Joseph F. Healey has pointed out that White ethnic identities are evolving into new shapes and forms, merging the various “hyphenated” ethnic identities into a single, generalized “European American” identity based on race and a common history of immigration and assimilation. In the light of the fact that virtually every minority group has generated a protest movement (Black Power, Red Power, Chicanismo, etc.), proclaiming a recommitment to its own heritage and to the authenticity of its own culture, European Americans also need some space to express their ethnic heritage.  St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, and Leif Erikson Day are festive occasions that White Americans should seize in order to honor their rich history and heritage.

In all societies with a history of migrations, the question “who came first?” becomes important. Centuries before Columbus, the Icelanders answered this question by meticulously recording the names and deeds of the pioneers for posterity, thus inspiring George W. Bush to conclude that on Leif Erikson Day,

we remember that son of Iceland and grandson of Norway for his journey to North America, and we celebrate the influential role Nordic Americans have played in our society. Leif Erikson was among the world’s greatest and most daring explorers. More than 1,000 years ago, he led a crew across the Atlantic to North America. … America is grateful for the many contributions of Nordic Americans, and we continue to draw inspiration from the courage and optimism of the adventurous Leif Erikson.

The discovery of new lands in the West by the Northmen came about in the course of the great Scandinavian exodus of the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries when Vikings “swarmed over all Europe,” conquering kingdoms, founding colonies and empires. In these centuries waterborne Vikings exploded out of their native lands to trade, raid, and settle all the way “from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains.” The main stream of Norsemen took a westerly course, striking Great Britain, Ireland and the Western Isles, and ultimately reached Iceland (in 874a.d.), Greenland (in 985) and North America (in 1000).

Leif Erikson’s father, Erik the Red, was the founder of the first European settlement on Greenland. Tradition reports that he gave the island its name as a marketing strategy designed to disguise its harsh environment and make it attractive to would-be colonists. Erik the Red’s father, Thorvald, left Norway for western Iceland with his family, having been exiled for manslaughter. When Erik was similarly outlawed and exiled from Iceland about 980, he decided to explore the land to the west (Greenland), across 175 miles (280 km) of water. The settlers encountered no other inhabitants, though they explored to the northwest, discovering Disko Island. Of the 25 ships that sailed from Iceland, only 14 ships and 350 colonists are believed to have survived to reach their destination – an area later known as Eystribygd (Eastern Settlement). By the year 1000 there were an estimated 1,000 Scandinavian settlers in the colony, but an epidemic in 1002 considerably reduced the population.

The second of three sons of Erik the Red, Leif Erikson (d. 1025) sailed from Greenland to Norway in the year 999 AD, and was there converted to Christianity by the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason, and Leif “the Lucky” Erikson joined the king’s body-guard. The following year Leif was commissioned by Olaf to urge Christianity upon the Greenland settlers. On returning to Greenland, he proselytized for Christianity and converted his mother, who built the first Christian church in Greenland. By 1053 the Christian church was well enough established to warrant inclusion in the Archbishopric of Hamburg–Bremen since Pope Leo IX includes it in a bull dated 6 January 1053, the earliest known reference to Greenland by name.

According to the “Saga of the Greenlanders” in the Flateyjarbók, Leif learned of Vinland from the Icelander Bjarni Herjulfsson, who 14 years earlier had become the first European to sight mainland America when his Greenland-bound ship was blown westward off course. He apparently sailed along the Atlantic coastline of eastern Canada but did not go ashore. In the year 1000 AD a crew of 35 men led by Leif Eriksson set out to find the land sighted by Bjarni. The sagas refer to three territories: Helluland (“Flat-Stone Land”, probably Baffin Island), Markland (“Wood Land”, probably Labrador) and Vinland – usually thought to have been located in the area around the Gulf of St Lawrence, possibly New England or New Brunswick.

In 1003 Leif’s brother Thorvald led an expedition to Vinland and spent two years there. A couple of years later, Thorfinn Karlsefni, encouraged by Thorvald’s reports of grapes growing wild in Vinland, led a colonizing expedition of about 130 people in three ships to Vinland, possibly making their first landfall at Baffin Island. They followed the coastline southward until they reached a heavily wooded region, perhaps some part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and settled there. According to some reports, “there came no snow” in the land which the Wineland explorers had found, indicating that they reached a territory farther south than usually assumed.

Thorfinn Karlsefni’s wife Gudrid (the widow of Leif’s brother Thorstein) gave birth to their son, Snorri (born c. 1005) – the first European in recorded history to be born on the North American mainland. By the time they had stayed there three years, the colonists’ trade with the local Native Americans had turned to warfare, and so the colonists returned to Greenland.

A few years later, Leif Erikson’s sister Freydis led an expedition to Vinland and soon afterward returned to Greenland. She is portrayed in the Saga literature as a personality steeled with a willpower and a strength of character that makes Wagner’s Walkyries look like a group of extras. Pursued and encircled by hostile Natives (“Skraelings”) in Vinland, Freydis (who was pregnant) took up the sword of a slain Viking to defend herself: “she stripped down her shift, and slapped her breast with the naked sword. At this the Skrellings were terrified and ran down to their boats, and rowed away.”

The Norsemen’s name for the land they discovered, Vinland, means “Wine Land.” A German crewman on board Leif Erikson’s ship is said to have been the first to associate the new land with wine:

In the beginning Tyrker spoke for some time in German, rolling his eyes, and grinning, and they could not understand him; but after a time he addressed them in the Northern tongue: “I did not go much further [than you] and yet I have something of novelty to relate. I have found vines and grapes.” “Is this indeed true, foster-father?” said Leif. “Of a certainty it is true,” quoth he, “for I was born where there is no lack of either grapes or vines.”

