“Guillaume Faye was indeed an awakener.”
Pierre-Émile Blairon

Guillaume Faye: Truths and Tributes
Robert Steuckers, Pierre-Émile Blairon, and Pierre Krebs
Arktos, 2020.

Guillaume Faye’s posthumously published Ethnic Apocalypse, or, to give it the original French title Guerre civile raciale (Racial Civil War), was one of my top three reads of 2019, so it was with great interest that I found out that Arktos was set to publish a volume of memories of Faye and reflections on his work. Faye passed away in March 2019, following a battle with lung cancer, and I recall thinking while reading Ethnic Apocalypse that its author seemed set to become one of those figures who make their greatest impact only after their death. Other than brief summaries of Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-catastrophic Age (1999), my primary encounter with Faye before reading Ethnic Apocalypse was a recording of the 2006 AmRen conference, during which David Duke took an opportunity in the middle of a question session following Faye’s speech to make known several historical facts relating to the specific issue of Jewish disloyalty. The footage shows Duke being interrupted and subjected to foul language by Jewish social scientist Michael Hart, apparently the sole malcontent, who then abruptly left the venue. The episode was certainly dramatic, and my sympathies firmly remain with Duke, but the chaos between Duke and Hart unfortunately overshadowed a very sophisticated response from the charismatic Faye that included the memorable line: “The Jews are good tacticians but have bad strategy — they do always too much, too much, too much.”

Faye’s relationship with the Jewish Question was very nuanced and, it must be admitted, at times completely wrongheaded, as illustrated by his handling of the topic in Ethnic Apocalypse which derived heavily from ideas conceived in his La nouvelle question juive (The New Jewish Question), published in 2007. The latter resulted in Faye being denounced at one point as a Zionist but, as I wrote in my 2019 review of the former text, “I firmly believe that Faye is not guilty here of subversion or fear of the Jewish lobby. If I did, I would hesitate to recommend this book. Instead, I see a paralysis-like error in thinking, brought about by a quite understandable reaction to the stark and visible Islamisation of France.”

This was one of my primary takeaway thoughts from that volume — that Faye was a great thinker, with wide interests and aptitudes, who at the end of his life was so gripped by the scale of the Muslim invasion of his beloved country that he could see no other threat, and perceive no other enemies. As such, I had an empathy for Faye, even where I could not agree with him, and I couldn’t help but be impressed with his authorial intensity and bluntness in expression. I was curious enough to start seeking out translations of his essays, particularly those concerning technology, civilization, and the system in which we now live. These have been educational and entertaining. I remained curious about the man behind them, however, and I therefore welcomed this new literary memorial from Arktos, which acts an illuminating, poignant, and unexpectedly tragic guide to Faye and his very considerable body of work.

The volume opens with a short and elegant Foreword by Jared Taylor, who performed the same task for Ethnic Apocalypse. Taylor, who also came relatively late to Faye but who appears to have become very good friends with him around 2003, rightly points out that “an intellectual history of Guillaume Faye is nothing less than an intellectual history of both the New Right and of the far bolder Dissident Right.” From there the text proceeds to a series of essays dominated by four contributions from Robert Steuckers, who knew Faye from the beginning of the latter’s career in the movement, and is able to flesh out a biography of his ideas and activism.

These essays by Steuckers are quite remarkable, and are impressive not only in their handling of the context and origins of Faye’s ideas, but also in the way the personality of Faye is always brought to the fore throughout. These are essays laced with sadness, even anger, however, because, in the perspective of Steuckers, Faye emerges as someone passionate but tragically naive — taken advantage of by organizational superiors. It must be stated that Alain de Benoist does not emerge well at all from this volume, described by Steuckers at various points in the text as lacking sincerity, seeking stardom, pallid, hyper-nervous, “the emblematic epitome of ingratitude,” and a boorish movement ‘pontiff.’” Above all, we see the energetic and talented Faye repeatedly pushed aside and paid minimal wages in order that other stars could shine brighter. The volume is thus a kind of fable for the darker side of movement politics and division that will probably always remain relevant.

But what of Faye? In his first essay, “Faye’s contribution to the ‘New Right’ and a brief history of his ejection,” we join Steuckers in the early 1970s, just as Faye was becoming politically active. Then in his early 20s, Faye “entered the scene virtually alone sometime between the departure of the partisans of the 1968 events and the arrival of the Reaganite ‘yuppies.’” His first involvement was with the ‘Vilfredo Pareto Circle,’ a political studies group loosely attached to, but later absorbed by, G.R.E.C.E. (Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization,” a thinktank that promotes the ideas of the New Right). Faye “was not attached to any branch of the conventional French Right,” nor had he any ties “to any Vichy or collaborationist circles, nor to those of the OAS [Organisation armée secrète, a paramilitary organization formed during the Algerian war] or the ‘Catholic-traditionalist’ movement.” Initially, Faye was not a nationalist in our understanding of the term, but rather a “disciple of Julien Freund, Carl Schmitt, Francois Perroux etc.” Steuckers describes Faye, the intense young political philosopher, as emblematic of a ‘regalian Right’ that “cast upon all events a sovereign and detached eye, which was not, however, devoid of ardour and ‘plastic’ will, sorting out in some way the wheat from the chaff, the political from the impolitic.”

In Steuckers’ eyes, “Faye was truly the driving force behind G.R.E.C.E., the New Right’s main organisation in France during the early 1980s.” He achieved this status through sheer hard work on weak wages, driven by passion and a desire to shock the ‘old Right” out of its comfort zone. Steuckers scathingly contrasts the idealistic Faye with a movement satisfied to “content itself with hastily camouflaging its pro-Vichy attitude, its colonial nationalism, its Parisian lounge-lizard Nazism, its purely material ambitions or its caricatural militarism under a few scholarly references.” Faye was quickly sidelined by the comfortable figures in the hierarchy, but “he never cared much about all those backstage intrigues; to him, what mattered was that texts were being published, and books and brochures spread to the public.” By the late 1970s, Faye’s charisma and intelligence is credited with bringing G.R.E.C.E. into contact with influential new circles, as well as students who “accepted the novelty of his speech and the essential notions it conveyed.”

