What Would It Take?

I believe Whites are willfully denying the clear and present danger we face. Whether it is through late or broken marriages, lackluster efforts at having replacement-level families, or feeble efforts at keeping the governing elite from importing a new (non-White) people, demographically, White Americans are in free fall. About this, the numbers speak clearly; there is no ambiguity. 

The National Policy Institute, for one, has an excellent set of free publicationsone can (and should) order. Here’s one of their presentations showing how Whites are faring demographically in the Great Darwinian Race for Survival:

NPI: Global White Population to Plummet to less than 10% by 2060

A short video of this is available at YouTube.

The message of this decline is everywhere.  For instance, The Atlantic Monthly, that most American of magazines, founded in Boston in 1857 and featuring such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, was once as White as they come. Now they revel in the dispossession of White men.

Readers no doubt saw the collectors’ cover photo of President-Elect Barack Obama in the Jan-Feb, 2009 issue of the magazine last year:

The cover story read: “The End of White America?” I suppose we exiting Whites should be grateful for the softening question mark attached to the title, though of course the essay itself reads as a elegy for White America.

Hua Hsu

Written by one Hua Hsu, an instructor at Vassar, it aptly points to the 1993 Michael Douglas film Falling Down. There Douglas “plays Bill Foster, a downsized defense worker with a buzz cut and a pocket protector who rampages through a Los Angeles overrun by greedy Korean shop-owners and Hispanic gangsters, railing against he eclipse of the America the used to know.”

In the dénouement, this White character faces a policeman, gun drawn, on the Santa Monica Pier. To his great astonishment, just before he is gunned down and falls into the sea, he learns that this is a new America. Shocked, he stammers, “I’m the bad guy?” And then he’s gone.

Fittingly, the story that follows Hsu’s account of America is one on First Lady Michelle Obama by Ta-Nehisi Coates (I’ll let readers ponder the race and gender of writer Coates). Accompanying it is a two-page photo of Mrs. Obama dancing with her husband.

Further, it’s hard to escape the impression that editors at The Atlantic aren’t begging advertisers to create ads that minimize the exposure of White men. Microsoft, for instance, ran a series in the magazine that imagined a future in which non-Whites and women would replace the White men who built America and sent rockets out into space. Here’s a sample:

Or my favorite, Lockheed Martin’s vision of America’s future:

Recently, after teaching an American culture class where I yet again illustrated the scripted decline of White men because — according to the Hollywood films in question — they were evil, I began to wonder if I had laid it on a bit too thick. Then I went down to the university mailroom and picked up my mail. In it was the July/Aug 2010 Atlantic.  Here’s the cover:

Yes, below the title “The End of Men,” the subtitle reads “How Women are Taking Control — Of Everything,” by Hanna Rosin.

The story, by the Jewish Rosin (“I’m Jewish, and I was born in Israel, and my whole family is Israeli“), begins:

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way — and its vast cultural consequences.

The two-page illustration accompanying it, with its outsized image of the Asian woman in blue, reminded yet again of Kevin MacDonald’s observation: “The United States is well on the road to being dominated by an Asian technocratic elite and a Jewish business, professional, and media elite.” Indeed.

Interspersed throughout the article are snarky pictures showing the petulant beings American men have become due to their loss of status.  As one enlarged Rosin quote reads, “Dozens of college women I interviewed assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed home. “Guys,” one senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.”

Contributor Pamela Paul even gets a little room to ask “Are Fathers Necessary?” A paternal contribution may not be as essential as we think.”

(By the way, last summer The Atlantic published the sizzling anti-male essay

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off :

THE AUTHOR IS ENDING HER MARRIAGE. ISN’T IT TIME YOU DID THE SAME?

To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,” only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal.

Male kitchen bitches.  Ouch.  Then again, any male that so bought into the Alan Alda-inspired demasculinization of the seventies probably deserves a few bad names thrown his way.)

