manner I dislike) with Randolph is that I can barely picture him as a human being, let alone feel that I could ever get to know him. How is that relevant, you ask? Because clearly, say I, Weaver wants us to know him in this way, as he (RW) very evidently does know him (R of R).
Now tell me what you think of KM’s essay, my friend? Do you think I read it right, or not?
@Will Fredericks:
I am sure that my fellow Traditional Catholic obscurantists appreciate your dispassionate estimation and analysis as much as I do. Be it noted, nonetheless, that whilst calling the remarkable Mr. Fleming prickly, Catholic, and any of a number of other things is well and readily justified, calling him a Traditional Catholic—the better term is Traditionalist, by the way—is not. He is a conservative Catholic, one who embraces Vatican II and happily assists at the Novus Ordo mass, the mass of Paul VI, the conciliar mass, the vernacular mass—call it what you will. He is quite hostile, in fact, to true Traditionalists, who will have nothing to do with what they (rightly) call conciliarism, neocatholicism, and things far blunter.
Allow me to say a few words about Sam Francis, whom I too admired and whom I met and spoke to about fifteen years ago for several hours in very congenial company. You clearly know that he made frequent mention of Professor Donald Warren, from whose writings, particularly The Radical Center, he got the MARs term and concept both. Try to imagine, then, my surprise upon learning that he did not know that Warren was a hard-core leftist, a man with no sympathy whatsoever for the middle-American radicals he named. Nor had he heard of Warren’s final book, Radio Priest, an unspeakably written collection of scurrilous slanders about Father Charles Coughlin, wherein Warren put on display his utter contempt for all Americans not smart enough to share his prejudices. Indeed, Sam expressed such surprise that politeness alone prevented me from asking him whether he had actually read the earlier book cover to cover (I honestly don’t think he had, though I mean this in no way as a disparagement of what I then agreed was his very sound analysis of the MARs phenomenon [I am no longer so inclined to think]). As it happens, I knew rather more than I wanted to know about Radio Priest because I had read it for the publisher, to whom I gave my earnest recommendation that it not be published, on grounds of complete incoherence. My recommendation, obviously, wasn’t taken, but a senior editor’s anonymous revision of the book at least eliminated a measure of the incoherence if not, of course, the drivel that underlay it.
@Sir Tristram:
That’s the silliest thing I ever read on TOO.
The reason why I quoted an original NSDAP source was not to evoke an emotional reaction from a crowd (since there is no crowd here) but to create some clarity about what National-Socialism in Germany was. If you’re not interested in the facts about National-Socialism then I would ask you to stop making uninformed references to it.
Your equation, that quoting an American means being credible — do you believe that? You’re quoting a representative of a political perspective that was defeated and belongs to a bygone era. You might as well quote Jefferson Davis, for all the advantage that quoting such “an American” is likely to get you.
Furthermore, there are logical reasons why States’ Rights has been on the losing side of history.
I can quote Jefferson in support of some important aspects of national-socialism, but Jefferson does not have all the ideas that we need. A presentation based entirely on well respected American sources would be half-baked, because it was Germany that ultimately worked out the idea of the state as preserver of a race.
I am more interested in ideas that will work than in rhetoric that will fly. If you have a workable idea then you can start moving people toward it. There’s no sense in taking the easy road of giving primacy to “rhetoric” if the result is that you’ve led people in a direction that doesn’t work.
@Pierre de Craon:First, I did read the KM paper, but it’s really not a subject I’m conversant with.
Second, I don’t wish to defend Thoreau the man, nor his isolationism, merely his reasoning regarding social covenant, where I think he was on solid ground. Weaver I put to reductio ad absurdum not because I don’t heartily believe in localism as the way to slough off our dogged parasites, but because the checks and balances promised by federal models have shown themselves to be, on balance, useless over time against the formidable centralizing forces arrayed against them.
In short, I believe localism was an accident of history, prickly individualists and religious fugitives in a new land, with enough territory to keep the hostilities and divisions between them tractable. From this, my belief that localism will again emerge from the chaos of Leviathan’s death throes, but what shape it will have no one can know.