One of Faye’s primary contributions to G.R.E.C.E. was his editorship of Éléments magazine, during which time he refined many ideas that would become characteristic of his later work: his criticism of the Enlightenment, his critique of Western civilization as something that has evolved into a “system that kills peoples,’ his concept of ‘ethnocmasochism,’ and his vision of technological progress as something that can be harnessed by nationalism rather than as something to be shunned or prevented. (Faye in this regard runs counter to more popular anti-technological positions adopted by Heidegger, Ellul, and Kaczynski.) Steuckers goes so far as to remark that “the glorification of technology and a rejection of archaising nostalgia are truly the main traits of Neo-rightism, i.e., of Fayean neo-rightism.”

Just how correct Faye was in this respect remains to be seen, but it is clear, in this age of increasing surveillance technologies and the mechanization of almost all aspects of life, that the question of technology is only going to become ever more prominent. Much as my own instincts tend to the anti-technological, it’s difficult to understand how one nation or ethnic group can divest itself from technological progress if this means ceding an advantage to other groups who won’t do the same. We may thus be locked into a technological arms race where our only option is to attempt to surpass all rivals in pursuit of what Faye called Archeofuturism.

In so many ways, Faye was a man ahead of his time — a fact that rises to the fore in the volume’s second essay, “Farewell, Guillaume Faye, after forty-four years of common struggle.” At a time when the youngest generation appears to believe it more or less invented shock humor tactics in politics, we gain some insight from this essay on Faye’s outlandish detour into prank comedy as the “Skyman” persona for the Skyrock radio station. This occurred in part due to his declining fortunes in G.R.E.C.E., which was in turn a result of the suppression or sabotage of his work. In one memorable instance, he was more or less forced by his superiors to follow up an intellectual exploration of Heidegger with an unironic piece on, of all things, Atlantis.

Operating on little more than enthusiasm, and lacking formal networking skills, Faye had nothing in place to support his work independently when he was finally ushered out in 1986 by a ‘core nucleus’ that had grown unhappy with his edgier direction and popularity. He then put his charisma and enthusiasm into a ten-year career in producing schoolboy-like sketches, hoaxes and jokes, one of which involved his fooling a substantial number of top-level French politicians by pretending to be on a secret mission from Bill Clinton to select the latter’s own secretary of state for European affairs. Faye played the role to a tee, presumably enjoying himself very much as these venal bureaucrats “jostled one another in a desire to get the job, maligning their own colleagues.”

Faye returned to political activism in 1997 in an interview for the then new magazine Réfléchir et agir. In the interview, Faye advised an intensification of associative action against “anti-European racism,” and when questioned about this in a later interview he trenchantly accused the French Right of engaging too much in infighting instead of pinpointing a common enemy:

The French national Right is undermined by the culture of defeat, petty bosses, gossip: the different groups of Muslims and Leftists can detest one other, but they have each and all the same enemies against whom they unite. Whereas for many people of our ideas, the enemy is at first his own political friend, for simple reasons of jealousy!

A year later, Faye returned to speaking engagements and published Archeofuturism, his response to “the catastrophe of modernity” and an attempt to provide an alternative to traditionalism. Although somewhat welcomed back into the New Right fold in 1998, when he published his edgy The Colonisation of Europe: True Discourse on Immigration and Islam in 2000, Faye attracted considerable hostile media and political attention. A move was apparently then undertaken by de Benoist and others to once against distance themselves from the more radical Faye in order to save face and respectability. One member was even discovered to have sent information on Faye to scores of journalists in an attempt to smear him as a “hothead” and “racist.” Steuckers alleges that de Benoist

proceeded to exclude him from all the bodies that he sponsored and banned his flock from spending time with him and publishing his books. Faye had thus suffered another terrible blow, one from which he would never recover and that would instill unabating despair into the very depths of his heart.

Faye would toil in relative obscurity for several more years until friendships with Americans like Jared Taylor and Sam Dickson, and a new relationship with Arktos Publishing under Daniel Friberg, brought Faye and his ideas into the Anglosphere in a serious way for the first time. Unlike the French scene, “within the vast American movement, no attempt to sabotage his books has ever taken place.” Within the American scene, Faye’s work received generous praise and treatment by websites like American Renaissance and Counter-Currents, and there are 20 essays at the Occidental Observer that touch in some way upon Faye’s writings. Anglosphere academics like Michael O’Meara have also given major attention to Faye, with O’Meara publishing his Guillaume Faye and the Battle of Europe in 2013. Faye’s books have been very well-received in the Anglosphere, as my own review of his last book indicates.

Although the biographical and bibliographical essays by Robert Steuckers form the backbone of Guillaume Faye: Truths & Tributes, I must say that one of my favorite essays in the volume is Pierre-Émile Blairon’s “Guillame Faye, an Awakener of the Twenty-First Century.” The tone is much little lighter than the previous essays, with less focus on the ways in which Faye was wronged, and a greater emphasis on his personal qualities as friend and political adventurer. Blairon recalls meeting Faye in the early days of his own activism and seeing in him “the brilliant spokesperson and inventive theorist for what would later be termed the ‘New Right’.” Blairon continues

I remember that, even back then, he was more than just an intellectual; he also had a sense of theatrics and farce and would delight us with improvised comedy playlets that made us laugh. Now, however, more than forty years later, History has issued its verdict — Guillaume Faye was much more than that.

For Blairon, Faye was “an Awakener:

Awakeners are men who come from an immanent , immutable, and permanent world, that ‘other world’ that lies parallel to ours, arriving here to accomplish a mission. These men have no other concern than to pass on their knowledge and energy; and their entire life ends up being devoted to this transmission. Awakeners appear in critical periods of history, when everything has been turned upside down and all values reversed, and when the situation seems desperate. They give their mission priority over their own person, their personal interest and comfort. Their rule of thumb is the following one: do what you must, without anticipating success.

The essay then moves to a succinct but excellent assessment of the main themes of Faye’s work: the fight against standardization and globalism; Europe as an entity of blood and soil rather than bureaucracy; Ethnomasochism; the convergence of catastrophes as a fundamental aspect of civilizational collapse; archeofuturism and technoscience; and, finally, Islam. For anyone new to Faye’s work, or seeking a refresher on some of the less well-known aspects of it, this volume is thus invaluable.

