Patriots, Identitarians, Nationalists and Sovereignists: They must all be positive
What follows is the text of my speech given at the Generation Identity conference in London, UK, July 27, 2019.
Words such as “sovereignty” and “identity,” both belonging to the family of patriotism, have become trendy words among European nationalists of different stripes. They are even used as synonyms along with their new derivatives “sovereignists” and “identitarians” respectively. Many of these verbal derivatives did not even exist in the English language until recently. In the German language these words, which are of Latin origin, have also come into use recently—words such as der Patriot, der Identitäre and der Souveränist, although they often sound odd and un-German to traditional German ears. These replacement words for the old word “nationalist” owe their birth to two political and historical factors: 1) The German language, shortly after World War II, was subjected to a profound cleansing process carried out by the occupying Allied forces and their re-educational apparatchiks, the latter mostly recruited among academics of the newly re-established, Jewish-dominated Marxist Frankfurt school. Their task was to impose on the German people a new political vocabulary, a new way of communication — and a new identity. 2) The old German words associated with the notion of patriotism such as the German adjective “völkisch” or the compound noun “Volksgenosse,” which stands for a fellow patriot, or the unique German word “artfremd,” which means an alien of different biological stock, or the word “gleichrassig,” meaning someone of the same racial stock, vanished overnight in 1945. Ever since they have become crimethink words banned from public discourse. Henceforth many modern German and other European nationalists, burdened by the stigma of the National-Socialist past, prefer to use imported words such as “patriots” or “identitarians” instead, well aware that these new words can provide them with a modicum of political legitimacy in the mainstream media.
The new word “identitiarian” sounds quite romantic and is often used by patriots today all over Europe and America although it is not specific enough. Our identity cannot be unitary; it can have multiple facets. How should we define our identity? In singular or in plural? For example, in my case, which identity comes first and which one comes second? Am I first a Croat or an American? Or a hyphenated Croat-American? Or a European-White-American? On the professional level I can also display triple or quadruple identities; I can first define myself as a writer, as a professor, a translator, or as a political activist. On the religious level, my identity may first be Catholic or agnostic. And finally, there is also my racial identity, which is being dismissed as a social construct today by the majority of System-friendly scholars and the mainstream media. There are, fortunately, a few prominent scholars today who consider race the first marker of man’s identity. Even a half-blind man when stepping out of this London hotel can notice swarms of individuals of different races milling around.
So which identity should I pick first in my case? Should it be based on my racial, national, political, religious, sexual, or professional preferences?
Finally, how do other people define my self-described identity or my self-proclaimed patriotism—especially if these people are not of my ingroup or of my race? They may often be more aware of my Otherness and my Whiteness and my Uniqueness than I am. I may wish them to become my friends; I may go to great lengths to preach their integration in my home country, but it is likely that they may view me as their enemy. They may be exemplary citizens and my good neighbors; but if there is a state of emergency or a shift in demographic trends or political culture, they may turn into my mortal enemies.
Let us also look at the notion of sovereignty, a notion that is closely allied with the notion of identity and patriotism. For instance many English patriots or sovereignists, and rightfully so, do not like the Brussels bureaucracy poking its nose into the British affairs. At the same time however, they consider it right and natural that London should have the last word in defining the Irish, Scottish or Welsh identity or sovereignty. On the one hand, English sovereignists are justifiably angry about their endangered identity in the European Union. Fair enough. On the other hand, they do not object to the assimilation of Welsh or Irish patriots in Great Britishness.
A better example is the new-born state of Croatia. Many Croat patriots—or let’s call them Croat nationalists—get upset when some high EU politician pontificates about the possibility of the reconstitution of the third Yugoslav state. Given the bitter experience many Croat patriots had in former multiethnic Yugoslavia, it is comprehensible why they are keen to uphold Croat identity and Croat state sovereignty at all cost. Yet many of those same Croat sovereignists or nationalists, while rejecting the notion of the revival of the Yugoslav state, gladly accept Brussels decrees and ukases and don’t seem to be too much worried that more than half of Croatia‘s legislative provisions are being dictated from Brussels with little Croatian input. This was not the case even in communist Yugoslavia, where Croatian communists enjoyed some margin of maneuvering when introducing their local legislation in the federal legal provisions of the now defunct state of Yugoslavia.