Thorfinn Karlsefni also reported that he found “wine berries” growing there, and these were later interpreted to mean grapes, though the Norsemen referred to any berry as a “wine berry,” and it is probable that they had actually come upon cranberries. The Vinland name entered the literature of continental Europe, almost certainly first in 1075 through the History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen written by Adam von Bremen. Adam mentioned Vinland on the authority of King Sweyn II Estridsen of Denmark, who told of Iceland, Greenland, and other lands of the northern Atlantic known to the Scandinavians. Adam says of King Sweyn:

He [the king of the Danes] spoke also of yet another island of the many found in that ocean [where Greenland lies]. It is called Vinland because vines producing excellent wine grow wild there. That unsown crops also abound on that island we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relation of the Danes. Beyond that island, he said, no habitable land is found in that ocean, but every place beyond it is full of impenetrable ice and intense darkness.

Despite the failure of their efforts to establish a permanent presence in North America, the Norse did make later visits to Vinland to secure materials, and stray finds have turned up in the excavation of native American sites, including a late eleventh-century Norwegian coin found on the central Maine coast (the coin was minted in Norway between 1065 and 1080 during the reign of King Olaf Kyrre). An Icelandic chronicle, Skálholtsannáll (1347), makes reference to a Greenlandship that had been to Markland on a timber-gathering expedition. Timber for shipbuilding was crucial to the Norse as both Iceland and Greenland were largely deforested.

It has been suggested that Christopher Columbus himself spent some time sailing in the North Atlantic, and may well have had knowledge of earlier Norse explorations. His son, Fernando, quotes a note of his father stating: “I sailed in the year 1477, in the month of February, a hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile [Thule, i.e. Iceland], whose northern part is in latitude 73 degrees north and not 63 degrees as some would have it … the season when I was there the sea was not frozen.”

Contrary to popular beliefs, the European world (or the concept of Europe) —with its division of powers, its plurality of small, autonomous and competing nation states linked by a common history, religion and elite language (Latin), maintaining a sophisticated but unstable order of power balance — is to a large extent a medieval creation. Historians like Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre pointed out that “Europe arose when the Roman Empire crumbled”, and that “Europe became a possibility once the Empire disintegrated.”

Medieval Expansion: The Discovery of Vinland and the Birth of Europe

The medieval expansion of European “Lebensraum” can be seen in Viking colonization of the islands of the North Atlantic, even establishing footholds in the New World, in their Norman offshoot’s march eastward to create Western European states in the eastern Mediterranean, and in the settlement of Frankish (German) and Dutch colonists in Eastern Europe that gathered momentum from the eleventh century onwards. In this period, the northern and western isles of Britain, northern Scotland, and the North Atlantic isles (the so-called insular Viking zone) became part of what Peter Heather has called “a Scandinavian commonwealth.”

Christian Krogh (1893): Leif Erikson sights land in America

During the Viking Age (roughly 800–1100), the Vikings played a decisive role in the development of much of Western and Eastern Europe. War was a means of social engineering in a world that lacked rigid social hierarchies. It was, in the words of Clifford R. Backman, a brutal sort of meritocracy. In the long run, this meant that the Germanic groups were led by men with talents for ferocity and ambition.

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The Vikings attacked France 214 times; Great Britain and Ireland, 94 times; Spain, 9 times; Portugal, Morocco, Italy and Turkey, 6 times; and the Germanic lands, including the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, 34 times. The geographical range of waterborne Viking activity was unprecedented, as John Haywood points out:

In the east the Vikings sailed down the great rivers of Russia to cross the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to attack Constantinople and the Abbasid Caliphate. Vikings settled extensively in the British Isles, Normandy and, to a lesser extent, in Russia but they also pushed the limits of the known world, crossing the North Atlantic to settle in the uninhabited Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland and to discover, but fail to settle, North America. Viking traders and hunters extended the limits of the known world even further, sailing far into the Arctic waters of the White Sea and exploring the west coast of Greenland as far north as Melville Bay in search of walrus ivory and hides.

The Viking expansion was all about ships, whose expense posed considerable limitations in terms of scale and access. Moving by land, as Heather points out, “early medieval populations could hope to manage maybe forty kilometers a day. Viking sailing ships, however, could cover four times that distance or more in twenty-four hours.”

Access to the relevant mode of transport — ships — was of critical importance to the Vikings, and ships were expensive. It was for this reason that colonization of the North Atlantic was led by aristocrats: Only they could afford the necessary ships.

Viking Longship

As buoyant and flexible as a longship, but a good deal broader, the so-calledknorr carried twenty tons and fifteen to twenty people, and with a good wind and a friendly sea it could sail at six knots, a respectable pace as recently as the Napoleonic Wars.

Viking Knoor

These vessels could carry horses, so that once they were beached the warriors could mount and ride across the countryside raiding. The vessels could also be transported across land on rollers, then put back into the water at a suitable point to continue on their journey. As Backman points out, a fully loaded Viking warship could sail in as little as four feet of water: “This made it possible to strike with lightning speed far inland, without warning, and then disappear just as quickly.”  In this way the Vikings were able to cross the Russian countryside, hauling their ships overland between rivers and across watersheds. F. J. Byrnenotes:

Ship-building was the craft that gave the Vikings their terrifying power and enabled them to span a quarter of the globe with an ease unparalleled until modern times. … The long sea-voyages, and especially the transatlantic explorations, were made not in the famous longship (langskipr) but in the rounder merchant vessel (knorr, whence Irish cnairr), and mainly by sail. … [I]t is estimated that the larger Viking ships carried crews of forty or sixty men, while later, in the eleventh century, royal ships — such as those of Cnút, or the Great Serpent of Olaf Tryggvason — held a hundred men.