In any case, this summer’s issue is a cultural treasure trove of visual evidence that the White race in America is being shown the door. Upon opening the cover — which, recall, asserts the End of Men — we are greeted with this two-page ad from Shell Oil:

Turn the page and there’s another two-page ad for Altria Group illustrating their support for educational programs aimed at “empowering” students to stay in school and picturing a racially diverse student population. Immediately following this is an ad for Dow Chemical featuring a Black woman stating that she is the “human element” in the “duty to put healthy, abundant food on the world’s table.”

Back in the days when Blacks had no power in America, we never saw them in ads either. What does it say, then, that we don’t see a White man’s face until page 8? (It’s the Pope and the caption reads: “Is the Catholic Church finished?”)

The issue closes on the inside back cover with Shell stepping up to the plate again. Their focus: Japan.  (Opposite it, there’s a column by the sort of person who functions as a stand-in for a “White male”: Jeffrey Goldberg. The implicit message: Don’t worry; with writers like Rosin and Goldberg, it’s obvious that we Whites still run the show.)

Readers won’t be getting a new issue of The Atlantic until September, so make this thick one last. And be sure to interact on the Internet with Hanna Rosin, her husband David Plotz and their three children.

As for me, I am no Hanna Rosin fan.  Her December 2009 cover story most certainly rubbed me the wrong way.  After a year of mind-boggling economic swindles and bailouts that have used up a significant portion of the universe’s zeroes, who gets blamed? Christians. Now that’s why Jews are so often credited with chutzpah.

Recall that Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi wrote in his essay The Great American Bubble Machine that

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

I just didn’t get the impression he was appealing to a stereotype about Christians. I did an article on the Jewish nature of massive financial swindles over the years in Take the Money and Run. Of course Israeli Rosin was just doing her part in the old Jewish game of blaming the victim. Kevin MacDonald explained this tactic in a recent blog when he observed, “In contemporary human societies, a large part of group competition becomes intellectual warfare over the construction of culture.” I knew deflecting the blame from Jews was on the Sanhedrin “to do” list when I watched the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123.

In the new version, Travolta’s character is a New York ethnic Catholic very interested in guilt. He was also a high-rolling Wall Streeter who skimmed millions of dollars until he was caught and sent to prison. Between then and now, he has also gone mostly insane, though he’s still canny enough to cook up a scheme to make a killing on stocks when he induces panic in the city with his subway hijacking. Now go back and read James Stewart’s excellent account of the savings and loan swindles of the Reagan ‘80s, Den of Thieves. The thieves were ethnic New Yorkers alright, but they sure weren’t Catholic. Sadly, this concerted media effort to blame others will likely work.

Another area in which White displacement advances is in government favoritism shown toward non-Whites. This was highlighted last year during the nominating process of Sonia Sotomayor for a position on the Supreme Court. She had famously ruled against White firemen, but still had no trouble become a Justice. Quoting TOO editor Kevin MacDonald again, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor “is yet another marker in the march toward the dispossession of Whites in America.” (She’ll likely soon be joined by another woman— this one Jewish — when  Elena Kagan gets appointed this summer.)

Speaking of women, it was Michelle Malkin who just stood up to defend Whites against government neglect. As she wrote,

This week, Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams came forward with damning public testimony about how Obama officials believe “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.”

I guess we Whites can use all the help we can get, though. Turning again to MacDonald, we have his commentary on the English translation of a chapter from Solzhenitsyn’s book 200 Years Together, which is about Russians and Jews. MacDonald has often written about the murderous hostility of Jews toward Russians, millions of whom were murdered. He also draws parallels to the situation for Whites in America today. Reporting on how Jews displaced Gentiles in Russia, he concludes that

This is a speeded up version of what is happening via affirmative action in America and other Western societies now. There is discrimination against higher IQ Whites in favor of lower-IQ groups. Jews, however, continue to be overrepresented in elite academic institutions on the basis of IQ, so they are not suffering a similar level of discrimination.

I’ve written about this, too. Recall my graph on the student makeup at Harvard:

To put a human face on such dispossession, let me share a letter from a reader:

Your observation that Jews have constructed walls to protect their fields such as government and academia is correct. They have also erected barriers to defend other fields which they claim to be their own. One of these is medicine. You would be surprised at the number of Jews running selection committees and medical education departments in hospitals and universities. There they have developed control of who may enter residencies and how residents are evaluated. The acceptance of white males into medical education at this level has sunk to a low. Preferred are Jews, Asians, Mexicans and females.