We could enumerate more examples. The French sovereignists are a case in point; they must be applauded for upholding their Frenchness and for being hostile to the Brussels bureaucracy. Yet on a sub-national level, French “souverainistes”—as they call themselves—are not too eager to talk about Catalan, Corsican, Basque, Alsatian or Breton souverainistes; nor are they willing to endorse their claims to separate statehood. In other words, they regard local identities of these peoples in France as a secondary love affair which, if going too far, may threaten the sovereignty of France. Let us face it; local European patriots waging wars against bigger European imperial patriots have cost Europeans millions of their lives over the last millennium.
On the external and institutional level, the use or misuse of the notion of identity is getting even more complicated. European sovereignists made a good breakthrough during the recent European Parliament elections, particularly Le Rasseblement National in France and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium. However, let’s face the fact that we seldom discuss: The liberal parliamentarian system, since the end of World War II ceaselessly claims to be the best of all worlds. Yet in reality this is hardly the case. Overall, all parties, all over the European political landscape, without any exception, once in office have a great difficulty in implementing their program—assuming that they really intend to do so in the first place. As far as the possible entry of nationalist parties into their respective governments is concerned, this is almost an impossible task. We have seen over the last seventy years various legal barriers erected to keep nationalist parties out of power. We have seen various smear campaigns conducted against them by the media, and various “cordons sanitaires” put in place by the System in order to keep them off the main political stage. If we add to that the factor of globalism and the omnipotence of various supranational bodies such as the WTO, the IMF, the EU, the UN, and the power of global financial markets, we must ask ourselves how and to what extent are our claims to our sovereignty, our identity and our patriotism viable or feasible at all.
The good news is that even the hard-core advocates of the System must admit that their much-praised liberal parliamentarian democracy is facing today a very serious crisis of legitimacy, which can best be observed in the increasing mistrust of the electorate toward the ruling elites and toward the mainstream media. A long time ago, the antiliberal scholar Carl Schmitt predicted that within a representative, indirect democracy, such as we know it today in the UK and elsewhere in the West, the ruling class is bound to become more and more estranged from its electorate. This raises anew the question whether this liberal best-of-all-possible worlds, as the media and our politicians have been telling us every day since the end of the World War II, is indeed any better than its defunct communist alternative.
Before we start delivering some positive and affirmative suggestions as to how to strengthen our patriotism, we must first grasp the main political issue: how to distinguish between our political enemy and our political friend. It has become very popular among European patriots to resort to a false identity-building process by looking solely at the negative consequences of non-European migration instead of examining its root causes. Among European patriots of different stripes, it has become a commonplace to blame the religion of Islam and waves of mostly Muslim migrants for the present ills in Europe and America. However, we should be just as concerned about mass arrival of pious Catholic mestizos from Latin America now storming the American border. These newcomers may be practicing the same religion as we do, but they don’t belong to our bio-cultural stock. And in addition, the most vocal advocates of the arrival of non-Europeans are not the proverbial Antifas, or the media, or the ethnic lobbies, or the globalist financial elites, but the powerful Catholic clergy both in the EU and America.
Private—let alone public—slurs against Islam or against Muslim migrants are nonstarters. I do not want to get involved now in theological disputes about the alleged goodness of Christianity versus alleged badness of Islam as many of our friends often do. Such a black vs. white picture of the world is a waste a of time and is bound to backfire. Let us keep in mind that White European Christians have also had their track record of violence, and not just in defending against alien Muslim Arabs and Turkish invaders starting in the eighth century all the way to the eighteenth century. Throughout their history Whites have also waged wars of annihilation between and among themselves—from ancient Troy to modern east Ukraine. Neither should we forget that Christianity, just like Islam, had its place of birth in the Middle East and not in Europe.