The Viking ships provided models for imitation elsewhere, as in the case of Alfred the Great’s langscipu — sometimes described as the first attempt to establish a Royal Navy. The skalds of King Cnut — who built a North Sea empire stretching from Dublin, via Scotland and Scandinavia, to the Baltic — advertised their prince’s ships as a symbol of power, a technological advance as revolutionary in the first decades of the eleventh century as ‘dreadnoughts’ were in the opening years of the twentieth.

Obviously, the marine technology that raiding and trading in the Viking Age demanded did not emerge overnight; its foundations lay in the 5th to 7th centuries. In fact, sea-raids out of Scandinavia were not unknown before the Viking age: The Heruls (from Jutland) raided Frisia in a.d. 287 and Spain in c. 455 and c. 460; the Danes are known to have raided Frisia in c. 528 and c. 570. As noted in Viking Empires:

[A]lthough nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers have tended to regard the ‘Viking Age’ as a distinct period of history, it is arguable that the Viking raids were only the culmination of a much longer period of empire-building among the Germanic tribes that inhabited the Scandinavian peninsula, a process that found its beginnings at the start of the first millennium in what is now known as the Roman Iron Age. The beginning of this process was the re-alignment of military strategy that took place in the Roman Empire as a consequence of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in AD 9.

Throughout the centuries before the Viking expansion — the emigrants from Scandinavia included Goths, Lombards, Vandals, Burgundians, Cimbri, and Anglo-Saxons. The Vikings, thus, were merely the last of a long succession of Germanic emigrants. To the 6th-century Gothic historian Jordanes, Scandinavia was the officina gentium — the “womb” or cradle of the Germanic peoples of the Völkerwanderung.

Over the long run, through the interplay of competition and technological change, war and preparation for war produced the major components of European states. In the Middle Ages, a series of inventions started to make an impact on European society. The Germans acquired or perfected all sorts of metalworking techniques which were remarkable for their ingenuity and efficiency, producing special steel for the cutting edge of swords or battle-axes which was, according to Lucien Musset, unequalled until the 19^th century and infinitely superior to that which the imperial arms factories were producing during the Later Roman Empire.

By the time of Leif Erikson’s explorations in North America — at the turn of the second millennium (1000 a.d.) — the bulk of the “cultural DNA-structure” of Western civilization was taking shape: Latin Christendom centered around the Catholic Church (“the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire”), science (embryonic universities), representative government (parliaments), the rule of law, a monogamous family structure based on the nuclear family, nation states and autonomous towns, citizenship rights etc.

Medieval Europe, thus, became an alloy of the classical, Greco-Roman heritage, Germanic laws and customs, together with elements from the Judeo-Christian tradition. As Heather points out, “Europe finally took on something of the shape that it has broadly retained down to the present: a network of not entirely dissimilar and culturally interconnected political societies clustering at the western end of the great Eurasian landmass.”

From the ranks of the Viking-descended Normans came, as J. R. S. Phillips points out, “the steady supply of highly trained mounted warriors who helped to guarantee European freedom from outside attack, and who were to play a major part in successful European expansion and military superiority overseas, in much the same way as ships armed with cannon were to do in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

Alain Erlande-Brandenburg points out that after the treaty of St-Clair-sur-Eptein 911, which granted to the Northmen a territory later known as Normandy, “the destroyers became builders, founding an advanced national state before going on to conquer other lands in southern Italy and England.” In fact, the origins of the English nation state itself can be traced back to the crisis of the Viking invasions.Preparation for large-scale war built up an infrastructure of taxation, supply, and administration that required maintenance. European national states united substantial military, extractive, administrative, and sometimes even distributive and productive organizations in a relatively coordinated central structure (see here and here). As Leonard Dudley points out,

[the Normans] were at the forefront in northern Europe in introducing a monetary economy.  Bishops and secular lords financed the construction of new towns with the revenues of tolls levied on trade. … The Normans were also innovators in military techniques. … After a half millennium of declining skills in architecture, economic organization and warfare, Normandy in the eleventh century was suddenly at the forefront of a technological renaissance.

The Norman Conquest opened England to the ethos of chivalry — derived from “cheval” (French for horse) and often associated with important changes in the rules and conduct of war.  Elements of that famous ethos — as Michael P. Speidel points out – can be traced back to ancient times:

The ideal of winning in a fair fight, going back to the second millennium BC and known to Homer, was still held by Emperor Julian in the fourth century AD. Germanic armies, in this spirit, were ready to settle beforehand on a time and place for battle. Vandal warriors followed the same ideal when in the decisive battle at Tricamarum in AD 533 they fought only with their swords. Maurice, around AD 600, said that Franks, Lombards, and other blond peoples scorn dirty tricks. The ideal of fairness in battle, so as to show one’s true strength, also guided Beowulf in his fight with Grendel, and later still the English in the battle of Maldon.