@Richard Pierce:
This is incorrect. As long as the attack on Memory is a keypoint of the presentism of the modern world, any intelligence that uses for its source the historical experience of a Traditional order will aid in the fight. Those that are especially pregnant due to premature evaluations or missed opportunities for full manifestation, such as some form of non-sectarian Christianity and Southern political theory, are even more valuable.
@Hadding Scott:
No, there’s no crowd. But the subject of the article is the value of rhetoric in an American context, which means that we are considering how to mobilize a message to a crowd, here, in 2012, not in Germany in 1933.
Look at your reaction. You thought I was being ridiculous and you called me ‘silly’ and then you called for me to stop it with my nonsense. Are you going to do the same to JoeBob the electrician who works 50 hours a week to feed his family, hangs an American flag on his porch, whose dad or granddad got shot down in a German trench in the 1940s by the Nazis, and who as soon as you start going metaphysical with NSDAP rhetoric, lifts his middle finger and shuts the door?
That’s what this debate is about. Rhetoric exists apart as a discipline from the logical truth of the dialectical process. The focus is on the value of rhetoric.
I don’t care what you’ve come to think National Socialism was in Germany. Were you there? More importantly, were your people there? And even if they were, you’re trying to transmit a foreign legacy to a people that won’t respond to it, because our tribe whupped up on that tribe decades ago.
Yeah, I do, because I stay connected to normal American people who live in the here and now.
No. That’s what you’re doing with National Socialism. Richard Weaver’s philosophy didn’t go down in flames. It was conceived and developed almost a hundred years after the Civil War was fought. And he was looking to the future. Comparing him to Jefferson Davis is an incorrect analogy.
And they are?
Again, NS gives us NO theoretical structures for confederal relationships between various States and NO paradigm for the nature of a binding entity between such states. The Southern political theory does.
No, you just haven’t studied American traditions very closely. We’ve always known about the importance of race and homogeneity as a basis of common interest in political development. Try reading the original American constitution sometime and then following the development of State Rights theory as it evolved to address the issue of consolidating white interests by diffusing power from the central unit.
See me after Part 2. You’re still not fully appreciating rhetorical technique.
@Alice Teller:
Great. I’m happy to check it out.
@Sir Tristram:
Just so; no quarrel there at all. Whether Weaver, if pressed hard, would have disputed this point, I simply can’t say. But I am sure he would have been extremely sad to admit it, given his love for his region and his country (I myself am so bloody despondent about this fact that the temptation to drink myself into a blind stupor daily would be hard to resist save for the fact that I can’t afford to buy the stuff I’d insist on drinking).
The blinding accuracy of the blockquoted comment first struck me when I read Mel Bradford’s Founding Fathers, which Alice Teller (I believe) or Sir T. mentioned higher up this thread. Bradford is, as a historian, the least insistent and the subtlest of writers. Yet in reading his thumbnail sketches of all the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (the context here is the ratification or otherwise of the 1787 Constitution), you have to be really attention-span-challenged not to catch on pretty damn quick that every last cavil, every last caution, raised regarding the document’s potentially disastrous pitfalls for the states and their citizens by the Anti-Federalists, first and foremost the great George Mason, has come true. Perhaps the only pigeon that hasn’t yet come home to roost is the formal dissolution of the states. Since their effective dissolution came a century ago, of course, with the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment (with the full support of the already enormously powerful Tribal crypto-elite), when the first black Jewish female president signs the executive order instructing our “Hessian” troops to gun down everyone in state capitals from Baton Rouge to Bismarck, no real harm will be done except to some brickwork.
@Sir Tristram:
@Trenchant:
My apologies to Sir Tristram. The last comment was meant as a reply to Trenchant. Blame age and lack of sleep …
@Trenchant:
I meant to conclude the comment above with the remark that I have come to believe that the happiest “federalized” arrangement history has ever offered for our delectation is the Holy Roman Empire, circa 1400 to the evil day when Napoleon destroyed it. Imagine, more than a hundred pocket-sized, independent-enough states, with a common language (German, in several varieties) and a common yet profound Christian culture. Except for the Thirty Years War, an ordinary slob like me didn’t even have much to fear from warfare, which was largely of concern to big shots quarreling with their cousins, as often as not over (as Hamlet put it) “a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name.”