Our first objective should be to elect friendly politicians and approach media outlets that may be sympathetic to our cause. In addition, we should also support academics and scholars who have provided us with ample empirical proofs about the failure of multiracial society, but who due to their nonconformist views and civic courage had fallen into public disgrace as a result of the machinations of the System.
Our second task should consist in decriminalizing some of our vocabulary and especially the word “race” and thereby facilitate our discussion about our identity. I can change my language, my culture, my country, and my passport. I can also dismiss my cultural heritage. But my inborn genetic and racial heritage I can never dismiss. My heredity and my biology cannot be shrugged off, and to a considerable extent they will determine my behavior, my political choices, and my social preferences. In the coming years we must decide where we stand. Denying my racial identity will not result in my enemy’s denial of his racial identity.
Dr. Tom Sunic is author of several books.
Further reading:
- Alain de Benoist, Nous et les autres : Problèmatique de l’identité ( 2007)
- Tomislav Sunic, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity (2017)
- Richard Lynn, Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality: An Evolutionary Analysis (2019)
- Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political ( 1932, 1996)
‘… when some high EU politician pontificates about the possibility of the reconstitution of the third Yugoslav state…’
Dr Sunic, I know this remark does not cut to the heart of your excellent argument, but I stalled on it, and I have to ask: Is this EU poli just a mega-fool in that none too bright context, or is there really a ‘third Yugoslavia’ thinking there?
@ Sunic
Interesting talk thank you. I’m a Canadian born from Slovenian/ Croatian parents and it pains me that I have lost my identity. More painful were my parents who never recovered from either the war or from the loss of family relations. Indeed if both of them didn’t live mostly as orphans in a new land. The loss of family Dr. Sunic doesn’t that play an important role in identity politics?
Also a very interesting talk or rant rather about the loss of a stolen Europe go here:
http://thesaker.is/saker-rant-about-a-stolen-europe/
My latest column about Europe has elicited a lot of reactions, more than I expected, and I feel that I have to follow up by answering some of the comments made and by simply sharing with you not so much my thoughts as my feelings about Europe and her plight. Careful here, this will be a angry rant, written with sadness and despair in my heart, and with no regard whatsoever for good manners or political correctness (or spelling and grammar, for that matter)
SYNCHRONIZE
before things turn chaotic.
A good speech about “Role Theory” in sociology.An analysis without practil solutions for the worlwide attack on the cultural values and identities wich endangered by Jewish silly Globalists.
” 1) The German language, shortly after World War II, was subjected to a profound cleansing process carried out by the occupying Allied forces and their re-educational apparatchiks, the latter mostly recruited among academics of the newly re-established, Jewish-dominated Marxist Frankfurt school. ”
My uncle was a pre-WW2 judge before and partly during the Great Leader, Hitler’s, term in office and thereafter
a diplomat in the post WW2, (((Occupation Forces’))) tyrannical regime.
One of my double minors while doing pre-med at McMaster was German Literature. As per request, I was to bring my reading list for the following year to him in Düsseldorf, Unterbach for preview, reading and discussion during my summer work terms.
The re-education process was not just confined to Germany after WW2.
My uncle pointed out, every single book on my list was banned during Hitler’s reign due to their being of a Jewish authorship albeit with German sounding names.
This was happening in Dominion of Cafkada, but rest assured, it was most probably going on throughout not only the entire UK Commonwealth, but in any country/place where Jews were allowed to have a say in matters educational (I.e. “…public…” libraries).