The Normans also inspired the evolution of administrative institutions which were the precursors of the bureaucratic machinery of the modern state. The German sociologist Max Weber emphasized the military basis of democratization, citizenship and modernization (e.g. the hoplites of antiquity, the guild army of the middle ages,  the lowering of the voting age in the US during the Vietnam War): “Military discipline meant the triumph of democracy because the community wished and was compelled to secure the cooperation of the non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms political power, into their hands.”  Marjorie Chibnall points out the warlike character of Normanitas:

The chronicles which describe the lives of the dukes of Normandyare dominated by two themes: their success in war, and their benefactions to the Church.  A subsidiary theme is their firm enforcement of just laws; however ruthless, they are never described as tyrants in the Norman chronicles. Warfare has been aptly called the national industry of the Normans, and it was as fighting men that they were most praised by their fellow-countrymen and remembered, with admiration as well as hatred, by their enemies.

Duke William II of Normandy, according to Dudley, may have enabled the West to cross a critical-mass threshold: “Within a century of William’s death, the basic characteristics of Western civilization — standardized media and non-standardized messages — had been established.  The rapid diffusion of information across a great mass of population made possible the ceaseless innovation that would henceforth characterize the West. While China, India and the Middle East were suffering from wave after wave of invasions, Western Europe became an impregnable fortress. Gradually it was developing the technologies that would allow it to achieve world dominance.”

The earlier vertical structure of command, with the ruler on top and his subjects below — carried over from the Roman Empire to that of Charlemagne — collapsed as local rulers were able to replicate the system for storage and retrieval of written information previously accessible only to an emperor. As Dudley points out: “With the Carolingian ruler’s monopoly on property rights broken and political power distributed across decentralized networks linked by a standardized communications medium, the stage was set for Western Europe’s great leap forward.”

The development of a standardized medium for written and spoken communication across Western Europe enabled competition among small, independent states. At the same time, the new communications technology permitted the formation of cultural institutions that spread across political boundaries. As Dudley points out,

There thus appeared simultaneously the two conditions necessary for rapid innovation: first, the incentive to do things better, in order to stay ahead of competitors; and second, the ingredients for doing so, namely, easy access to the stock of information accumulated in the past.  … [The Norman Conquest] resulted in the unhindered diffusion of a new communications technology that permitted accelerated innovation and economic growth. The ultimate beneficiaries were not just the English but rather the whole of Latin Christendom. The West had now attained a critical mass that would allow it to compete with the established civilizations of Eastern Europe and Asia. Over the long term, the Norman Conquest was perhaps the principal influence on the formation of the modern English language.

The Anglo-Saxon clergyman Alcuin brought together the best existing practices to develop a standardized procedure for preserving information, thus reducing information storage costs. As Dudley points out, it is no coincidence that the Times Roman typeface is a direct descendant of the Caroline Miniscule: “The use … of titles, periods, capitalized initial letters, paragraphs, word separation and chapter breaks replicates the structure standardized by the ninth-century monks who prepared the Tours Bibles.” From a technological point of view, Medieval Europe — with its waterwheels, sawmills, flour mills and hammer mills — became the first great civilization not to be run primarily by human muscle power.

It has been suggested that the Icelandic colony — from which the Vinlandexplorers emerged – was “an interesting forerunner of the American republic, having a prosperous population living under a republican government, and maintaining an independent national spirit for nearly four centuries.” The western world’s first parliament, called the Althing, was established in Iceland. It has convened every year without exception since 930 AD.  Without stretching it too far, Norse Vinland and Greenland, like post-Columbian America, can also be seen as a “frontier society” (in the Turnerian sense) marked by a “dual dynamics of war and peaceful interaction … a greater freedom, feelings of self-reliance, social fluidity … and multiple loyalties”.

George W. Bush certainly got this one right: “I call upon all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs to honor our rich Nordic-American heritage.” Would that American Whites —inspired by the shining examples of their past — could reclaim their courageous ways and pioneer spirit.

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.

I have been reading, with great interest, the articles recently popping up on TOQonline that answer the question, “Why We Write?”  I tend to concur with the assessment that the “most interesting thing about the writers of TOQ isn’t why we write, but why we came to write from the perspective that we have.”

Here I offer my own perspective on why I write (or, rather, why I have been prompted to write and why I wish to continue doing so).  It is my hope that you, the reader, will find my perspective not only interesting, but perhaps of some value also.

The first reason that I write is for the well-being of my children, and, by extension, for the future well-being of their children.  This “well-being,” or “flourishing,” can only occur within a culture created to nourish, support, and protect Whites.

The culture that we presently have is not a good environment for the cultivating of children of European descent.  Indeed, it is poisonous to them.  Our present “culture of critique” has done much to wither the roots of White families.  Not only can they not thrive in its soil, they cannot even grow in it.

Several years ago there was an arresting and informative article entitled, “Invasive Plant Secretes Acid To Kill Nearby Plants And Spread.”

The invasive strain of Phragmites australis, or common reed, believed to have originated in Eurasia, exudes from its roots an acid so toxic that the substance literally disintegrates the structural protein in the roots of neighboring plants, thus toppling the competition.

“Phragmites is taking over the marsh world,” said UP plant biologist Harsh Bais. “It’s a horticultural disaster.”

Bais is an expert on allelopathy, in which one plant produces a chemical to inhibit the growth of another plant. He refers to these plants with the capability to wage chemical warfare as “natural killers.”

Walnut trees, pine trees, ferns and sunflowers are among the plants that release harmful chemicals to prevent other plants from growing too close to them.

However, Phragmites uses this strategy not so much to keep other plants away, but to aggressively conquer them and invade new territory.

The toxin works, Bais said, by targeting tubulin, the structural protein that helps plant roots to maintain their cellular integrity and grow straight in the soil. Within 10 minutes of exposure to the toxin in the lab, the tubulin of a marsh plant under siege starts to disintegrate. Within 20 minutes, the structural material is completely gone.