@Pierre de Craon: That should read “as a character in Hamlet put it”.
@Hadding Scott:
Silliest thing ever. You obviously don’t read your own posts.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! LOL
I know you mean well, that your poor National Socialist Germany has been unjustly maligned, and if it has its problems, hey everybody does. But lets face it – poor Adolf is still a tough sell in America politically, a lot more than people whose only vice seems to be that they are dimly and stupidly associated with proto-fascism by a few leftists.
Hey, occasionally I can’t help complaining that Moeller is unjustly maligned, and he unlike the National Socialists actually put out something of substance, but I just can’t bring myself to say people ought to go out on a limb for a man whose most well known book was The Third Reich (and not in criticism). And Moeller was only a pseudo-demon, you’re dealing with the real thing.
Simple, well known rule for in successful politics; you don’t quote Adolf Hitler, Al Capone, Benedict Arnold, Jack the Ripper, Joseph Stalin, or old scratch himself. If you’re going to make your life’s work rehabilitating old Dolphie, I doubt you really expect to be taken seriously despite your token protests, even here.
@Pierre de Craon:
Amen.
The police cannot credibly police the police without some metaphysical transformation being effected by the badge, idem for judges judging judges.
So, whilst I’m very sympathetic to using rhetoric as a tool to sensitize people towards a Weaver-favoured decentralized model, one of social bonds and shared local knowledge, I do not believe that imposed constitutions offer a viable means to achieve same. Even that most decentralized of all developed nations, Switzerland, is not immune from this process of denaturing localism. I regard the greatest protection in the case of Switzerland to be the cultural awareness and sense of distinct difference between the peoples, and not some piece of paper, and I believe that Sir Tristram’s (there’s got to be a story to that moniker) piece celebrates the former in an American context.
@Will Fredericks:
Not at all, because I was not the one claiming that my source gave me some alleged rhetorical advantage. I am not doing rhetoric here. I am doing truth.
@Pierre de Craon: Hoppe goes into this at great length in Democracy: The God that Failed; the heightened class-consciousness, signature of hereditary monarchy, effectively circumscribes what the kingdom’s subjects will tolerate (it’s unfairness is patent). There is not the public identification with the king’s problems or ambitions, and a perfectly good understanding that the health of the treasury is a matter of personal, not generalized, concern. And as you say, war prior to Napoleon was a different beast.
@Trenchant: Yes. I would say that the hallmarks of traditional nondemocratic arrangements are thus realism and honesty. Alas for us all, all American children are “schooled” (read, “indoctrinated”) to regard such arrangements as abominations that that most sacred of American inventions, the Holy Vote, has rescued them and their (probably illegitimate) offspring from.
Indeed, it is easier both to believe and to understand that kings and other rulers (whatever name they bear) might well in such circumstances be loved by their people and love them in turn, as counterintuitive as this proposition seems to us, the indoctrinated. The possibilities for intellectual integrity and emotional engagement suddenly expand to the horizon once the requirement that people lie to one another, day in and day out, gets thrown in the dumpster. And except in its moral and juridical senses (the two senses where, one notes with bitter irony, the ideal of equality is never honored in the observance in this country), has “all men are created equal” ever been anything but a big lie?
@Pierre de Craon:
Perhaps this note really should be on part two, but it seems to follow from your point regarding required lies. I think that there are many people in this country who merely require permission to say the emperor has no clothes. The signs are everywhere that people are paying attention to our public life and thinking about what has gone awry. Once you start looking the reason’s are not really hidden. We lack a vocabulary that has not been tainted, we lack the courtesies which veil some on the harder realities, we lack an elite that is remotely worthy of emulation on any but the grossest levels. I think our people are desperate for all the guidance that men like Weaver and The Agrarians offer.
Many need conversion, more need permission. The long, slow decline has been speeding up of late. It is not possible to hide from on any level of society. Although no longer a young man, my husband is not the sort to run scared. Recently he had occasion to go to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, once a lovely tourist section. He found himself locking the doors and looking over his shoulder. He is not alone.
Time and tide, Gentlemen.