Even when mildly German White Nationalist Publishers of weekly or monthly German News Papers in non-German Nations (again…, Cafkada in this case) began to read and reprint translated articles that I was sending them written by “…self-censured…” academic standard, Jew savvy authors, like Paul Craig Robert’s widely circulated open letter of circa 2009 for example,
the publisher immediately found himself embroiled in nasty threatening confrontations by Jew Lobby groups and eventually buckled under pressure and sold his publication to crypto-Jews.
Immediately thereafter all remotely nationalist sentiments were substituted with diseased, multiculti or Jew Globalist approved of themes.
Jews are extremely quick when “…weeding the garden…” of even the smallest seedling of dissenting thought.
_____________________________________
“So which identity should I pick first in my case? Should it be based on my racial, national, political, religious, sexual, or professional preferences?”
One ought to start with the identity that one has discovered for himself to be most relevant.
For example, as my first identity, I am in fact a Spiritual Being encapsulated within a Body of the Flesh.
Thereafter, most of rest of Prof. Sunic’s identities apply in the order of their most relevant import.
Prof. Sunic’s question is most important to consider, for self-identification as a Spiritual Enlightened Being imparts the ability to radically expands one’s faculties over any non-Spiritually Enlightened being.
The sooner that an individual “…Realizes…” this “…Truth…”,
the sooner that this same individual can apply this Experience to vastly accelerate, differentiate and navigate one’s way through the (((murky, shark-infested swamp))) of life.
___
RE: Prof. Sunic’s lengthy reflection upon the different examples of contradictory positions taken among the Croat, French, etc…:
Under the umbrella of a Spiritually Enlightened Mind, there is an intrinsic understanding that most of the above speech-cited positions are not mutually exclusive and that significant overlap of each Self-identity with the other is in fact part of the nature of life.
As such, Croats for example, in light of the negative experiences under (((Communism))), may tolerate European interference because they wish to be seen and partake of the advantages of being equal members of a larger (especially Western) European Ethno-State.
Croats may largely be unaware of the nefarious Jew underpinnings of the present (((EU))) and the (literally dual, both solemn and deadly) “…grave…” directions that (((Brussels))) has in store for them…,
especially since emerging out of the relative bloody impoverishment under Jew-proxy controlled Communism.
Similar, but much more so than the Croat example, is the case of the Vietnamese, (((Hotel))) Wage-Surf, House Keeper here in Iceland who is more than happy to have his Occupational Rights trampled upon by his new (((oligopolist))) employers…, given that his new wage is still one hundred times greater than during his past Slave Labour existence in impoverished Vietnam.
Little does the Vietnamese, carrot-chasing worker realize the much more brutal and repressive future, than was the case during the Vietnam Conflict, that will be in store for his grand-children should the Jew World Order ever come to pass.
Out of the proverbial Vietnamese frying pan,
through the relatively fresh air, Icelandic free-fall that
abruptly ends in a red-hot, Jew World Order coal fire.
Spiritual Enlightenment is something that is arguably open to every living Entity that pursues it.
Once Attained, the myriad of confusing choices [ I.e. those espoused by either the (((Catholic Pope or Saudi Sheiks))) ] become comparable to an exponentially profounder relativity that promotes a broader sense of commonality within a corporeal existential framework of difference.
Basically, the dissident Right needs mild-mannered front organizations to convince voters that accelerated leftist control of every thought and action within civil society is a totalitarian barbarism to be avoided at all costs. The message therefore needs to be one of universal individual freedom away from the organs of state repression. The communists used front organizations very successfully to deliver messages of universal brotherhood, peace, love, and fraternity as a cover for their real goal of the total collectivization of society – so successfully in fact that now they feel totally emboldened to declare outright that their goal within the Democratic Party is socialism pure and simple. Anyone on the dissident Right thinking that the West will go from outright leftist control back to European-centered ethnostates in a heartbeat is completely delusional. Ideological purity in the current age is outright silliness. ANY conservative, or even moderate, candidate for any western political office needs to be supported and elected in order to first wrest control of the economy, society, and academia away from leftist totalitarians. Thereafter, anything can be accomplished.