“When the roots collapse from the acid, the plant loses its integrity and dies,” Bais noted. “It’s like having a building with no foundation‑‑it’s on its way to self‑destruction.”

Indeed, “it’s like having a building with no foundation.”  The foundation to our building, or, if you will, the roots that support the flourishing of White families have been intentionally dissolved; they have been poisoned by the noxious ideas endlessly streaming forth from the mouths and pens of those who have created the culture of critique, with the inevitable result that the plant above can no longer be supported by the roots below.  Thus, our plant withers and dies, and its place and resources are taken over by the invasive species that killed it.

It goes without saying, of course, that the acid that Phragmites exudes does not destroy its own roots. That the culture of critique has destroyed White roots, however, is indisputable.

One root of that culture is Christianity.  For all the real and perceived faults of this religion, one thing that can be said about its moral teachings is that they will strengthen any group that will adhere to them.

Why?  Because races are based on families, and the more children that a family has, and the stronger and healthier those families are, the stronger and healthier the race will be.  I believe that Christianity fulfills these functions admirably.

Religious Christians are the only Whites who are reproducing at above-replacement levels. As Philip Longman notes, “In the United States … fully 47% of people who attend church weekly say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as opposed to only 27% of those who seldom attend church.” Indeed, in general, Muslims, Christians, and Jews who are more religiously fundamentalist have more children: Faith equals fertility.

As always, the future belongs to the fertile.  The problem for Whites is that formerly White societies have been invaded by other races and ethnic groups. White fertility then becomes a critical issue — far more important than if Western societies had remained overwhelmingly White. Quite simply, we are being displaced, and low fertility is a major part of the problem.

The Duggar Family of Tontitown, Arkansas. They are conservative Baptists. From their website: ” Lo children are a heritage of the Lord, the fruit of the womb is his reward.” (Psalm 127)

Christianity encourages familial responsibility:“But if someone does not provide for his own, especially his own family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” (1 Tim. 5:8).  Powerful words, these.

It encourages respect for the husband, and love for the wife (Eph. 5:22-28). Children are to be obedient to their parents (Eph. 6:1) and parents are forbidden to provoke their children to anger (Eph. 6:2).  Sexual promiscuity and perversion are condemned.  Divorce, except for very specific reasons, is condemned.  So is addiction (how many White families, even intelligent ones, have been ruined by divorce, or drug addiction?  The entire “Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll” culture is antithetical to Christianity, and, by the way, to strong White families as well). Work is praised (“If you do not work, you do not eat,”), 2Th. 3:10.

Is there anything in the above that a White person, keen on the survival of his own race, would find objectionable?  Racial strength begins at the family level.  This is, in my opinion, the ground of battle.  If you lose here, you lose at the racial level.  All the books, articles, and pamphlets that you write will be useless.  In order for our race to survive, and flourish, White families need to survive, and flourish.  In Christianity, you have a ready built engine to power the race forward, but this engine has been sabotaged by those who invented the acidic culture that we now have, that is, the “culture of critique.”

This is why many Jews, who ought to praise Christians for their shared morality, instead ruthlessly attack them for it (e.g., feminism; porn; Psychoanalysis; art; music; education; media; anti-authoritarianism; economics; destruction of moral norms; post-modernism; diversity; tolerance; etc.).  Jews rightly perceive this morality to be a threat to their dominance. (They likewise are threatened by Christianity’s theology, but more on that in a different article.)

I also write because I think that my particular White culture (Protestant, Scots-Irish/English) is worthy to be protected.

I have an old picture (circa 1920’s) of my grandpa, who was a Texan, standing on a dusty, Texas road.  He is wearing leather chaps, a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, etc.  He is standing ram-rod straight and sitting on his left shoulder is a pretty woman, smiling.  In his mouth is a pipe, which he is smoking.  He is a handsome man, and there is an admirable air of manliness and confidence emanating from him.

His grandpa had fought for Texas during the Civil War, and had been wounded twice, once with a gunshot and the other with the slash of a sword.

In the 1930’s my grandpa came out to California with his family.  During the depression he boxed to make money, winning every fight that he entered (22), including his last fight in which he broke his hand.

When I was growing up my father had the Declaration of Independence prominently displayed on an antique desk located in our dining room.  Upon this desk was also situated a balance, which signified Fairness and Justice, two things that are wholly ignored nowadays when talking about the interests of Whites.

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I grew up thriving on the stories of the frontiersmen; mountain-men; cowboys; the heroes of the War of Independence; Andrew Jackson; and the heroes of the Confederacy.  I always knew that these folks were, if only distantly, my kin.

No one ever talked about hating the North, but I always knew who I was, and where I came from, and that we were, quintessentially (at least from our point of view), American.

I write to preserve pride in the White race and to be honest about our achievements, which are many.  I write to preserve my history, and the history of all those admirable men who fought and died for freedom, whether by the pen, or by the sword.

I write because I am a man.  I am not a slave.  I am not going to bow, God willingly, and lie and say that the naked emperor’s clothes are beautiful.

I write because I believe in Truth (yes, “Truth” with a capital “T”).  Races exist. Diversity does not work.  Some races are more intelligent than others.  Some races are more organized than others.  Some races are more violent than others.  Some races are more creative than others.  Jews have been the necessary but not the sufficient cause of our demise.  The sooner that we recognize these truths, the sooner things will get better for Whites.

I do believe in the Gospel, but the Gospel is not going to increase your IQ a standard deviation.  “The poor you will always have with you.”  IQs have consequences!