In addition to two poems by Pierre Krebs, the book significantly benefits from a section titled “Annexes,” which contains direct engagements with specific examples of Faye’s essays and books. The best of these, in my opinion, is Robert Steuckers’ review essay concerning Faye’s System to Kill People. In this work, Faye had argued that, diluted by massification and depersonalization, Western civilization no longer exists as a civilization but rather as a system that is directly hostile to the nationality of peoples and thus “kills” them. This basic idea is central to Faye’s anti-Westernism, which is itself founded on Faye’s general hostility to the Enlightenment. Faye lamented the reduction of our ethnic identities in a way that rendered them “folklorised,” “ornamentalised” and “transformed into a smoke screen that conceals the ‘progress’ of planetary homogenisation; they shall simply be a source of entertainment.” Some 30 or more years after Faye wrote these words, of course, the situation is immeasurably darker than even he predicted, since White identities are no longer even permitted as folklore or entertainment but are rather presented as oppressive and evil.

Faye was clearly, however, a prophetic and perceptive thinker. He foresaw the gradual replacement of genuine political leaders with “regulators,” adding that

the political decisions taken by states are therefore replaced by strategic choices made within the framework of various networks — those of large companies, banking organisations, public or private speculators, etc. All these separate strategies trigger a self-regulation mechanism that allows the System to work towards satisfying its own ends.

While my own tendency is to focus on “known actors,” by which I mean decision-makers and influencers rather than action in the abstract, Faye’s conceptualization of overlapping strategies makes it easier to understand how something like, for example, Jewish influence can seemingly persist and perpetuate “in the open.”

If I could make one minor criticism of this collection of essays, it would simply be that I would have liked to see at least one major essay contributed from the Anglosphere. Truths & Tributes is a translation of a French original, but the English edition may well have benefited from a longer essay from Jared Taylor, and perhaps also from Sam Dickson, who appears to have known Faye quite well and I’m sure could have shared some choice and entertaining anecdotes. I’d also have enjoyed reading a perspective from Daniel Friberg, who appears to have put in considerable work over the years in bringing Faye to English-speaking audiences. Alas, these perhaps can be relayed at a later time, maybe even in a further volume. Certainly, I do not believe we have heard the last word on Faye.

My final thoughts in closing this review are that I believe we could all benefit from adopting the attitude of this lively Frenchman, because even if we might disagree with some of his ideas, there is little doubting the benefits of embracing his contemporary Heraclitism of “innovative mobility.” For Faye, our situation is ever-changing and dynamic, and if we have any hope of meeting that challenge then we too must respond with energy, speed, and even joy, no matter how dark the context. Although his last book was very dark indeed, I hope Faye was able to find some of this joy in his final days. I leave the final word to Pierre Magué:

In a replete and slumbering France, Guillaume Faye was the one to raise the alarm, never worrying about whether or not it was a suitable time to do so, whether he risked interrupting idle chatter and academic speeches. … Such is the characteristic of prophets.

Go to Part 1.

Part II. Solution Considerations

“A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation [i.e., intermixture]. … The enterprise [i.e., separation of the races by the resettlement of the American Black population in a separate country of their own] is a difficult one, but where there is a will there is a way. … Let us be brought to believe it is morally right … and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.” Abraham Lincoln in debate with Stephen Douglas at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857

“To him that will, ways are not wanting.” Seventeenth-century English proverb

A movement is defined more clearly by what it is for than by what it is against. What it is for is a statement of what a movement is, giving its goal, purpose and direction. Unfortunately, we tend to be much more united, and much less divided, in what we are against than in what we are for. That is why some think it unwise to clearly advocate an alternative to what we are against, fearing it will cause division and lose support. Yet a purely negative movement is severely limited in its ability to achieve any positive goal. A position with no vision of an alternative really cannot qualify as a “movement” as it has no goal to move toward. To achieve anything positive, a movement must be able to achieve a sufficient level of unity and agreement in what it is for no less than in what it is against.

Besides fearing loss of support, some avoid a major solution because they think it would be too difficult, or even impossible, to achieve, and believe a minor or incomplete solution would be more attainable. They are mistaken on both counts. On the first, both potential supporters and opponents will want to know the movement’s proposed solution, and to hide it would be to invite a host of assumptions, many erroneous and many of these very unfavorable. So, unless a solution is very bad indeed, it is better to state it clearly and openly. On the second, avoiding a major solution in favor of a minor one will not make success more likely, because the ruling Anti-White-Coalition, with control not only of almost all levels and branches of government, but also of almost all major corporations, educational institutions, and non-governmental activist organizations, would not tolerate the existence of any separate White political entity of any size, and especially one that claimed territorial sovereignty. As the establishment of such an entity of whatever size could only be an exercise of power, a necessary precondition for the establishment of any separate White political unit would be gaining power. That is the only way it can be done. And if power is gained, it can be done on a sufficient scale no less than on an insufficient scale, so it might as well be done right, in the way that will really save and preserve all of the White race that is still capable of being saved.

There are three phases to our solution. The first phase is to gain sufficient White support for the solution. The second phase is to gain the political power needed to implement the solution. The third phase is the actual implementation of the solution. The first phase involves winning the “hearts and minds” of our people for the preservation of our race in sufficient numbers to move forward into the second phase. The numbers required depends on the path to power followed in the second phase. Historically, the clearest path forward in the second phase has been through the electoral process, which depends on winning enough White support in the first phase to prevail electorally. Racial demographic change has made this path ever more difficult, requiring ever larger White majorities, with the long-expected racial tipping point projected to make it effectively impossible sometime around 2040. Over the decades of racial demographic change until 2015 this path has continually narrowed, then for the five years of the Trump candidacy and presidency it seemed to widen again, with an unexpectedly high proportion of White voters supporting at least implicitly pro-White policies, although Trump himself showed no more awareness of the White existential problem than any typical Republican politician. In a 2001 essay I suggested that the GOP adopt a populist and economic nationalist program to broaden its White support, and that if it did so there was a possibility it could be transformed into a pro-White political vehicle, the very thing the Anti-White Coalition fears the most and what a pro-White coalition should see as its best hope.^[12] In 2016 we seemed to take a step in this direction, but with the massive subversion of the electoral process in 2020, this path seems to have been permanently blocked by coordinated systemic fraud on a scale so great that only a major political upheaval could open it again.