@Pierre de Craon: As birthright is essentially a lottery, it is possible that one can speak of an honourable monarch without oxymoron. Probably a small subset, granted, but the inherent selection bias in our democratic system excludes that a good man prevail. When Ron Paul is ensconced in the Oval Office, please join in with me in ridiculing this conviction of mine.
@Tristram:
Historical revisionism is useful, but it’s half the battle, at best; fighting the last battle. Has Holocaust revisionism – or even something more relevant, like 9/11 revisionism – contributed significantly to our present fight?
Certainly, in the sense of learning from past mistakes. Those missed opportunities provide an understanding of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that allowed those systems to be defeated.
But pretending that we’re going to re-establish the Gallant South, or the Holy Roman Empire, is escapist fantasy. Both regimes *failed* and it was *not* because they weren’t “tried enough” or we “lost the true faith” or somesuch. They failed due to their inherent weakness, just like National Socialism.
Since you all seem to be in love with ancient Hebrew mythology, let’s remember that the neo-Hasmoneans of the Roman-Jewish war were certain that YHWH was going to “open the heavens” and chariots of fire driven by angelic beings were going assist them in defeating the pagan hordes. The Romans, with their superior technology and tactics, crushed them, and they would up dying slowing on crosses.
Some Jews blamed the defeat on not following the laws of YHWH stringently enough, went into the desert and doubled-down on the fanaticism, fastings, religious mumbo-jumbo and rebellion, they finally committed mass suicide at Masada, completely defeated.
The smarter Jews adapted, worked to undermine pagan society, and now we all worship the Hebrew god.
Reconstructionist nostalgia for pre-scientific Christianity, pre-industrial Southern agrarianism, and pre-1941 National Socialism has next to nothing to offer the next generation, except as an example of what NOT to do next time.
Any news on the new Dixie TV network? Have the Cardinals of the Church anything better than EWTN? Have the National Socialists created an alternate financial system that can compete with Wall Street yet?
P.S. who made you a “sir” anyway?
Ah yes, monarchy, the “erotic form of government.” In the immediate aftermath of the Afghanistan invasion in 2002, the old deposed king had some journalists write up some puffery in the New York Times suggesting that re-establishing the traditional Afghanistan monarch – as a vassal to the US Empire – might promote stablility in the region. Doubtless true.
But there was never any question that he would be a puppet figurehead for the Washington regime, just as European monarchs – even American presidents – have been mostly vassals for globalist corporate/economic interests for a time period measured in centuries.
The modern world’s most successful monarch, Elizabeth, is wholly dependent on the deference of the mass media, and she nearly lost it in the 1970s. Without the short-lived Hollywood style drama of Princess Diana, a decade of mockery in the press might have done away with that venerable institution as well.
It *would* be so much easier if we could go back to the pre-mass media, pre-internet, pre-global capitalist days of yore. Priests in dresses chanting mumbo-jumbo might still be able to impress an illiterate peasant class.
You’d be better off with the almost equally daft gold standard Ron Paul libertarian cult, at least they understand the true god of democratic man, money. Mao was right that political power flows from the barrel of a gun; hopefully Whites will learn eventually that the targets are chosen by the owners of mass media.
Britney Spears could more effectively raise an army than any neo-traditionalists posting on TOO; the truth hurts. Hail your new Joan of Arc. Always remember that globally, “Madonna” hasn’t meant the Virgin Mother for 30 years.
“Control of the functional institutions (like the media and the banks) makes direct rule of the member democracies unnecessary.” — Some 1970s Trilateralist paraphrased by Richard Pierce
@Richard Pierce:
Do you have a solution or do you just love complaining?
@Pierre de Craon:
“And except in its moral and juridical senses (the two senses where, one notes with bitter irony, the ideal of equality is never honored in the observance in this country), has “all men are created equal” ever been anything but a big lie?”
Yes, I think so: It was intended specifically as a rhetorical device, to proclaim that the British colonists of America were every bit as entitled to their rights, as Englishmen, as were their British brethren who were born and resident in the Mother Country itself; and that the colonists, as endowed by their Creator, were created equal even to King George III himself– even though, by birth, he bore the Crown, through patrilineal descent. The Declaration, after all, is not itself a legal document, granting rights or creating a government; it is, rather, a petition of grievances, addressed to the world at large, and seeking assent and recognition, as newly declared, but inherently equal, states. It was not a lie per se, because it was neither intended nor hoped that it would be interpreted or believed as the radical egalitarians of the modernist age now pretend that it was intended. Virtually no one, anywhere, in July 1776, would have understood it to mean that all individuals were, or had been born, equal to each other– let alone believed such a self-evident fallacy!