I write because I want to maintain the way of life that Christian Europeans created in America.  I grew up in a small, overwhelmingly White town in the West. Everybody had a basic understanding of the rules.  There was a great deal of trust within our society.  Most people were not pathological, or violent.  Most Whites wanted to own a home, settle down, and have a family.

Additionally, we did not have to continually bend over backwards to prove that we were not racists, and then bend over forwards to be screwed by the Minorities’ double-standards.

There was not the constant friction of an aggrieved group trying to get something from us by playing off our guilt.  The atmosphere was not permeated with the bitter acrimony that professional grievance massagers, like the Jews, generate wherever they go.

Some of my fondest memories come from Christmas, and from Christmas music.  I remember going caroling on cold, wintery nights with my Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal friends.  Truly, everyone was of good cheer. No one turned us from their doors.  No neighborhood was “off-limits.”  No Jew gave us a nasty look and then showed us her Holocaust tattoo, reminding us that “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” led to the deaths of six million Jews.  Frankly, is there anything as heart-warming as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” or as moving as “Silent Night” (especially the German version)?

I write because I love Western Civilization.  I love my kind.  I love what Whites have created.  I love their literature–everything from Homer to Sir Walter Scott.  I love their art; their music; their architecture; their engineering prowess; their genetically driven sense of awe, wonder, and curiosity.  I love their science; their energy; their yearning for political freedom; their dependence on logic; their warrior spirit; their sense of honor; their sense of beauty; their sense of justice.

Does anyone honestly believe that these virtues will continue in the forms that Whites have created/molded them when Whites are out of the picture?

Does anyone seriously doubt that Whites (especially White Christians) will not be severely persecuted when they become a minority?  Is it not highly likely that this persecution will be directed by those self-righteous haters, the Jews?  Have not Jews already demonstrated what they are capable of once they have gained power over a hated Christian majority (e.g., Russia, the Ukraine)?

In summary, I write in the hope that in some small way I can provide a defense against the toxins that are killing our roots.  I write for the love of family.  I write for the love of God.  I write for the love of my culture.  I write for the love of my way of life.  I write in the aspiration that some day there can be White towns again filled with White people who trust each other, who work for the common good, who practice their religion freely, and who create societies where the cultivation of their children is of the utmost importance.  In other words, I write for us.

Jack Spence (email him) is a family man, Westerner (with Southern sympathies!), and Protestant.

Originally published in 1886; 2005 edition edited by Darrell W. Conder; available from Occidental Press.

Reviewed by Anthony Hilton

September 29, 2009

Many of us remember getting the message about Social Darwinism during the Franz Boas-dominated second half of the 20th Century. According to Boasians, the behavior of humans is remarkably exempt from biological forces and is instead governed mainly by social constructs. Thus humans can achieve utopian peacefulness and universal altruism by developing the appropriate cultural mores. In contrast, Social Darwinism was the idea that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” so that we might as well go along with it, along with all the other animals, and be as ruthless as we like: kill, kill, kill!! Ruthlessness would be a natural, thoroughly acceptable lifestyle since it is part of what we inherit rather than learn, and it would be unnatural to keep trying to override such built-in tendencies. If we inherited them, they must be adaptive and therefore good.

But the social learning advocates explained to us that just because, say, a tornado, was natural didn’t mean we had to like it. That would be the flawed logic of confounding the empirical with the moral — confusing “what is” with “what should be.” It was also pointed out that much of Darwinian evolution occurs not through bloody battles but via such non-violent processes as mutations for, say, better digestion of milk in adulthood and better immune systems. No “red in tooth and claw” there. “Survival of the fittest” was declared a tautology, meaning only that those organisms that ended up having the most surviving and reproducing offspring were, in modern biology’s jargon, the “fittest” — but only because “fittest” no longer meant that the “fittest” somehow deserved to survive, or might be expected to survive, but only that they in fact did survive.

The book under review, Might Is Right…, (MIR), would certainly be considered by many to be the reductio ad absurdum of 19th-century Social Darwinism. “Ragnar Redbeard” (RR) was evidently greatly enamored of Darwin’s theory of natural selection including sexual selection (in which choice of mate by both males and females influences which genes are propagated) despite the fact that he, like Darwin, could not have known about  genes or modern molecular biology. Nevertheless he manifested an intuitive understanding of one important modern term, “inclusive fitness”: “A man’s family is … part of himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would his own life” (p. 49).

“Ragnar Redbeard” was a pen name, but whoever he was, he was an extremely well-informed, erudite person, albeit with a rather florid literary style which might be off-putting for some readers. I came to find both style and content quite amusing. In fact, it occurred to me more than once that I was reading a satire, one suitably embellished by esoteric Biblical references and Victorian phraseology: a worthy companion to Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.

On the other hand, suppose MIR was not a satire. Then why would anyone in the 21st century look twice at such a book? One reason would be the emergence today of a rethinking of conventional wisdoms: in economics (OK, communism is out, but aren’t there big problems with unregulated market economies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and fractional reserve banking?), in politics (what happened to the Republican Party and “true conservatives”?), human nature (we don’t all have the same IQ?), or race relations (diversity is not a utopia?). Much of this rethinking is taking place on the internet, of course.

Some have even concluded late in their lives that they’ve been the butt of a big ideological con game.  They eventually realize that humans, either individually or in groups, cannot possibly be at all “equal” except in the restricted sense of each person theoretically having one vote (“one idiot, one vote”). And is “democracy” really all that sacred? Instead of living under a dictatorship of one man, we have a dictatorship of a majority manipulated by Hollywood, the mainstream media, and obscure elites. But many of us have given up on utopias and now simply want to obtain or defend a half-decent way of life which we are awake enough now to see is severely threatened if not already lost — given the ubiquity of muggings, rapes, and car-jackings in US cities, the Wall Street shakedowns, the dumbing down of schools. So, having had so many of our assumptions about what is “right” or “good” turned up-side-down, maybe we should re-examine “Social Darwinism” too.