Before the election, I was concerned with the harmful effects of a legitimate Democrat victory, with the possible enfranchisement of 20 million or more illegal immigrants and statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. accelerating us over the demographic tipping point and past the electoral point of no return. I did not anticipate, even after the forewarning provided by the Democrat’s increasingly extreme actions of the previous four years, just how far the Anti-White Coalition was prepared to go to ensure that the White populist victory that happened in 2016 would not happen again. Was 2020 the Earl Raab election, the stroke of the long-hanging Damoclean sword, intended to forever block the pro-White electoral path to power? If that path is preempted in the near term by establishment suppression, fraud and skullduggery, or cut off in the longer term by demographic racial change, the other possible paths are much less clear and predictable, with no formal rules or process and no precedent in the American tradition. There can be no comfortable predictability or orderly certainty here, for in this uncharted and potentially lawless terra incognita, we “see through a glass, darkly.” But however uncertain the prospect, if the electoral path is closed to us, we must find another path. If the electoral path is blocked, then, as in the old folk tales and legends, our hero’s journey^[13] must venture into the woods, into the wilds, to find another way, to emerge from our trials reborn stronger and better than ever before. As in the old adage used by Lincoln, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” We must find that way. It is a matter of racial life or death. The continued existence of our kind depends on it. If we have the will to live, to continue in Lincoln’s words, “Let us be brought to believe it is morally right…and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.”

But first we must have the will, which brings us back from the now much less certain second phase to the surer footing of the well-trod paths of the first phase, the winning of the hearts and minds of our people. It is in the first phase that the will to prevail in the second phase and see us through the third phase is forged. This makes it the most decisive phase of our struggle to save our race. If we succeed in the first phase, a majority of Whites will want our solution, and want it enough to find a way to make it so, to implement it and make it a reality, by whatever way necessary. To win those hearts and minds we don’t just need any solution, we need a good one, one our people will see as good and believe is morally right. A sense of moral righteousness is the social glue of White communities and has been a powerful motivating force throughout Western history: A fundamental aspect of the individualism that is unique to Western culture is that group cohesion is based not on kinship but on reputation — most importantly in recent centuries, a moral reputation as capable, honest, trustworthy and fair. Such a solution will be crucial to success in the decisive first phase and must be achieved starting from the present media, educational, and political environment in which a sense of White identity and interests are a sign of moral depravity. However, a sense of the moral imperative of White preservation should not be feared as a negative that will alienate those who are not really serious about supporting White racial preservation, but as a positive that will motivate and inspire those who see the solution as a positive, as a realizable hope for the salvation of our race. Seeing a solution as a positive should remove any temptation to avoid or delay it, to “kick the can down the road” for a later generation to deal with. For two centuries previous generations have avoided the issue and kicked the can down the road, allowing the problem to metastasize into something far greater than what they confronted, and so making the required solution correspondingly more difficult. The time of reckoning is long overdue, and so it falls to those now living to finally undertake the task that will secure the preservation of their race. There are many Augean stables to be cleaned, in governments, academia, the media and the corporate world—each a Herculean labor in itself. The removal of non-Whites by separation will be the cleansing flood of the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to accomplish the far greater part of this task.

Why Should the White Race be Saved?

Does White preservation matter? Is there a reason to care whether or not the White race is destroyed? Knowledge and knowing are very different things than emotions and caring. We can provide the knowledge of White racial dispossession and of possible alternatives. These are matters of objective fact and logic. Providing the emotions — the love, caring and valuing — that would instill in Whites the motivation to want White racial preservation is a very different matter. Emotions and caring, unlike knowledge and knowing, come from something within, the internal wellspring of values and emotions, and can be very resistant to external influence.

The capacity for an emotion or sentiment cannot be given, transmitted or shared. It must already exist in a person for them to be able to experience it. Knowing can have no effect on those who do not, or cannot, care. Many Whites totally lack the ability to value their race or anything connected with it, and they often flatter themselves that their incapacity is evidence of their moral and intellectual superiority. Others, in a distorted aberration of natural feelings and loyalties, actually work for the subjugation and replacement of their own race. On such as these it is best not to waste any effort. But there are those Whites, hopefully far more numerous, who possess a latent though not yet activated capability to care about their race and just need to be given the right reasons to love their race and want it to be preserved. They need to have the right buttons pushed, the buttons that connect their race to things they care about. In this struggle not of knowing, but of caring, it is better to focus our efforts on such as these.

Pushing the right buttons means enlisting the assistance of existing positive emotions in the cause of White preservation, the presumption being that the person does have positive feelings for things that are connected to their race but is not aware of the connection. The task is to identify these things that the person loves, values and cares about that are connected with the White race.

This task is made much more difficult because it is opposed by the dominant anti-White culture which wants the opposite. It does not want connections to be made between the White race and anything of value that could evoke positive emotions. It works to influence public awareness so as to disconnect the White race from anything of value that is part of it, whether its visible phenotype as embodied in its physical traits and beauty, or the vastness of its extended phenotype — the products of the unique individualism of the Western mind: its inventiveness and spirit, as revealed in Western art, music and literature; its technology, engineering, and architecture; its science, discovery, and exploration; its emphasis on education and scholarship, philosophy and representative government. Recent social science research has shown that Westerners are more trusting of strangers and of people in positions of power, but that first- and second-generation immigrants from countries with intensive kinship remain relatively untrusting of strangers, foreigners, and people from other religions; they are less individualistic-independent and more conformist-obedient[1]—traits that are negatively associated with creativity and inventiveness. Further, people from societies with intensive kinship contribute less to group projects, volunteer less, are less likely to donate blood to strangers, are more willing to lie under oath to help a friend or relative, and more likely to hire relatives. “Cultural transmission can perpetuate a clannish psychology for generations, even after clan organizations have vanished.”[2] Whether one supposes that individualist attitudes can be socialized over a period of several centuries[3] or that there is genetic inertia for such attitudes,[4] this suggests that Western societies would be well advised to avoid immigration from societies with intensive kinship and develop  their own racially homogeneous homelands if they want to retain high levels of society-wide trust and other traits making up the individualist ethos.