@Alice Teller: Whilst everything in your comment is worthy of praise and, better still, reflection, pardon me for thinking that the very best point is also the subtlest: that absent the ability to comprehend and use courtesies, which you justly term veils for harder realities, the very capacity to express oneself in any form is, to an extent at least, crippled. I am not sure whether I would call this an intuitive truth, but it certainly is something that I myself see verified several dozen times a day, and I thank you for giving me a compendious way of expressing this perception.
Where I think your comment just may have more local than universal application is with regard to “permission” to point to the emperor’s nakedness. You evidently see far more white people than I do on a regular basis, and I am sure that what you report corresponds with the evidence your senses provide you. However, in the Northeast, preeminently here in New York, the situation, I think, is one where Judaic privilege and luxurious detachment have their corresponding alternative universe in the vast and growing Third World population’s utter lack of embarrassment at its own filth, lack of hygiene, criminality, degeneracy, contempt for the most rudimentary conventions of public conduct, and worst of all, sheer ingratitude for all sorts of things, things taken and given, to which it has no conceivable entitlement. All of these are people for whom all may not be right with the world but enough of it is either to forestall any serious complaint of their own or to menace anyone not of their clans who has the temerity to suggest that their glorious monarch is as disgusting as they themselves are.
I see and hear, I am sad to say, almost nothing expressive even of disquiet, let alone focused anger, from those who, like me, pay hard cash for their own suppression and dispossession. It is less that there is no sense that the situation is nearing the literally unbearable—even my college-indoctrinated white neighbors get that—than that it is simply immoral or evil to blame what has happened and is happening on actual persons. Put otherwise, what I observe hereabouts is, not a matter of lack of permission or lack of access to one or several mots justes, but an incapacity to think, speak, or act born of moral castration. Our Jewish medical geniuses have no interest in reconstructing those organs, needless to say.
The only positive aspect of the local situation is that, were there ever to be either a palace revolution or a populist one, the white locals around here might piss and moan a bit about “change,” but they would go along, more or less acquiescently. That, after all, is what they do best.
@D. K.: You are ever so right! The crux of the Declaration Problem, shall we call it, was laid out fifty years ago in an essay by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey, who noted that Abraham Lincoln singlehandedly, through the misuse of rhetoric (pace Weaver and Sir T.), amalgamated the Declaration into the galaxy of “governing” documents, and there, usurper though it be, it has resided ever since.
Incidentally, Garry Wills has made a good living over the years off the work of Kendall, a far better man and scholar (albeit a genuine crank), in that Wills took this insight and ran with it in two books: one, a rather good one, called Inventing America, and the other, a base one, called Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.
@Alice Teller
Step one of my solution – stop listening to the losers of the past and send the Generals of the losing side to a well earned retirement.
When you are ready to hear step two, let us know.
@Alice Teller: The latter is all he can do. He is a yelping lapdog trying to convince all and sundry that he is a pit bull. Only the mess he leaves on the sidewalk is worthy of note.
P.S. Did you notice that when he says “history,” he means thirty years ago. How’s that for a “long” view!
@Pierre de Craon:
I have no doubt that New Yorkers will be the last to know hit them. To be fair, New York has not been our territory for some time now. I remember crossing the GW bridge thirty years ago and wondering if anyone had notified the government that the Japanese had captured Fort Lee.
Fortunately, despite our critic’s charge of Luddite-like behavior, we are conversing via new technology. Your audience is not limited to your neighborhood.
I see abundant evidence of the anger and disillusion among the young. It is one thing to let government favored groups go to the head of the line when jobs are plentiful. In the current atmosphere many have a very different attitude. I see more and more complaints about the disconnect between the reality we all live and lies we are required to tell. A minor example. I saw a post on facebook complaining about the foolishness of those who booked two entertainers at nearby venues. One was Snoopy Dogie and the other Joe Walsh. Bets were being laid about how many shootings would occur due to this bad planning. No one seemed to think that this was a wonderful opportunity to celebrate our vibrant diversity.