Another way in which they enforce a leadership role is by the assignment of labor in residency programs, where Jewish chief residents assign work  so as to favor their own kind and put white males at a disadvantage. Jewish physicians also seem to prefer to run organizations and to control the distribution of funds.

Everything in this article written thus far describes the non-violent dispossession of Whites, but there remains the possibility of the process speeding up through mass slaughter. MacDonald is explicit in comparing the heavily Jewish Bolshevik takeover of Russia to the situation here today: “Again, the analogy is striking. Asemphasized repeatedly on TOO, Whites can expect to be increasingly victimized by non-Whites with historical grudges as they sink to minority status and lose political power.”

I don’t need to repeat myself because I’ve written about the potential for such abloody future for White Americans before. Instead, I’ll try to appeal to readers’ visual sensibilities. Below is a chess set made by Italian Jewish glassblower Gianni Toso. In 1969 he created a stunning set called “Jews vs. Catholics.”

I strongly suspect most Christians are ignorant of the fact that so many Jews still think in these terms. They’ll soon learn, however.

Let me leave readers by revisiting the issue of The Atlantic I addressed above. The writer I noted, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is an African American male. I found out because he has a three-page article in this summer’s issue. There he gives a short biography, noting that as one of seven children, he was less than a scholastic standout. “My roller-coaster ride through the Baltimore-area schools included two suspensions, two expulsions, and an arrest by school police. In 11th grade . . . I was kicked out of the local magnet school.” Still, he (somehow) made it into college, where he proceeded to do little work and failed to graduate. In an America that gave us Obama, however, that’s not always a hindrance.

In 2005 TIME magazine saw fit to hire him as a journalist, and now he has a solid career going. “I had an office 23 floors in the air, in Midtown Manhattan. I used to look down on Sixth Avenue and wonder about the distance between my scholastic and professional lives. How could I utterly fail in practice and then succeed in the game?”  Gosh, I wonder.

Perhaps it has something to do with the program of removing White men from the newsroom (and fire stations and NASA offices and the Oval Office, etc.)  and replacing them with non-Whites who will never threaten those with real power in America today: Jews.

What would it take to make this dispossession process more clear to people? Until they recognize what is happening, there is no hope of confronting it. The loss of the White race would be a true blow to humanity.

The A3P replies to the New York Daily News and Huffington Post

Kevin MacDonald: The New York Daily News has reached a new low in journalistic propaganda with its article “New Hampshire State House Candidate Running On White Supremacist Platform” (July 13, 2010). The article purports to be a description of the candidacy of Ryan J. Murdough for the state senate in New Hampshire. The accompanying photo pictures a man with a swastika tattooed on his head giving a Nazi salute despite the fact that there is no connection at all between the photo and anyone in the American Third Position.

Daily News caption: A New Hampshire man (not pictured) is hoping to use racism and the support of a hate group to get elected as a Republican to the State House.

Daily News caption: A New Hampshire man (not pictured) is hoping to use racism and the support of a hate group to get elected as a Republican to the State House.

Similarly, a Huffington Post article on Murdough’s candidacy features a photo of a flag with a Swastika along with Nazi-style salutes–again, completely unrelated to anyone connected with the A3P (“New Hampshire State House Candidate Running On White Supremacist Platform”; July 13, 2010).

Uncaptioned photo from the Huffington Post article

The Daily News article refers to the A3P as a “hate group,” and Mr. Murdough is characterized as “racist.” Like many other Americans, Mr. Murdough is concerned about the very rapid demographic changes engulfing the country. His comments reflect absolutely normal and legitimate concerns about the future of his people and his culture.

We reject labels such as “white supremacist” or “racist” that are routinely bestowed on assertions of White identity and interests as a means of muzzling their expression. In the vast majority of countries around the world, it is perfectly normal and legitimate for people to resist the invasion of other peoples. No one would suppose that, say, South Korea has a moral obligation to admit millions of non-Koreans so that native Koreans become a minority. Nor is there any moral imperative that they give up the primacy of Korean culture. No one would suppose that Koreans are being evil or “racist” for opposing the entry of millions of people unlike themselves–people who will be allowed to vote and compete for political power and other resources.