This rejection of the idea that there is anything of value in Western culture is maintained by a culture that represses awareness of the uniqueness of the West. Valuing the West and its accomplishments is regarded as a “racist” (i.e., pro-White) threat to the new anti-White order of multiracialism. Thus Whites who value the physical beauty of their race often fail to appreciate the connection between that beauty and the race of which it is a part, and without which it would not exist, and so see no inconsistency in supporting, the policies of multiracialism and racial intermixture that are replacing it. During my 1965–67 high school years I was one of those who read as well as looked at the pictures in Playboy magazine. Even at that age I noted the disconnect between the implicitly pro-White values presented in the pictures — which were a clear celebration of White female beauty as visibly embodied in the models — and the anti-White editorial content, including the installments of publisher Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy,” which promoted the policies of multiracialism and racial intermixture that were leading to the replacement and destruction of the White race and that same female beauty.

While we’re trying to make these positive connections between the White race and so much that is valued, the dominant anti-White culture is energetically denying them. This culture of White racial denial includes many supposed advocates for the traditions and values of Western Civilization, many of them self-described “conservatives,” who make no connection between that civilization and the race that created it, and actually deny such a connection is valid or meaningful, thereby turning it into an abstract concept. They value only a deracialized, de-Europeanized, globalized and racial nihilist concept of Western civilization which they see as a disembodied thing, disconnected and separate from the biological and genetic, tangible and physical entity that created it and from which it came. But a culture and civilization are not disembodied things consisting only of traditions, customs and abstract ideas. They are the products, the extended phenotype, of the genetic endowment of a biological entity with a tangible physical being, and when they are separated or disconnected from the population that created and sustains them, they degenerate into something else consistent with the new population.

Our advantage in this contest is that the connections we make are objectively real and true, based on actual data that has given us the knowledge needed to allow White people to realize the connection between the White race and those things they value — such as its beauty, their family and ancestors, their heritage, history, culture and civilization, even the gene pool from which their own existence came.

Not all can be successfully reached in this way. Some are innately lacking in racial feeling as a result of their extreme individualism. Others have been so psychologically distorted by the culture that whatever positive feelings they could and should have had for their race have been replaced with negative ones. They are racially dead in soul if not in body, and their dead souls are beyond our powers of resurrection.

The dominant culture rejects all that can be associated with the White race, in the present or the past, turning formerly revered historical and cultural figures into part of an evil and exploitive entity—hence the statue-toppling campaign against the Founding Fathers. Another method is to disconnect the valued achievements of Western civilization from the White race by wrongly crediting them to other races, inserting non-Whites deep into Western history, projecting the multiracialism of the racially dystopian present into the past and invading it with non-Whites, such as recent historical dramas that miscast sub-Saharan Africans as historical figures like Anne Boleyn and iconic semi-mythical figures like Achilles. Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, and Helen of Troy, Achilles’ feminine counterpart, would logically follow.

Some engage in rationalizations to justify racial intermixture, such as arguing that other races are superior to the White race and therefore nothing of importance would be lost if it disappeared. But even if other races are superior in some sense, does that mean the White race should not continue to exist? But there is one thing, the most important thing, in which Whites are undeniably superior to any other race, and that is in being us. No other race, or mixture of races, can be us, can be my race. And it is possible that the White race could exist as long as this planet can sustain human life. The existence of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Bach, Edison, Curie, Rutherford, von Braun, etc., as well as Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, etc., depended on the prior existence of their race, which provided the genetic material that made them. Without the existence of the White race, those White individuals would not, could not, have existed. Intermixture changes the race into something that is no longer us.

Demarcating the Ingroup

A factor that is central to any proposed racial separation solution is the demarcation of its territorial and racial boundaries, the latter being the criteria for membership in a particular race—the criteria that determine which racial categories are the “ingroup” eligible for inclusion within the proposed White nation.  This determination indicates the purpose of the proposed solution. If the purpose is White racial preservation, in the sense of preserving the White race as it exists now, then limiting inclusion to European Whites is the only standard consistent with this goal, and including any persons who are not of European ancestry or whose phenotype is outside of the normal European phenotypic range is inconsistent with it. Both of these aspects of the solution must be addressed in order to provide a sufficient solution for White preservation, and they must be mindful of White sensibilities in order to maximize White support and minimize White opposition.

The sole consideration for ingroup status should be race as determined by phenotype and ancestry. Basing the ingroup on non-racial categories such as religious beliefs or sexual orientation would indicate that the purpose of the proposed solution is at least to some degree something other than racial preservation. In fact, any attempt to divide the White race on ideological or other non-racial lines would be contrary to White racial interests and incite internal division and opposition.

In the great majority of cases, ingroup classification can be determined by the traditional and natural way by the visible physical phenotype which is also the method most consistent with White racial sensibilities and would therefore enjoy the strongest support and agreement. The standard for this determination should be based on the normal European phenotypic range, not on rare exceptions and outliers. I propose that persons of at least three-quarters (75%) European ancestry and within the normal European phenotypic range—i.e., with no visible physical indication of non-White mixture should be racially classified as White. Phenotypically borderline cases, including some common Southern European phenotypes that are also common in the populations of North Africa and the Middle East, should be decided by establishing at least 15/16^ths (93.75%) European ancestry.

The normal phenotypic range and distribution of phenotypes varies across Europe, most notably on a north to south cline, as estimated in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Percentage estimates of phenotypic groups in the native populations of the west European sector of the Caucasian region, showing the composition and the extent of overlap

The table in Figure 7 is my attempt to provide an admittedly rough estimate of the phenotypic composition of the native European populations with percentage estimates of phenotypic groups, illustrating the composition of the different racial environments and the extent of overlap. (Phenotypic groups with under 0.5% representation are excluded.) The reader may disagree with my estimates, and I assume they are not precise, but I believe the concept is valid, and I assume the estimates are sufficiently accurate to give a valid illustration of the concept.

