Destination 1982: Wilmot Robertson’s “Ventilations” Then and Now — Part 1 of 2
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The Context
Absolutely true event — not a joke: My former neighbor, whose parents emigrated from the nation of Georgia to Israel to the United States, introduced me for the first time to his parents on a family visit. I cordially spoke, “Hello, my name is Sigurd, and I live next door.” The mother immediately fired back with the strangest reply in her strong foreign accent, “Have you heard about the new holocaust movie?” “Why no, I haven’t. And what was your name again?” I answered. While geography and family economic status had me surrounded by Jews since early childhood onward, and having developed an understanding of what I might expect in their social behavioral traits, this mother’s opening line finally confirmed my midlife curiosities that these people were wired differently, despite the often-similar skin color. This was my turning point where I scrutinized our social, cultural and political situation with a much keener eye. Human diversity was a fact, and as my worldview evolved along with the internet, I came across a book — a quasi-underground classic — that attempted to spell it all out on behalf of the European-American’s perspective: The Dispossessed Majority, by Wilmot Robertson, published in 1972[1] (henceforth TDM).
President Trump is found on cover of the latest paperback edition of The Dispossessed Majority
Robertson’s magnum opus is an eloquent attempt to bring racial consciousness to the American Majority before it’s too late! As its dust jacket introduction states, “this mind-rousing book hammers home the theme that America has changed, and changed for the worse…the Americans of Northern European descent — the American Majority — have been reduced to second-class status.” It continues, “the sickness of America…is presently racked by a double infection: (1) the moral debility of liberalism [and] (2) the rampant virus of minority racism.” The concluding paragraph here finally describes the American Majority as “the loser in a racial war.”
Wilmot Robertson’s life experiences and extensive education brought him the great clarity to coin the term “The Dispossessed Majority.” But while even the mainstream Fox News channel will carry today’s similar term “The Great Displacement,” they dare not credit the author whose book forewarned Americans and is still available on Amazon (hardcover, $224 and paperback for $35). For Fox News, delving into what they’d consider extreme right-wing literature is far more violent and hateful than tacitly approving the America-funded-and-condoned bombing of defenseless women, children, and non-combatant male civilians in the Middle East (continued by Trump).
As abhorrent and devastating as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had already been by the writing of TDM, this subject comprises but a small chapter within a larger section on “The Foreign Policy Clash.” In fact, after addressing racial dynamics, racial composition, and the predicaments of the Majority, the core substance of its original 538 pages carefully describes the Minority groups within our nation that have interests that conflict with those of the Majority. The factor of assimilability is stressed in Robertson’s writing long before the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion movement celebrated the differences of all groups and sub-groups of peoples apart from the nuclear family which is indigenous to Whites and rare in the rest of the world; nor was the heterogeneity of Whites acknowledge in an effort to paint all Whites as cut from the same (evil) cloth. Chapters V–VIII emphasize Majority-Minority “Clashes” — culturally, politically, economically, and legally, and the book concludes with Prospects and Perspectives. It is here where Robertson’s nine pages titled “Toward a Pax Americana” foreshadows concepts for his final book, “The Ethnostate,” a 1993 utopian journey that he professed would be most beneficial for the civilizations of all races — not just those of European descent — since multi-cultural societies always degenerate into discord.
Social Science Bookshelves Today
TDM has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in over fifty years despite the challenges promoting a book that defends and advances the uniqueness of Northern Europeans and their American descendents. Indeed, the quality of Robertson’s writing and the rationality of his intellect present (in this author’s opinion) the most profound and sagacious appeal ever accomplished on behalf of the White race. TDM would easily have sold millions if abundantly stocked on the Social Science shelves of a Barnes & Noble book store today. This is where you should find this well-thought-out discourse in defense of Western peoples and culture. Robertson’s the book is both exemplary and thorough, but instead of carrying TDM or other like-minded books, instead, this last bastion for brick-and-mortar book sales carries titles like: Rich White Men, by Garrett Neiman, White Fear, by Roland S. Martin, White Fragility, by Robin Diangelo, Nice Racism (How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm), also by Robin Diangelo, Nice White Ladies (The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in it, and How We Can Help Dismantle It) by Jessie Daniels, and of course Critical Race Theory, Fourth Edition, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Today’s mainstream social science topics certainly do not shy away from the topic of “race.” It’s just that “racial justice” today means tipping the shelves over with multi-pronged anti-White attacks from every direction![2]
Typical books found in the “Social Science” section at popular book stores
One book that was also displayed prominently in the Barnes & Noble social science section was Uncomfortable Conversations With A Jew, by Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby, both “New York Times Bestselling Authors.” The back cover of Uncomfortable Conversations brings up a multitude of topics on Jews that I’m confident Wilmot Robertson would loved to have opined on — topics which today’s critical-thinking youth of all races are probably questioning amidst the escalations of Israeli (read: Jewish) deadly aggression (read: war crimes) and student protests against it (read: last vestige of American freedom of speech). We find:
- Is a “Jewish race” a thing?