Our main concern is that this upheaval unleashed by massive non-White immigration opposes the legitimate interests of the European-descended peoples of the U.S. It’s not about hatred. It’s about seeing real conflicts of interest among different ethnic groups. Quite simply, massive non-White immigration is not in the interests of the vast majority of White Americans.

Murdough’s letter to the Concord Monitor expresses concern about the costs of diversity. Throughout the world, ethnically diverse societies are marked by ethnic conflict. No one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. Our vision of the future of America is that it is well on the road to becoming a cauldron of competing ethnic groups, with chronic divisions over issues like affirmative action, redistribution of wealth and the establishment of public goods like health care — any issue that may be seen as benefiting one ethnic group more than another.

Finally, the Daily News article grossly distorts the views of the directors of the A3P. We do not endorse “Nazi ideals” or simplistic, biologically reductionist theories of Judaism and Jewish influence. Questions related to the influence of various ethnic groups and conflicts of interest between different ethnic groups can be scientifically investigated. It is perfectly legitimate for any ethnic group, including White Americans, to identify the forces that oppose their interests and to act on that basis.

A major aspect of ethnic activism for all other ethnic groups is to call attention to their perceived opponents. For example, the Los Angeles Times reports today that Latinos of all political parties oppose the Arizona immigration law and see White racism as the source of the opposition to legalizing millions of Latinos. Similarly, it makes sense for A3P to articulate the forces we see arrayed against us.

There can be little doubt that one of the main forces arrayed against White people identifying as Whites and acting on their interests is the non-White coalition of ethnic groups  centered in the Democratic Party, and this includes the organized Jewish community as well as other non-White minority groups, such as Latinos. We understand that Latinos have an interest in getting as many of their people into the U.S. as possible. However, Latino interests in immigration conflict with the interests of White Americans. We have a legitimate interest in preserving our culture and our political power.

The fact that the great majority of White Americans feel they cannot identify as Whites or discuss their conflicts of interest with other ethnic groups is a completely unnatural state of affairs — the result of a prolonged assault on the legitimacy of these concepts by politically and ethnically motivated elites that have dominated public discourse on issues of race and ethnicity since before World War II and especially since the 1960s. Our purpose is to change that, and Mr. Murdough’s candidacy is a big step in that direction.

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James Edwards on Mel Gibson

James Edwards’ current TOO article (“On the crucifixion of Mel Gibson“) emphasizes themes that have been a staple here: Jews adopting very different strategies and attitudes in Israel than in the Diaspora and Jews making alliances with other minorities against the White majority. It reminds us once again that, unlike the old WASP elite, the new elite in America will not be principled.

Ari Emanuel is horrified that Gibson would use the N-word but he comes from a long line of racial Zionists–followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky who believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish. For example Jabotinsky stated, “These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the differences in soil and climate.” As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.” On the other hand, as soon as they move to the US, the family adopts the leftist, pro-multicultural, anti-White attitudes typical of American Jews. His mother was a civil rights worker in the US, and of course his brother Rahm Emanuel is a major power in the Obama administration and its left-leaning multicultural, anti-White agenda. Edwards shows that Emanuel’s talent agency also represents several White-hating rappers. Of course, Jews have their own grudges against the people and culture of the West, epitomized by the hostility toward Gibson’s The Passion of Christ.

It’s only common sense for Whites to fear an America in which they are a minority with a hostile Jewish elite that has made an alliance with Blacks and other minorities with their own historical grudges.

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Is Racial Purism Decadent?

“Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.”

—Oswald Spengler

Recently I spent a good deal of time re-reading the great Oswald Spengler: for general enlightenment, but also with an eye to criticizing his teachings about race, which seemed at first reading confused, bizarre, and dangerous. Much to my surprise, however, I have come to see much sense and truth in Spengler’s views.