Phenotypic group A consists of the most distinct Northern European phenotypes found only in Northern Europe (represented on this chart by Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, and northern and central Germany). Phenotypic group B consists of the most common Northern European phenotypes which can still be regarded as distinctly Northern European although they are also found as minority elements in Central Europe (represented by southern Germany, Austria and northern France). Phenotypic group C consists of generalized phenotypes that are common throughout Northern and Central Europe and are also present as a minor element in Southern Europe (represented by Italy, Spain and southern France). Phenotypic group D consists of more generalized phenotypes that are found throughout Western Europe but are most common in Central Europe. Phenotypic group E consists of phenotypes that are common throughout Southern and Central Europe but are absent or very rare in the native populations of Northern Europe. Phenotypic group F consists of phenotypes that are common in Southern Europe, present in small numbers in Central Europe, but absent from Northern Europe. Phenotypic group G consists of distinct “Mediterranean” phenotypes that are common in Southern Europe, present as a minority element in North Africa, but absent from the native populations of Northern and Central Europe. Phenotypic group H consists of more distinct “Mediterranean” phenotypes that are common in both Southern Europe and North Africa. Phenotypic group I consists of the most distinct “Mediterranean” phenotypes found among the native populations of Southern Europe, but more common in North Africa. This clinal north-south distribution of phenotypic groups also correlates closely with the distribution of Yamnaya/Kurgan versus Neolithic Anatolian Farmer ancestry, with the proportion of the former decreasing, and the latter increasing, moving from north to south.

Figure 8: Examples from the opposite ends of both the geographic and phenotypic European ranges: a “sunny” Stockholm A/B type (1962) and a sultry Andalusian G/H type (María José Cantudo, 1974)

It should be noted that phenotypic overlap does not necessarily indicate an identical genotypic overlap. For example, the generalized C and D phenotypes found in both Northern and Southern Europe are not genotypically equivalent, as in the north they would be much more likely to include recessive A and B genes in their genotypes than would be the case in the south.

In determining the ingroup, mixed-race children with a White parent who are visibly outside of the normal European phenotypic range are non-White and should be excluded, as to accept them would be to extend the racially harmful effects of the White parent’s personal action to the White race as a whole. Historically, the great majority of the offspring of racial intermixture between Whites and non-Whites have been assimilated back into their non-White ancestral race, so keeping the extent of non-White ancestry in the White population low (1.4%, per Figure 2). The White parents themselves need not be excluded, but it should be assumed that most of them would choose to remain with their children, and so reside with them in the non-White nation.

The Jewish population as a corporate ethnic entity is the most highly organized and networked ethnic group in the world at both the national and international levels, with hundreds of well-funded and coordinated organizations aggressively promoting Jewish interests. In every country in which Jews are a minority (i.e., all except Israel) multiracialism is regarded as a core Jewish interest (or “value”) and intensely promoted as such, creating a fundamental conflict between core Jewish interests and the racial interests of Whites.

Figure 9: From Wikipedia page “Jewish Population by Country,” accessed December 6, 2020

Figure 9 divides the U.S. Jewish population into four categories.^[14]  The “Core” Jewish population of 5.7 million consists of those who consider themselves Jews to the exclusion of all else. The “connected” Jewish population of 8 million includes those who say they are partly Jewish and have at least one Jewish parent. The “enlarged” Jewish population of 10 million adds those who have Jewish background but not a Jewish parent (i.e., they have more distant Jewish ancestry such as a grandparent). The “Eligible” Jewish population of 12 million includes all those eligible to immigrate to Israel under its Law of Return, including spouses of Jews and those with one Jewish grandparent.

Consistent with genetic studies that indicate Ashkenazi Jews are a hybridized semi-European population, averaging 50–60 percent Middle Eastern and 40–50 percent European ancestry, they display considerable phenotypic variation, including many individuals within the normal European phenotypic range. In Separation and its Discontents^[15] Kevin MacDonald cites D.J. Elazar’s 1980 estimate that 70–85% of American Jews are committed to Jewish causes, with 15-20% forming a core of regular participants, activists and operatives consisting of an inner core of 5–8% who are intensely involved in Jewish affairs as a full-time concern and another 10–12% who work actively for Jewish causes on a regular basis. Unfortunately, as Jewish group interests are usually defined as the opposite of White racial interests, Jewish activism has generally promoted White dispossession, including multiracialism, racial intermixture and non-White immigration into White homelands. This needs to be considered with regard to the eligibility for inclusion in the White ingroup of those individual Jews who meet the European phenotypic standard, most of whom would be connected and primarily committed to the corporate Jewish ethnic group and its interests, including those “core Jewish values” that are in fundamental conflict with vital White racial interests, and should therefore be excluded as incompatible with the White ingroup.

A 2014 autosomal genetic study by Katarzyna Bryc et.al. (see Figure 2) found that the average proportion of European ancestry in a “23andMe” sample of 8,663 Hispanic-Americans (“Latinos”) was only 65.1%, a proportion that would not qualify them to be classified as White as a group, although perhaps about 10–15% of Hispanic-Americans would qualify individually as White by European standards. This is in sharp contrast to their “23andMe” sample of 148,789 non-Hispanic European-Americans, whose average proportion of European genetic ancestry was determined to be 98.6%. The study also found that only 3.5% of European-Americans have 1% or more African ancestry, only 1.4% have 2% or more African ancestry, and only 2.7% have 1% or more of “Native American” ancestry, with about 94% having essentially no genetically measurable non-European ancestry.

[1] Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2020): 207, 244.

[2] Ibid., 195.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Kevin MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolution, History, and Prospects for the Future (Seattle: CreateSpace, 2019).

Retroculture: Taking America Back
William S. Lind
London: Arktos Media, 2019.

One of the defining characteristics of the Dissident Right has been a scathing critique of American conservatism. The main charge is that mainstream conservatism has failed to conserve much of anything other than plutocratic wealth. For social analyst Brad Griffin of the website Occidental Dissent, “The price of admission [to conventional conservatism] is abandoning all of your beliefs and going along with this disastrous status quo.”  He notes that a 2019 Pew Research Center study found that traditional religious beliefs are declining at an accelerating rate further eroding the utility of a conservative approach to our problems. The conventional Right has been steamrolled in the culture wars to the point where transgender access to the public restroom of their choice is now the country’s cause célèbre.