- Is it true that people don’t believe the Holocaust really happened?
- Are Jewish people white? Do they have access to the privilege that comes with that?
- If Zionism is Jewish people’s right to have a country, what’s the counter?
- Is it possible to be an anti-Zionist and not be antisemitic?[3]
- In whose life am I the oppressor?
- Why are there so many Jewish people in Hollywood?
- Could the Holocaust happen again?
- Is ending antisemitism even possible?
And most relevant to what we see and hear today in everyday news and media:
- Calling things antisemitic is the quickest way to shut down a discussion. But if there are no discussions, how can we ever reach a place of understanding?
Everybody on the book shelves is a “New York Times Bestselling Author.” Wilmot Robertson devoted a chapter in Ventilations to why he didn’t garner this accolade.
If equity or egalitarianism[4] referred to any notion of fairness for all races, this book and the previous social science bestsellers already mentioned would alone justify mainstreaming of TDM. It should sit side by side on the shelf next to Uncomfortable Conversations at Barnes & Noble, since Robertson’s book represents the uncomfortable racial realism issues confronting Majority Americans — whether they know it or not. Instead, TDM receives “The Censorship of Silence.” And a decade after its first edition print, this would become the title of the third chapter in a new Wilmot Robertson book that provided his essays and commentary on TDM: Ventilations.
Anti-White books dominate brick & mortar book store shelves for “Social Science.”
Wilmot’s Observation: More Pronounced Domination = More Separateness
Robertson wrote 45 pages on “The Jews” as a separate chapter within “The Minority Challenge” section of TDM, and it was the longest chapter regarding minorities while representing less than ten percent of the book.[5] After reading the book twice, I found his treatment of Jews and their history to be just a small side story in the overall message and lessons he was trying to convey, and I wondered if the Uncomfortable Conversations authors would even approve TDM on the same shelf as theirs? But for today’s young adults with curiosity on how our government and nation ticks, having no clue as to how a William Ackman[6] can summon up a congressional hearing to confront campus free speech, or how people like him, such as Idan Ofer, Len Blavatnik, or Leslie Wexner, can earn or accumulate vast sums of money and a great deal of power, this TDM chapter instructs us:
To sum up the phenomenon of Jewish affluence, what is happening in the United States today is what has been happening throughout much of Western history. The Jews, finding themselves unrestricted and uncurbed in a land rich in resources and labor, are rapidly monopolizing its wealth. It is almost certainly the same historic process that took place in Visigothic, Arabic and Catholic Spain, in medieval England, France and Germany — and most recently in twentieth-century Germany. Yet no one cares — or dares — to notice it.
He emphasizes that so many people seem to be
concerned about labor monopolies or business cartels, about the influence of the Roman Catholic Church or the military-industrial complex, about the WASP domination of the big corporations or the international Communist conspiracy,
but these same critics are
strangely silent and utterly unconcerned about the activities of an ever more powerful, ever more dominant, supranational ethnocentrism with almost unlimited financial resources at its command.
Here are Robertson’s comments on anti-Semitism — comments that prefigured Uncomfortable Conversations and provide a quite different perspective:
Instead of submitting anti-Semitism to the free play of ideas, instead of making it a topic for debate in which all can join, Jews and their liberal supporters have managed to organize an inquisition in which all acts, writings and even thoughts critical of Jewry are treated as a threat to the moral order of mankind. The Tartuffe[7] of the contemporary era turns out to be the Jewish intellectual who believes passionately in the rights of free speech and peaceful assembly for all, but rejoices when permits are refused for anti-Semitic meetings and rocks crack against the skulls of anti-Semitic speakers.
More than fifty years later we find our U.S. House of Representatives passing an outrageous anti-Semitism bill aimed at preventing criticism of Jews and Israel;[8] and we find that “punching Nazis” has become normalized and society-approved form of violence. Robertson saw it all coming, but then he also understood history. He emphasizes that “Jews seem bent on destroying the very political, economic and social climate that has made their success possible.”
But how does Robertson really feel about Jewish history?
As if in the grip of a lemming-like frenzy, they have been in the forefront of every divisive force of the modern era, from class agitation to minority racism, from the worst capitalistic exploitation to the most brutal collectivism, from blind religious orthodoxy to atheism and psychoanalysis, from total dogmatism to total permissiveness.