Biological Race

Although Spengler speaks dismissively of Darwinism, he does not deny that race is a biological phenomenon. For Spengler, races are extended families, people who share the same “blood” (i.e., genes). Spengler even speaks of a race as a vast collective body of individuals through which the same genes circulate.

But Spengler denies that biology is all there is to race. Race, it turns out, has both psychological and cultural aspects as well.

Like Darwinists, Spengler believes that biological races are mutable. They change over time. According to Spengler, the principal force that shapes races is “landscape,” i.e., environment. This is consistent with the biological view that a distinct race emerges when a human population is isolated and subjected to unique environmental conditions. These conditions select for certain genetic variations. These variations then spread throughout the entire population through inbreeding. (If there are barriers to breeding between different parts of the population, then multiple new races or subraces will emerge.)

Where Spengler departs from sound biology is his belief that landscape can shape a population independent of genetic change, and that different races, when placed in the same landscape, will converge in their traits without genetic blending. Spengler even refers to Franz Boas’s false and probably fraudulent claims that in America, the offspring of different European racial stocks had convergent biological traits that were products of environment alone. But none of Spengler’s conclusions about race depend on these false assumptions, which can be excised without changing his overall viewpoint.

Psychological Race

What is “psychological” race? Spengler often speaks of “having race” and being “of race.” But having race is not merely having certain genes. It is a matter of having a certain feeling: a primitive, vital urge to propagate oneself. It is the drive to immortalize oneself through one’s progeny. In The Hour of Decision, Spengler writes:

A woman of race does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but amother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and distraction, but of many: the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her the race. Out of this instinct arises the primitive jealousy which leads one woman to take away from another the man whom she covets as the father of her children. The more intellectual jealousy of the great cities . . . betrays the waning of the race urge to permanence; and that instinct for permanence cannot be reawakened by speeches and writing. . . . A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors. That is the Nordic idea of immortality. These peoples have known no other and desired none. It is the source of that tremendous yearning for fame, the wish to live on among posterity through one’s work, to see one’s name perpetuated on monuments or at the least held in honourable memory. (Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934], 220–21)

This feeling of race is not “racial consciousness,” i.e., awareness of belonging to a certain race. The feeling of race is forward-looking. Racial consciousness is backwards-looking. The feeling of race impels us to create new life. Racial consciousness is merely awareness of life that has already been created, the life handed down to us. The feeling of race is the stirring of the same creative force in ourselves.

Race and Culture

How, then, is race also “cultural”? If a race is a collective body that exists and propagates itself through individual bodies, a culture is a collective mind that exists in and through individual minds, propagating itself by means of language.

Race shapes and limits culture. But once culture arises, it turns back on and reshapes its racial substratum in the light of ideas that are not dictated by biology. These ideas include conceptions of beauty and fitness that guide mate selection, myths and religious beliefs that regulate sexual behavior, moral ideals that promote the propagation of certain types, etc.

Cultural selection may be eugenic, dysgenic, or both, but if exercised over a long enough period of time, it can produce human populations as varied as different breeds of dog.

Race Change

Spengler puts great stock in the mutability of races.

He denies what might be called “race Platonism,” namely the idea that races are immutable kinds that are more or less well-instantiated by particular individuals. For Spengler, a race is just a collection of individuals with common blood. If a race can be likened to a collective organism, this organism does not exist over and above its individual members. Instead it exists only in and through them.

Spengler also denies what can be called “race Traditionalism,” the idea that in the distant past, a godlike super-race existed, which has since declined because of miscegenation with inferior races or spiritual transgressions or both.

Race Platonism sees every concrete, living organism as an imperfect reflection of its ideal archetype. Race Traditionalism sees all change as degeneration. Both views see change as metaphysically inferior to timeless perfection, and the Traditionalists think that as time rolls on, things usually go from bad to worse.

But if race Platonism and race Traditionalism are false, then change is notnecessarily a bad thing. Life is constant change, and stasis—even frozen perfection—is death.

In Spengler’s view, a race just is a constantly changing group of individuals who share the same genetic traits at any given point in time. But these traits are not timeless and permanent either. (That would be just a sneaky, immanent form of Platonism, i.e., Aristotelianism.) Genetic traits also change over time. This means that if we go far enough back in our family trees, we will find people quite unlike ourselves.