It’s not the Catholics…
Whites around the world need to unite based on what they have in common: Indo-European, Aryan heritage, broadly defined (including white Russians and various white strains of people in the Middle East (e.g., Syria) and Latin America (e.g., Argentina) and Western Civilization. The Great Confrontation taking place now is between the white and the non-white, with Jews manipulating things to the disadvantage of whites. Unity can only develop through communication and dialogue between whites around the world. All other considerations should be set aside (e.g., nationalism, right-vs.-left, ethnic differences among whites, religious differences, etc.) The goal should be the creation of a defensible white homeland or confederation of white homelands without non-whites and Jews.
We must begin by facing the hard fact that we have no support outside of ourselves. Even where things look fairly positive, they are not. For example, persistent Jewish influence in Hungary and Russia. If you speak out too strongly against the Jews in either country, you will be shown the door.
But rather than fight these negative factors directly (which would get us nowhere), we should simply assert our identity and increase our unity, excluding those who are not us. Then let the chips fall where they may. I don’t think we can do more than that.
@ Andrew
Well, looky here a Russian just lost it at a Jew totally and completely lost it and on national TV. Wow!
https://twitter.com/NlK0S/status/1159926828594880512
gotta love it!
What did he say? I couldn’t find the clip.
“Souverainiste” and “identitaire” should have the same meaning as nationalist, but those words are sometimes used as code words. “Identitarian” is used by nationalists who are against race replacement, but afraid to use the word race. That’s why “Generation Identity” is anti-islam: because it is more semitically correct than being pro-white. By contrast, Marine Le Pen is a “sovereignist” who likes to criticize the EU and supports the idea of assimilating the 15 million non-Whites, soon to be 30 million. Saving the white race is not really her priority, but she remains a French centralist.
“French sovereignists / hostile to the Brussels bureaucracy / Yet not too eager to talk about Catalan, Corsican, Basque, Alsatian or Breton souverainistes”
Breton nationalists used to think the EU would give them some protection against the old tradition of French centralism, but it never happened. In the past, there was at least some discussion of the problem of centralism in the French media. The problem has worsened, but the discussion has stopped. I now see that as a Jewish problem.
I think economic centralization could make sense in a small homogeneous egalitarian nation. Everyone would contribute to the development of a national industry in the capital city. Then, the capital city would have to redistribute the benefits to the country as a whole. But what tends to happen in a Jewish-run centralized country, is that the Jews take control of the center, and their message to the rest of the country is that they should drop dead. That was their message to the Yellow Vests. The Jews in Paris also like the idea of regrowing forests where the countryside used to be, and importing more migrants.
I think we need a lot of protectionism, economic decentralization, and local production, the opposite of what the EU wants, even though a centralized system may be more effective. But it is impossible to repair the system while the Jews are in control. I guess many French nationalists would agree with my views on decentralization…, until they realize I’m a Breton separatist!
“the most vocal advocates of the arrival of non-Europeans are not the proverbial Antifas, or the media, or the ethnic lobbies, or the globalist financial elites, but the powerful Catholic clergy both in the EU and America”
Leftist Catholics may help with the invasion, but the laws against racism, hate, discrimination, and in favor of censorship, have come from the Jews. Judicial actions against White nationalists are brought by the Jews. The anti-white media are in the hands of the Jews. In France, a favorite trick of Jewish “anti-racist” organizations is to go to night clubs and camping sites with Arab friends and video cameras to film their rejection. Catholics would never do that.
“looking solely at the negative consequences of non-European migration instead of examining its root causes.”
The root cause is Jewish hostility to White people. Leftism is a problem mainly because it is manipulated by the Jewish media, and so are Christian organizations. Besides, in places where White people have not been replaced yet, their culture is still being destroyed by the Jews, with their malicious ideologies, their domination of all institutions, their censorship and stifling of the European spirit.