So consider several issues raised in MIR.

Much of MIR focuses, albeit a bit repetitively, on what RR perceives as an unending history of horrible treatment meted out by humans on their enemies and the logical and empirical imperative of relying on “might” in the normal course of human affairs. He probably commits one empirical excess in an especially misanthropic diatribe in Chapter IV: While stating that the story of Jews stealing and murdering Christian infants in order to use their blood for Passover rituals is a myth, he accepts as fact an exceedingly high estimate of the frequency of human cannibalism — perhaps understandably given the dearth of reliable anthropological evidence 100 years ago.

Now, the anti-Social Darwinists complain that evolution and natural selection are not always so horribly bloody. Quite right. However, that does not mean that violence is never adaptive. Consider Genghis Khan whose Y chromosome has been found by geneticists to be so widespread across Asia due to the fact that the leaders of the Mongol armies controlled the women in the areas they conquered.  

Actually, RR may be advocating “power” more than bloody battles, thus helpfully broadening the concept of might. No one has to tell us that power is extremely important to human lives, but again, we should pay attention. This issue is at the heart of a recent debate between Eric P. Kaufman and Kevin MacDonald concerning the precipitous decline of the West and of WAS(P) and Northern European dominance of the United States.

RR is quite successful in demonstrating the ubiquity of power relations, and then is surprisingly convincing in his argument that striving for power is not only an essential and inevitable feature of life but is highly desirable as a course of action for any man wanting to make a success of his life (RR seems to be addressing primarily males.)

About equality: one of RR’s main messages is that there is no such thing, in any practical sense, and never will be; the idea of “equal rights” is nonsensical. Instead, people vary in their abilities and other characteristics all over the lot. People have always been and always will be in a state of competition; so that the only thing to do, really, is to strive to compete as well as one can and forget about ever being treated equally. The only way to be treated as one would like is to have the power to enforce such treatment.

An obvious implication for Whites in the West is that anyone happily waiting for other races and ethnies to treat us “equally” or even well, once they take over (very soon) as majorities in the US and Europe, is an illusion. With the votes they will simply run our countries as they see fit and to hell with us.

STOP!! Devout Christians will find the next paragraphs offensive! Read at your own risk!

RR provides an extraordinarily articulate, and to me hilarious, critique of Jesus Christ and Christianity.  Might-makes-right being his number one rule, he has nothing but contempt for Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and celebration of the weak, the poor, the miserable. RR values the courageous, the powerful, the ruthless. Why in the world would any sane person value, desire, or want to emulate what Christ recommended?

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[W]e must either abandon our reason or abandon Christ…All that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies — all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces.… He  praises “the humble” and he curses the proud. He blesses the failures and damns the successful. All that is noble he perverts — all that is atrocious he upholds. He inverts all the natural instincts of mankind and urges us to live artificial lives… he advises his admirers to submit in quietness to every insult, contumely [outrage], indignity; to be slaves, de-facto. … this preacher of all eunuch-virtues — of self-abasement, of passive suffering. (p. 7)

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Anyone who wonders if Christianity is fundamentally a malevolent Jewish stratagem for emasculating goyim will find this treatise exhilarating. Everything within the Christian church seems designed simply to fleece the flock:

The bliss of a sheep! How superlatively delightful? How divinely glorious? And a Jew as the Good Shepard, who leadeth his lambs ‘to green pastures, and quiet resting places, the pleasant waters by.’ … For two thousand years or so, his fleecy flocks have been fattening themselves up with commendable diligence — for the shearing-shed and the butchers-block.” (p. 14)

With RR, not even the “golden rule” goes unscathed — on the grounds that it makes no sense to follow it given that no one else does. Shades of the alternative “Golden Rule”: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

The theme extends to practical politics where “deceitful Ideals are cunningly woven by dexterous political spiders, to capture and exploit swarms of human flies” (p. 18). He follows with a searing analysis of America’s “Declaration of Independence” which he says begins with “an unctuous falsehood, a black, degrading, self-evident lie — a lie which no one could possibly believe but a born fool. With insolent effrontery it brazenly proclaims as ‘a self-evident truth’ that ‘all men are created equal’ and that they are ‘endowed by their Creator’ with certain inalienable rights’” (p. 19).  The subsequent… “democracy” as practiced by Americans is viewed as an elaborate con game, a view that should strike a chord after the recent bank bailouts and the Iraq war.

We must then ask ourselves: Is the extreme altruism advocated by Christianity at all responsible for the West “giving away the farm”? Think about Teddy Kennedy and his Jewish associates who opened up America to immigration from the whole world.

RR’s attack on Christianity and “equality” of course begs the question of alternatives. As a friend recently remarked,

While many people (in our movement and without) sneer at what they see as an emotional crutch for weaklings, the fact remains that the birthrate is closely correlated with a hopeful, optimistic view of life. No society has ever been able to function without a religion. And it is most unlikely that anyone will be able to create a religionless society in the future.