The TDM chapter on “The Jews” ends with Robertson admonishing the reader “to transcend, for the first time, the ancient racial infighting by submitting the Jewish problem to reason and full disclosure, not to the harsh and inconclusive solutions of the past.” His appeal is fundamentally moral. But this last paragraph incorporated a pre-condition for this to occur: “When and if a resuscitated American Majority has the strength and the will to put a stop to the Jewish envelopment of America,” he wishes that we learn from, and not repeat history. And with (1) new laws on the near horizon combating anti-Semitism and possibly even “hate speech,” with (2) a newly elected President Donald Trump ostensibly supporting such crackdowns,[9] and with (3) politically-right-leaning citizens resting (all too) comfortably within the Republican Party that now has four more years in control, it remains doubtful that Wilmot Robertson’s reasoning and “full disclosures” will see daylight any time soon.
Most Americans read very little, and very few have heard the term “The Jewish Question” or “The JQ,” and even fewer “The Jewish Problem” despite these societal conflicts having existed for millennia.[10] Mainstream media and academia create the historical, political and cultural narrative that we consume. Most of the Majority haven’t a clue as to how many influential people in America identify as Jews, and so a book like TDM might open the eyes of a typical under-informed American and change his or her worldview, adding both wider and sharper focused lenses.
A Decade after TDM: An Open Discussion on Race and Politics
In 1982 Wilmot Robertson published Ventilations, a short 113-page gem that is no longer available in print. It can, however, be downloaded from colchestercollection.com, the archival work created by a former writer/White advocate from The Occidental Observer, Russell James. I call it a gem because Robertson elucidates so many topics that occupied “the current events” of my teens and early adulthood, giving them a fresh perspective that complements and affirms the significance of TDM as we fall ever more downward in The Decline of the West.[11]
Wilmot Robertson was also the founder and publisher of the magazine Instauration, which presented articles that TDM readers likely found important and insightful. For instance, one issue featured the sensational 1913 Georgia trial of Leo Frank and the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, “Pardoning the Unpardonable.” But it was in a 1982 issue where he finally commented on pro-Spenglerian metaphysical white knight “Francis Parker Yockey and the Politics of Destiny,” and especially regarding his book, Imperium, for it was the definitions of “race” that caused splits between the two camps of right-wing movements supporting America and Western Civilization. Per author Kerry Bolton’s biography on Yockey,[12]
The two types of race theory according to Yockey are ‘horizontal race’ and ‘vertical race’. The first is the race of the ‘spirit’, culture and soul, expounded by the German Idealists, Herder, Goethe, Fichte, et. al. The second is biological and materialistic, measured and tabulated, influenced by Darwin, and introduced to Germany by Haeckel.
Wilmot Robertson’s TDM definitely embraced the vertical race concept, as Bolton also describes as ‘zoological’ race theory. The quotes of the Instauration article provided in Bolton’s book are important if an advocate for “Westernkind and White Wellbeing”[13] wished to learn the history and inner conflicts of the movement resisting Majority dispossession:
In the six years since its existence, Instauration has not once touched upon the problem of Francis Parker Yockey. We say problem because it’s hard to know exactly what to make of this mysterious character, who has become a cult figure of certain hermetic elements of the American right. His much touted and much thumbed through Imperium (Noontide Press) is part twentieth-century Book of Revelations, part post-script to Oswald Spengler, part revised and updated edition of Mein Kampf. His suicide or murder in a San Francisco jail makes him a candidate for martyrdom in some future century, provided that in the meantime his writings and his tragic life story have not been scourged out of the West’s consciousness.
Towards the end of the article, Robertson sheds his positive viewpoint on Yockey:
[Yockey’s] great selling point is that amid all the despondency of the present age, he is one of the very few thinkers who offers us Balm in Gilead, some shreds of hope, some possibility of white resurgence. Expectedly, it is not the deep space of the cosmos that Yockey is interested in, but the equally deep and equally mysterious space of the inner man. This is all to the good because in these days anyone who writes seriously and earnestly about the soul, about the Western soul, strikes a bell that reverberates most pleasantly up and down our increasingly spineless spines.