Some argue that despite its deficiencies, conservatism serves as an ideological gateway to more substantive views. Many persons, including major thinkers of the post-1960s racial Right started out as conservatives before becoming radicals.

Revilo Oliver began his activism writing book reviews for William Buckley’s National Review and was a founding member of the John Birch Society. By the mid-1960s he had broken with conservatism. He describes his evolution in America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative (1981).

William Pierce also served a stint with the JBS during the 1960s. In his well-known essay “Why Conservatives Can’t Win,” Piece writes, “Some of my best friends are conservatives,” but he goes on to state that conservatives do not understand the forces that oppose them, and only a revolutionary counter force can defeat the Left.

In 1960 Wilmot Robertson was a conservative business man. By the time he wrote The Dispossessed Majority (1972) he had come to realize that conservatism was part of the problem, not the solution.

But what about activists who have remained conservatives throughout their careers such as William S. Lind the author of Retroculture, the book under consideration here. Is he a different sort of conservative who deserves our attention?

Lind, a Baby Boomer (b. 1947) and self-described paleoconservative, graduated from Dartmouth and earned a master’s degree from Princeton. He began his career as a staffer for Senator Robert Taft Jr. He is probably best known for developing the concept of Fourth-Generation Warfare back in the 1980s.  The basic idea of 4GW is that future wars are likely to involve non-state actors either against states in asymmetrical conflict, or against each other. 4GW is rooted in the crisis of state legitimacy.

In the 1990s Lind helped popularize the term “cultural Marxism.” Lind is also somewhat of a race realist who discusses the issue of Black crime. The Great Replacement is considered an aspect of 4GW.

In 2009 Lind and the late Paul Weyrich co-authored The Next Conservatism, a highly critical look at neo-conservatism. The authors made a number of cogent points such as the primacy of culture over politics. Election victories by so-called conservatives have not stopped the Left’s cultural revolution, nor have they halted demographic replacement. Neoconservative economics favors Wall Street over Main Street, and its foreign policy supports costly military interventions. Unlike most conservatives Lind and Weyrich supported environmental protection and the New Urbanism. Presently Lind writes for the American Conservative and the online journal traditional Right.

More evidence that Lind’s Retroculture might embody a different sort of conservatism is that the book was released by Arktos Media. Founded in 2009, this company quickly established itself as the leading publisher of rightwing thought. With more than 170 titles and publishing in sixteen languages, they have issued works by Guillaume Faye, Alexander Dugin, and Pentti Linkola as well as older works by authors such as Julius Evola.

The theme of Retroculture is established early in a brief Forward by John J. Patrick, professor of education emeritus at Indiana University, who asks: “Why can’t we restore old lifestyles in the same way people are restoring gracious old houses? The answer is we can” (xi). Really?

In the first chapter, “Signs of Change,” Lind lists some indications of an emerging conservative cultural revolution: Old neighborhoods are being restored, new “old towns” such as Seaside, Florida are being built, admen are using the past to market all matter of goods and services, ignoring the displacement of Whites from advertising. “Young people, especially young families, are going to church again” (7). This last statement flies in the face of the Pew study mentioned above. Unfortunately, the author makes a number of unsubstantiated claims using anecdotal evidence at best.

At the end of the chapter Lind asks, “Is it all just nostalgia? Or is something more happening here — something big?” (10). First, this book is saturated with nostalgia, though several times Lind denies indulging in those sentiments. Yet if nostalgia is strong enough and widespread enough, it would indeed be something big. Nostalgia is a form of alienation, and collective alienation can be the first step towards fundamental change.

In Chapter Two Lind defines retroculture, a concept he and Weyrich touched on in The Next Conservatism. “Retroculture rejects the idea that ‘you can’t go back’” (11). Almost every student of history would disagree. As with many paleocons, the author sees the 1960s as the great watershed, so going back means pre 1960.

No matter how radical, all rightwing thought contains some elements of conservatism. Lind mentions that America should not reject its inheritance, but rekindle a healthy national identity. People should respect wisdom received from past ages — the basics of civil nationalism. He decries the “selfism,” the self-centered and self-indulgent ideology associated with the left that gained currency during the 1960s. One problem he does not mention: This selfishness has morphed on the Right into libertarianism, thus occupying two poles of the political spectrum, a two-headed monster.

In Chapter Three, “Getting Started,” Lind seeks historical examples of retrocultural revolutions. He points to the Renaissance as one case. Well, the Renaissance did use earlier classical civilizations as a source of inspiration, but Renaissance Italy was a far different place than ancient Rome. In an American context the author wants to reestablish traditional values, “civility, public spiritedness, charity, craftsmanship and stewardship among others” (27). He advocates for walkable cities. Hard to argue with any of this, especially walking. Walking is great exercise and a form of active meditation. Of course, integrated schools and housing helped create suburban sprawl, an environment not conducive to perambulation.

At this point Lind suddenly asks rhetorically: “But wasn’t the past bad?” A good question because throughout the book the author tends to idealize the past. He answers that retroculture captures the good and eliminates the bad. “No one seeks to return to Jim Crow laws” (32). Permit me to mix metaphors: One cannot cherry pick cultural practices. Culture is a whole loaf.  The traditional American way of life was only possible with a significant degree of racial separation.

Chapter Four is about retro-homes. The book is full of good ideas (a few silly ones also) for lifestyle choices. Unfortunately, these individual decisions are not going to bring about the fundamental social change we need. Lind advises buying an older house in an established neighborhood. They “are less expensive” and “have sidewalks and big trees” (40). My own house is 115 years old, so I agree with the author. The problem is that many of these old neighborhoods have changed so demographically as to be uninhabitable, especially for White families.

To his credit Lind is as close to being a renaissance man as you are likely to find these days. He is one of the few persons who can discuss military history and tactics, residential architecture, sartorial issues, as well as classical music with authority.