If that is true, and this writer agrees, a major contribution to the survival of our people, the indigenous people of the British Isles and Europe including those who migrated to the Western Hemisphere, would be to develop a religious alternative to Christianity. Such a religion would regard the survival of our people as its primary sacred goal and hopefully would be more consistent with scientific knowledge. It would establish communities of the like-minded of common ethny (as Jews have done). It would develop either new rituals or utilize those imagined as originating in pagan or Druidic times. Perhaps, as a friend suggests, some existing Christian communities, especially those whose main goal is “community,” could be gradually “retro-fitted” along these lines. Keep the harmless features of  Christianity, especially the European cultural details, but throw out or simply ignore everything that RR is making fun of.

What then do we now make of the main issue raised by MIR, the relationship between “what is and what ought”? RR seems to be saying that “what is” (e.g., human ruthlessness) determines directly “what ought.”

First, we should note that evolutionary biologists/psychologists have in recent years argued strongly that our values and morals do originate in aspects of human nature (what is) that evolved biologically. Actually, David Hume pretty much figured this out back in the 18^th century. This would be the first “link” — between brain mechanisms (emotions, motives) that are adaptive and what a person feels is the right thing to do even if the feeling of right is logically distinguishable from what “really” is right.

That distinction is the basis for the “naturalistic fallacy” critique of Social Darwinism. Oliver Curry has well reviewed why this fallacy is, itself, a fallacy: The logical distinction between “is” and “ought” does not detract from the empirical relationship between what is adaptive and what a person normally values.

We must ask, then, if there is anything more important to us than our own survival and that of our close relatives. If there isn’t, then how could we do anything more ethical or morally correct than doing whatever is adaptive for us and ours? For us, whatever is adaptive should be morally correct, no?

But wait! Morally correct for whom? Isn’t there a flaw here in the anti-Social Darwinists’ reasoning? They have in mind a morality that not only applies to everyone on the planet but a morality of which the consequences are beneficial to all of humanity, not just ourselves and relatively close kin. Sounds like a corollary of Christianity! (Unless Jesus intended that his principles apply only to relations among fellow Jews.)

Such a moral principle necessarily stands outside of human evolution in the sense that, according to all the widely accepted theory in evolutionary biology, such a moral principle could not have evolved as an adaptive trait of individuals. A moral principle is certainly not a measurable physical force like gravity, permeating everything. It exists only within a person’s brain.

This does not mean that people could not act according to such principles. But it would mean that doing so would not automatically “feel good” in the same way that helping oneself or helping one’s family feels good. With enough propaganda, of course, nearly anything is possible. But that’s what it is: Propaganda.

This is probably what’s behind the controversy over government-run health care in the US: For most Whites, it doesn’t feel good to support a program where they would pay disproportionately for medical care for the hordes of non-Whites who now populate the country — even if they could be convinced it was good for the country as a whole.

A universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity also runs into problems because of individual differences:

1)    Sociopaths/psychopaths apparently lack normal moral feelings/values. They feel no guilt, so nothing like a universal moral imperative  to help humanity there.

2)    The fact that, say, the desire for revenge is found throughout the world as a human universal, would be consistent with it being adaptive. But individuals will still vary in the strength of that desire which is subject to the natural selection common to all biological variables.

Finally, a universal principle of doing what’s best for humanity fails to deal adequately with conflicts of interest. Individuals are often in competition because of different interests: Hunters feel morally justified in shooting a deer to eat. The deer, were he capable of such thought, would feel differently about being shot. No common morality there. Same logic within our species. What seems morally justified to the Hatfields will not be to the McCoys.

So there would not seem to be a universal moral code by which everyone would agree on the same ethical course of action in a particular circumstance. Bye, bye Christianity.

So RR may have been onto something in taking his strongly Social Darwinist position. His book’s heuristic value lies in the hard-nosed, un-blinking acknowledgement that life is tough; one had better get used to it, get prepared for it early in life, appreciate the warriors among us and never go “soft” (except, as RR says, around close family members and close friends!) If you cease being prepared, you’ll get run over by those who are tougher and more ruthless.

MIR is not advocating indiscriminate homicide, since the real focus of the game, evident by the end of the book, is simply “power”, which can be obtained in myriad ways. A further caution would be that what has been adaptive in the past may not be so in the future since relevant selection pressures may change. What is adaptive in one situation may not be so in another.

Long term, the unanticipated consequences may be the most important. Biologically, it might seem adaptive to simply slaughter your enemy. But as Daly and Wilson once suggested, whether one adheres to a policy of “an eye for an eye” or a “massacre” should depend on whether an attempted massacre of one’s enemy seems likely to be total. If they don’t all get killed, the survivors may have a long memory and your own survival and reproduction may suffer.

Here one might reflect on the Nazis’ “final solution” that ended well before completion: The surviving Jews have displayed great energy in obtaining reparations and hunting down escaped Nazis.  The “Empire Strikes Back” is the situation facing the British, as descendents of once conquered peoples have non-violently emigrated to the U.K.  Similarly, Mexicans are subjecting the American Southwest to a “reconquista” by presenting themselves as a useful labor force and congenial nannies.

There is a lesson in MIR, then, for anyone attempting to protect his family or his nation or a collection of allied nations, depending on which level one’s adversary is targeting.  For example, Whites in America and Europe today are generally under threat. The lesson would be to gain power, economic as well as territorial, establish enclaves wherever convenient but eventually, as the late Sam Francis declared, re-conquer the whole of one’s country. A few Christians may balk at this, but encourage them to be hypocrites.

A slogan recently seen on a T-shirt, “Fighting Solves Everything”, may be an oversimplification. But the attitude is a good one. Inculcate it in your children.

MIR is available for only $10.00 from the Occidental Press. Get it for your friends and relatives.

Anthony Hilton (email him) is Assoc. Prof. (retired) in the Psychology Department, Concordia University, Montreal.