The unity of a race, therefore, is ultimately not defined by the persistence of something that remains unchanged in time, but merely the continuity of an ever-changing process, one of the strands of the ever-changing process that is nature itself.  

Race Preservation?

What is race preservation? Most race preservationists will answer that it consists of maintaining a certain set of genes. This is, for instance, the core of Frank Salter’s concept of Ethnic Genetic Interests.

But if Spengler’s view of race is correct, then this is tantamount to the demand that time stop. It is tantamount to taking a snapshot of a moving process and demanding that no further change take place.

Yet if a race is a constantly changing collective organism, then the demand to “preserve” it at a certain arbitrarily chosen moment is actually the demand to kill it. It is analogous to “preserving” a bird at the height of its beauty—by shooting it and taking it to the taxidermist.

Every generation of a race is shaped in part by the conscious and unconscious choices of its forbears. Each new generation will be slightly different, and when we compare our remote ancestors and our remote descendants, they will hardly resemble one another.

At one end of the family tree, there will be the ape-like primitives of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the other end, there might be something like the macro-cephalic, telepathic “butt heads” of the original Star Trek series. But they will still be “one” race, one extended family.

Allowing that story to unfold is the only genuine form of race preservation that is possible.

The false race preservationist, however, decides that his generation—or some previous generation—is the “right” generation to preserve. Then he seeks to hold onto—or “get back” to—a particular genetic snapshot or cross-section of the race’s life.

All generations before that point were not just shaped by previous generations, they also shaped subsequent generations. But the race preservationist decides that from a certain point on, every generation will be made by previous generations. But they will not be allowed to make future generations in their turn. They will no longer be agents of change, but merely agents of preservation.

Who are they to change anything?

Racial Purism as Decadence

Spengler regards such a mindset as decadent. Consider the following passage from The Hour of Decision:

In speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike—that is, healthy—generations with a future before them have from time immemorial always welcomed a stranger into the family if he had “race,” to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it.

This manifests itself above all in self-evident elemental fecundity, in an abundance of children, which historical life can consume without ever exhausting the supply. God is, in the familiar words of Frederick the Great, always on the side of the big battalions, and now if ever this shows itself. The millions who fell in the World War were the pick of all the white world had in the way of race, but the test of race is the speed with which it can replace itself. A Russian once said to me: “The Russian woman will make good in ten years what we sacrificed in the Revolution.” That is the right instinct. Such races are irresistible. (The Hour of Decision, 219–20)

Following Nietzsche, Spengler holds that positive values and a healthy culture are the products of “ascending life.” Negative values and a decadent culture are products of declining life.

Ascending life is active, conscious of what it can do, of its power to change the future. Declining life is passive, conscious of what has been done to it and cannot be undone.

Ascending life is vital and life-giving. Declining life is devitalized and devitalizing.

Ascending life is forward-looking and hopeful; it creates and embraces change; it pursues gain rather than avoids loss; it is motivated by love and passion, not fear; it is warlike, willing to risk life for higher gains.

Declining life is backwards-looking, fearful of the future, fearful of change, fearful of loss, fearful of risk and conflict, conservative, stinking of senility, hemmed by shrinking horizons, chilled by looming death.

Ascending life is aware of the past, but selectively so: it remembers what is empowering and forgets what is not. When the past becomes restrictive, it sloughs it off like a snake discards an old skin.

Declining life is less selective. It has a long memory, brooding over old mistakes and picking at old wounds. Declining life is defined by the past, which it carries as an ever-growing burden, like a snail adding to its lifeless shell even as its living substance wanes, until finally it is crushed under the dead weight.

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According to Spengler, when the healthy man thinks of race, he is less concerned with the race we have been than the race we will become. He may feel grateful to his ancestors for the positive gifts—the strengths—they have bequeathed him. He gives no thought to their mistakes and imperfections, even those that mark him. It is enough to be aware that they were not perfect, that there is room for improvement. And a healthy man thinks that he can make improvements. He thinks that he can bequeath more to his progeny than his ancestors bequeathed to him.