In Chapter Five Lind decries the decline of domesticity in American culture since the 1950s. Interestingly he does not explicitly criticize feminism, but does write that kids need a mom at home. Strong families produce well socialized children, a worthy goal, but how do you achieve it? That would definitely require a cultural revolution.

When Lind considers education, we see an example of a blanket statement idealizing the good old days. “In the past, parents were careful about what their young children learned. They saw to it that stories taught sound morals, that good conduct was rewarded and bad swiftly though fairly punished, and that manners were inculcated right from the outset” (73). Well, some parents in the past did not do those things, and some today still do. That more parents in the past successfully socialized their kids and fewer do today has less to do with individual parental efforts and more to do with a lack of societal support. Again, we need a cultural revolution.

Optics has been an issue for the Dissident Right, and in Chapter Six Lind offers some sound sartorial advice. The decline in American standards of dress has been precipitous across the board. He recommends buying fewer articles of quality conservative clothes. This will save you time and money in the long run because your apparel will look better and last longer. The author points out that men’s fashions have not changed much in the last three generations. “Lapels shrink and grow, shoulders fatten and thin, and the fashion trade tries to make a big deal of it all. In fact, its piffle” (94). Some shopping advice: “By needing fewer things, you can also frequent better shops when you buy, thus avoiding the degradation of the discount house and the silliness of the boutique.” In a decent men’s shop “you get real value, good American and British stuff, not some wog creation that makes you look like a pimp” (94).  One last fashion tip, leave Hawaiian shirts to Hawaiians in Hawaii.

Chapter Seven deals with entertainment. We can all agree that much of contemporary popular entertainment is crass, ugly, and downright offensive, but Lind goes ultra-reactionary when discussing music. Many on the Dissident Right, myself included, love the romantic classical genre of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers such, as Wagner and Sibelius. Lind, on the other hand, believes these are much inferior to the eighteenth-century greats such as Bach.

Other notes on entertainment: dinner parties are preferable to cocktail parties “where people surreptitiously try to make a meal of hors d’oeuvres while pretending to enjoy superficial conversation with persons they’ve never met” (109). Lind includes civic engagement as a form of retro entertainment. All too often people on the Dissident Right, especial young people, shun mainstream community involvement believing they will be stigmatized and rejected. This is usually not the case if they possess some people skills and live in a compatible community (i.e., one with few of Edward Dutton’s spiteful mutants). Lind recommends leisure reading to recapture lost worlds. Old National Geographic magazines are excellent in this regard.

Concerning the present lack of civility and good manners, “When did we go wrong? As usual, the answer is in the cultural revolution of the 1960s” (122). That decade was a turning point, and today our society is simply too diverse for a common etiquette. Lind’s solution: “don’t frighten the horses.”  Everyone should at least be discreet when engaging in behavior that may offend others. How likely is that to happen? A more practical suggestion by the author: boycott businesses whose practices or advertising is offensive. In the area of public behavior, Pandora’s Box has been opened and we would need a cultural revolution to set things right.

Lind has long been a supporter of train travel so it is no surprise that he advocates that mode of transport, after all. on the Chattanooga Choo Choo, “dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer.” If motoring, the author suggests taking the scenic routes rather than the interstates and having a picnic at a roadside park rather than eating at “fast food joints, those gustatory cesspools of the Interstate Era” (151).

In the chapter on retro business, Lind opines that there is an untapped market for retro furniture and clothing. “Publications are another major market where Retroculture could be good business” (160). Really? It seems as though print media are struggling. “What about the return of the great department stores of the 1920s and 1930s?” (162). Brick and mortar retail is another uphill battle these days. It appears the author’s acumen may not extend to business and economics.

The final chapter, “Retro-America,” sums up Lind’s view of our country: Where are we and where are we headed? He declares that we have lost our confidence. “Americans have become pessimistic. … people are not happy with the way things are or where they seem to be going.” (177). Well, he’s half right.  The traditional core demographic of America has lost its confidence. It has allowed its history to be rewritten, its heritage to be denigrated, and its monuments to be torn down with impunity by mobs of punks and thugs. Ethnic minorities, on the other hand, are empowered, culturally and politically ascendant.

Yet the author is sanguine about the future. He believes the counter-revolution has already begun, “it is already happening.”  This neo-reactionary movement will pick up steam during the 2020s and largely be accomplished by the late 2030s due to “a great national rediscovery of our past” (182). The end product will be “America as it was: quietly prosperous, well-tended, harmonious and at peace” (190).

Lind’s belief in a great restoration is an illusion. There is no returning to circa 1950. We are a vastly different country now, demographically and culturally. Moreover, what would be the impetus for such a restitution? Research suggests that a revival of fundamentalist faith is unlikely. And increasing numbers of diverse Americans do not share Lind’s reverence for our past. Indeed, the American past is routinely vilified in all the cultural high ground, from the mainstream media to the universities and throughout the educational system.

I began this review by asking what role paleo conservatism might play in our people’s instauration, offering that it may be a useful portal to more radical ideas. It’s certainly true that paleoconservatism can be an ideological halfway house. Unlike neo conservatives who embrace disembodied ideals of a universal propositional nation, paleocons appreciate the primacy of culture over politics in shaping a society. Culture informs politics rather than the other way around. But such an ideology can also be a dead end of wishful thinking and escapism. You can study the past, but you cannot live there. The old common culture America once possessed has been destroyed by the multi-cultural Left. There is no going back. History never moves in reverse.

What many paleo cons have trouble accepting is the racial foundation of culture. Ethnic change within a society will inevitably bring about profound cultural change.  You cannot preserve the constitution without preserving the ethnic group who conceived it, nor can you preserve the pre-1960s culture with the ascendant non-White majority. Paleoconservatives have a vision of what they want America to be. Lind lays out that vision at the last chapter, but he, and his ideological fellows, have no realistic route to arrive there. What is more critical — even if by some miracle we could reconstruct 1950s America, it would be insufficient for our project of promoting the welfare and progress of Western peoples and their civilization. We should aspire to do better than simply replicating the past. We can use our science and our aesthetic to create a better world.

Retroculture contains some pithy criticisms of contemporary culture along with a number of useful tips for individual and familial living while waxing nostalgic for times past. It might be a good suggested reading or gift for an older mainstream friend or relative.