I truly do think that something has to give. If those of us who still have some small influence and more important, the ability to attest that life was not always this ugly, nor need it be, coupled with intelligent, intellectually honest arguments to support our position, we made avoid turning all of the west into NY.
@Richard Pierce:
And yet, here you are. Because I am not always a woman who stays where she belongs I have over-heard the admonition ‘if you don’t have a solution, you are just bitchin’. I do believe we need to head this comments section with the commandment “Thou shalt not whine!
@Trenchant: Gladly. I’ve had a pound and a half of crow in a Glad Freezer Bag for years in anticipation of the happy event.
Have you ever been a Chronicles reader? Back in 1996, probably shortly after the NH primary, when a PB-led Peasants’ Revolt actually seemed thinkable, Fleming wrote a high-spirited lead article in which he talked about Pat’s administration, wherein Sam Francis was chief of staff, Ron Paul ran Treasury, and Jim Traficant was over at Commerce. Just the thought of such a White House does my heart good.
I went all the way back to the Roman-Jewish war, to cater to your mythology, but at the end of the day it’s like trying to appeal to Lord of the Rings fans.
Perhaps you can tell us how to defeat drones with Greek Fire?
@Alice Teller
Yes, I’m posting on the blog of an evolutionary psychologist; a scientist, and trying to shoo away the religious nutjobs and wannabe Middle Earth re-enactors so we can get down to serious business.
Again, step two, let us know when you are ready.
The Occidental Traditionalist has an relevant pot.
http://occidentaltraditionalist.blogspot.com/2012/04/modernity-kills-imagination.html
Well one part of tradition I can fully embrace – traditional gender roles. If modern man has any weakness, it’s projecting on women the capacity for reason. Imagination, drama, and romance certainly, anything else is a waste. The ancients were sharply divided on whether women even had a “soul” – if that’s a euphemism for rationality, I’ll take the conservative side.
Fortunately, most women sympathetic to our cause wouldn’t dream of joining the military, for instance.
Now, how to explain the (male) Hobbits?
@Pierre de Craon: No, never a Chronicles reader. Being, as you are, a fan of ancient history, you’ve probably seen the 2004 Bill Clinton – His Life, which I think is pretty representative of what it takes to achieve high office. Mercifully, a world all at sixes and sevens under Clinton was restored to harmony and probity by the Bush Dream Team.
http://is.gd/cwrUet
@Trenchant: “Mercifully, a world all at sixes and sevens under Clinton was restored to harmony and probity by the Bush Dream Team.”
Say what?
I haven’t seen the flick. Thanks for the tip. My Memorial Day afternoon now has something to be done in it.
@Richard Pierce: Drones come from the Federal budget, maybe you could suggest how to dry up that swamp.
@Pierre de Craon: Irony, in thick dollops.
@Richard Pierce: Flying drones, too.
@Trenchant: I was considering being hurt that you felt you had to explain, but then I recalled my upcoming Clintonian viewing pleasure, courtesy of you, of course, and so I decided to be big about it.
@Sir Tristram:
You’re putting the cart before the horse. The “we” that will do the mobilizing and the direction in which the crowd is to be mobilized have to be established first.
Seriously, Americans do not need to be told that rhetoric is important. This is a nation of bullsh-t-artists who get along by going along, and that’s a big factor in why we are going down. The importance of truth is what needs to be emphasized.
I am not talking to JoeBob. I am talking to a guy that wrote an essay and is presumably somewhat informed and rational.
Do you make a deliberate point of limiting your thoughts to whatever will sound good right now to JoeBob? You seem to be demanding that I limit myself in the same way.
Germans are “our tribe.” Germans are the largest descent-group in the USA.
I know a few things about National-Socialist Germany because I have had some friends from Germany, some that lived there while Hitler was in power. On top of that, I’ve done research. I translate original National-Socialist texts and post them online. So, when I suggest that your use of propaganda-clichés about “n-zis” is uninformed, it’s not as if I hadn’t done any research myself. Relatively speaking, I am informed. I am not a mere rhetorician! I care about being accurate!