Thus the healthy man “of race” is not concerned with racial purity—defined as the preservation of a certain set of gene frequencies, whether his own or his ancestors’. He is pleased with the good traits he has received, and he would like to pass them on. But, as Spengler says, he is more concerned with strong sons than pure ones, and he would not hesitate to breed with an outsider if he thought this would improve his progeny.

For Spengler, a concern with racial purity is a sign of racial decadence, of a lack of racial vitality. The racial purist looks to the past, not the future, because he does not have the vitality in him necessary to create a future. He is defined by the past and feels that he does not have the power or the right to change it, only to repeat it (or talk about repeating it, and urge others to repeat it).

As Spengler writes, “Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.” This means that the people who talk the most about reproduction do it the least. And, Spengler might add, that is a good thing. Let the sapless branches rattle in the wind all they want, as long as they spare us their shriveled fruit.

White Nationalism: A Degenerate Movement?

Racial purists often claim that their intellectual opposition to miscegenation is merely a healthy “instinct.” They also claim that there is something biologically sick about the instincts of miscegenators.

Spengler thinks that the exact opposite is true. He would predict that those who intellectually oppose miscegenation and advocate racial purity and preservation would be, on average, less virile, less fecund, and less mentally and physically healthy than the average person, including the average miscegenator.

Based on ten years of experience in the American White nationalist movement, I have to say that Spengler’s prediction is absolutely correct. White nationalism in America is an overwhelmingly degenerate movement, and I do not exempt myself from this judgment.

But what does this mean, exactly? It means merely that, from the point of view of biological vitality, a White man who preaches racial purity but has no children is less healthy than a White man who chooses to have children with a non-White woman.

It does not mean that the White nationalist is wrong in his convictions about biology and politics. It does not mean that, from a eugenic point of view, Whites have anything to gain from mixing with other races. (As a matter of fact, I think we do not.)

Decadent people can be right, and healthy people can be wrong.

But there is a lot more to politics than simply being right.

And from the point of view of practical politics, we White nationalists need to take a good hard look at ourselves. Can such a degenerate movement win?

Should it win? For the sake of all that is holy, shouldn’t we want to keep nostalgia-addled kooks away from any power over the future of life, lest they murder and mummify the race in their quest to preserve its purity?

Vitalizing White Nationalism?

What would a vital White nationalism look like?

This is where Spengler’s views of how culture shapes race come in. I also take inspiration from Michael O’Meara’s essays on myth and politics in his Toward the White Republic and Alex Kurtagić’s “Learning from the Right” and related essays.

White nationalists love sobering facts, so let’s begin with one. The White nationalist movement, which seeks the salvation of nature’s fairest and most talented race, is less capable of motivating real world activity than Star Trek, a silly but entertaining set of movies and TV shows about multiracial and miscegenating liberals who live in Tupperware, dress in pajamas, and fly around the galaxy preaching high-minded, hypocritical twaddle about tolerance and pluralism and diversity.

Even if we correct for the differences in the size of audiences, Trekkies accomplish more in the real world than an equal number of White nationalists.

Why is that? It has nothing to do with idealism. Both movements are highly idealistic. It has everything to do with animal vitality. For all its silliness, there is something about Star Trek that motivates human action and creativity—that taps into pure animal vitality—better than White nationalism.

Present-day White nationalism is conservative: backward looking, devitalized, decadent, and gloomy. Star Trek is progressive: forward-looking, optimistic, and hopeful. (Nauseatingly so.)

With this in mind, ask yourself who is more likely to preserve the White race: (1) the present White nationalist movement, or (2) a group of kooks who, taking Tolkien as their bible, decide that through eugenics, they are going to mold every successive generation of their progeny closer to the archetype of the elves: the fairest and wisest race?

The elves have it. Why? Because, kooky though it may be, creating a race of elves far better captures the imagination and mobilizes human vitality than dark predictions about the rising tide of color.