So more power to Yockey. He is still alive and kicking in the hearts of a sizeable number of true believers. Despite his shortcomings, his life and his works are proof that no matter how far they get us down, we will never be out.[14]
Yockey was profoundly spiritual, Robertson was rational and more pragmatic. They also viewed Europeans differently, Yockey being the ultimate ‘inclusive’ proponent of all Europeans — including Western Russians — while Robertson favoring Nordics. And while they may have viewed race differently, they did share an updated view on the Soviet Union, particularly regarding the decline of Jewish power and influence in that communist state. Apparently, this topic tended to divide the right-wing movement from the 1940s onward, and Ventilations presents this topic as its first chapter, “The Kremlin and the Jews.” Given a similar divide in Majority opinions today on Russia and Putin, good or evil, Robertson’s 1982 commentary (contesting that the U.S.S.R. was under Jewish control by that time) provides amusing quips and forgotten events:
Jews themselves have reason to be suspicious about Russian racial policies when the foremost Jewish world organizations, which used to sing the praises of Russia openly or in secret, now issue frequent press releases accusing the Soviet government of anti-Semitism. When the United States Senate rejects most-favorite nation treatment for Russian trade, when Jewish publishers and reviewers in America heavily promote books by Khrushchev, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, and the dissident Yugoslav Communist, Djilas, pointing out instance after instance of Stalin’s anti-Semitic speeches and cheer Yasser Arafat, when Russia gives or sells huge amounts of arms to Syria, Iraq, and Libya, Israel’s bitterest enemies, when Jews flee the Soviet Union by hundreds of thousands, it is difficult for anyone to say that Russia is a pro-Jewish country.
With all of the recent American uproar against Russia and our arming of Ukraine, Robertson’s view predicts the 2024 victory for Donald Trump and his campaign promises:
If we want to protect ourselves from the Russians — and we should never close our eyes to the possibility of a sudden Russian assault on Western Europe or on the oil fields of the Middle East — we should clean up our domestic chaos, which is an open invitation to Soviet aggression everywhere.” (my emphasis)
When millions of Americans go out after dark without running the risk of being mugged, raped or murdered by bands of roving young blacks who haven’t the faintest notion of what a Communist is or what communism stands for, it hardly seems logical for the Birch Society, William F. Buckley, Jr. and other assorted ‘patriots’ to harp on the Red Menace while carefully avoiding the far greater domestic menace.
Fast forward to today and we hear Republican pundits constantly harping on “Chinese Communists” while BLM/AntiFa rioters have recently burned our cities down ostensibly with federal agency immunity. Russia recently failed to support the Syrian government against Israeli and U.S. intervention, but in 1982, Robertson wished to straighten out the geo-political beliefs of right wingers:
When Jewish propaganda mills are cranking out anti-Russian articles day and night, it is some-what mind-boggling for our rock-ribbed anti-Semites to inform us that Jews and Russians are joining in a secret alliance. These fossilized patriots cannot seem to get it out of their heads that Jewish support for world revolution has now been withdrawn from the Russians and funneled into the New Left, the Maoists, the Zionists, militant liberalism and noisy Kosher conservatism.
[1] The Dispossessed Majority, Howard Allen Enterprises, Cape Canaveral, FL, 1972. Wilmot Robertson was the pen name of John Humphrey Ireland (1915–2005), who studied at Yale, served in the Army during WWII, studied Physics at U.C. Berkeley, started a small scientific company, and had a successful career in journalism and advertising. Obviously, he was an intelligent man whose written words on racial matters could not be easily dismissed as simply “bigoted racism” (as leftists and mainstream conformists would describe), but rather an intellectual counter-argument that had to be censored by The System.
[2] It does appear, though, that Wilmot Robertson’s TDM might be purchased online in the new edition paperback from the https://www.barnesandnoble.com/. On searching availability of this paperback, however, this author’s effort yielded nothing. It certainly wasn’t available on store shelves.
[3] Uncomfortable Conversations With A Jew uses the spelling “antisemitism” instead of the more commonly presented “anti-Semitism” on the book’s back cover.
[4] Robertson’s TDM frequently refers, instead, to ‘equalitarianism’.
[5] For comparison, Robertson wrote 25 pages on “The Negroes” in “The Minority Challenge” section.
[6] https://www.thenation.com/article/society/william-ackman-harvard-donor/
[7] Tartuffe, or The Impostor, or The Hypocrite, was a French theatrical play (by Molière) first performed in 1664 that included a character with the same name. The word Tartuffe now is used to mean a hypocrite who gives a false impression of caring for what is virtuous.
[8] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6090
[9] See CNN’s story: “Trump Vows to ‘Remove the Jew Haters’…”, https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/08/politics/trump-remove-jew-haters-october-7-event/index.html
[10] But when Americans do read non-fiction, they do flock to the social science section of the book store in search for answers to the crazy world we are living in.
[11] The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler, original publications: Volume 1 (1918), Volume 2 (1922), available by Arktos Media Ltd (2021)
[12] Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey, Kerry Bolton (Arktos Media Ltd., 2018), https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38741770-yockey
[13] Jason Kohne, Go Free: A Guide To Aligning With The Archetype of Westernkind, (2017)
[14] Yockey, A Fascist Odyssey, Kerry Bolton, p. 502 (Resurrection)