@Richard Pierce:
I’m not sure. I think it was a woman, a really pretty one, you know, one to die for.
@Hadding Scott:”Anybody that tries to fight centralized power with diffused power places himself at a severe disadvantage.”
Not so. For others who may be interested in a different opinion:
“after Napoleon had invaded Spain and beaten the regular army, he encountered the fierce resistance of spontaneously organized warriors. Fewer than 50,000 of these famous ‘guerrillas’ engaged up to 250,000 soldiers, or half of his army, which eventually withdrew from Spain. Similarly, Russian partisans engaged up to 20 German divisions in World War II and were thus instrumental in the defeat of the German forces.38 More recently, in 1960, 20,000 Algerian warriors engaged 400,000 well-trained French soldiers and forced them to withdraw. In our days, 500 Hezbollah warriors are reported to have engaged 20,000 world-class soldiers of the Israeli army, which just withdrew from South Lebanon.”
Hoppe, H-H, (ed.)The Myth of National Defense, p. 392.
http://is.gd/mHMm27
@Trenchant:
Metternich’s technique of diplomacy also offers considerable parallels in the European context.
@Trenchant: Your examples of guerrillas harassing armies do not in any way contradict the fact that scattered centers of power are at a disadvantage against a single, unified power.
I don’t know much about Napoleon in Spain but the partisans in the USSR were not fighting Germany by themselves and certainly could not have defeated Germany. Don’t be ridiculous. By the way, I don’t know how many “Russian partisans” there were, but there were a lot of Jews. I believe they were directed and supplied from Moscow and not just a spontaneous movement.
One of the great advantages of centralization is the ability to draw resources from wherever they happen to be and concentrate them wherever needed. A Federal government always has a lot more resources at its disposal than any one of the member states.
@Sir Tristram: Thanks. I could have also cited the example of highly decentralized military and political structure (Belgium’s king surrendered when his people may not have) of WWII Switzerland, and how that gave Hitler pause for thought. See Halbrook:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/stagnaro5.html
@Hadding Scott: Part of the Wehrmacht’s success was its managerial decentralization, vis-à-vis, say, the USSR military. “Defeat” I’d classify as repulsion of an invader, not conquest of the aggressor country. Afghanistan is certainly proving costly to herd goat-herders, and might eventually cause a withdrawal. Meantime, look at the cost to the Treasury.
@Hadding Scott:Germany still had private property, nominally, though its regimented controls, rationing and quotas denatured the essence thereof. USSR’s total collectivization impoverished it to a far greater extent. Poor armies do worse against rich ones, all else being equal.
A slightly more comprehensive review of the Swiss decentralized fighting model.
http://www.frontline.org.za/articles/reformation_resistance.htm
@Richard Pierce:
This is exactly the type of narrow arrogant juggernaut mentality that will get us nowhere. Serious business? What does that mean – trying to out-tech the military industrial complex with more and more refined science? Why not go more in the other direction and address hearts and minds in the poetic tradition in order to command the type of allegiance that is willing to fight and die for something? That means utilizing myth, poetry, rhetoric, religion, art, and all of the things that have demonstrated holistic, inspirational power in a human context.
Psychology itself occupies a middle ground between physics and metaphysics. Catch up to the times. Your comment exemplifies an outdated modern rationalism that is more closely akin to enlightenment era thinking.
Psychology is the science of the “psyche” but we’re in the movie, which means that one can’t look at humanity like an elemental specimen. The observer here is himself inside of an existential situation from which he cannot be detached.
Science/Dialectic and Poetry/Rhetoric ought to occupy equal but opposite spheres which would ideally create a binocular effect, expanding our consciousness. But many scientists or scientific types are too busy bashing the folk mind to recognize that the larger human community will always maintain some form of belief in God or the soul or, if nothing else, an inscrutable mystery that is never fully available for logical reconstruction and analysis.
At least this perspective dodges the trap of thinking that one knows it all.
@Sir Tristram: K.O.
@Trenchant:
I like that. I met a Swiss guy a few years ago who told me about how they have engineered tunnels and bases within the Alps.
Mel Bradford also mentions the political examples of Iceland, Venice and the Netherlands at their respective heights of development.