A vital White nationalist movement would be a utopian, progressivist, eugenicist mythical-cultural phenomenon. It would not be founded on empirical studies of how race influences culture. It would not propagate itself through academic conferences and policy studies. It would be founded on a grand culture-creating, race-shaping myth, propagated through art and religion, that enthralls and mobilizes a whole people. (No, I don’t have one handy.)

It would be less concerned about the race we were or the race we are than about the race we can become. It would not brood over whether the Finns or Armenians or Sicilians are White enough. It would not obsess over the odd Jew or Amerindian in someone’s ancestry, as long as he or she makes a net contribution to the coming race. (No, this is not special pleading on my part.) Besides, eventually, we will be able to just edit out undesirable genetic code, although I hope we will be more concerned with the perfections we can write in.

Most importantly, a vital White nationalist movement should require its leaders to lead by example, by marrying wisely and fruitfully. No, the movement should not and cannot turn away talented people who have the misfortune of being unwilling or unable to reproduce. But the movement should definitely have a hierarchy, and anyone who wants to rise to the top needs to do more than talk about a future for White children. He needs to contribute White children to the future.

This article is also posted at Counter-Currents.com with a section for readers’ comments.

Greg Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. He can be reached at editor@counter-currents.com.

John Paul Stevens as a prototypical WASP

There’s been a lot of talk about the fact that soon there will be no WASPs on the Supreme Court. What does it mean? And does it really matter?

What’s fascinating is that John Paul Stevens was nominated to the Supreme Court as a moderate Republican who gradually moved further to the left as he got older.  What strikes me is his strong sense of principle–even to the extent of making decisions that could not possibly be seen as helping his ethnic group. After all, that’s what being principled means: Doing something because you value an ideal, not because there is anything in it for you. If I don’t steal something because I am afraid of getting caught, it’s not a matter of principle. But if I refrain from stealing some money it even if there is no possibility of being caught and even if getting the money would mean a lot to me, then I am acting on principle.

Stevens’ liberalism meant that despite being nominated by a Republican, he timed his retirement to occur during a Democratic administration. Even without knowing who would be the Democratic president, he surely knew that a Democratic president would nominate someone quite unlike himself to fill his position. The chances of any Democratic administration appointing a WASP to the Supreme Court are less than zero. And of course, Obama appointed someone who seems to all appearances to be a strongly identified Jew — not to mention that she has no visible qualifications and has benefited immensely from Jewish ethnic networking.

Much the same could be said about David Souter–another WASP appointed by a Republican who chose to retire during a Democratic administration and was replaced by a Latina.

The result is that the Obama administration has has had two appointments very early on, predictably appointing people who represent two important Democratic constituencies–Latino and Jewish. (Jews contribute at least 60% of the money for the Democratic Party, and Latinos are an increasingly important component of the non-White ethnic coalition that the Democratic Party has now become.)

Stevens therefore is the ultimate non-ethnic actor. This is reflected in his writing:

“The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach,” he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent [in a 1989 flag burning case]. “If those ideas are worth fighting for—and our history demonstrates that they are—it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.

Ideas are worth fighting for, but Stevens has no interest in advancing the cause of WASPs as an ethnic group. Here he idealizes non-White Filipinos fighting alongside Whites to secure a set of principles. He has no concern that there will be no more WASPs on the court for the foreseeable future, presumably because he thinks that what’s important is that certain ideas will continue to guide the country.

Writing in the LATimes, Gregory Rodriquez framed the the issue by titling his article “The triumph of WASP culture“: the lack of WASPs means the WASPs have won. The multicultural left should build statues to Stevens and Souter as heroes of the hopeful non-White future. Their principled sense that ideas matter and that race and ethnicity are not at all important is exactly how the multicultural left wants all Whites to behave. WASPs as the proposition ethnic group heralding America as the proposition nation.

This devotion to universalist ideas is a strong tendency in the liberal WASP subculture that has been such an important strand of American intellectual history. (See my review of Eric M. Kaufmann’s The Rise and  Fall of Anglo America.) (The exception was during the 1920s when the WASPs sided with the rest of America when they led the battle to enact the immigration restriction law of 1924 which drastically restricted immigration and explicitly attempted to achieve an ethnic status quo as of 1890. Even then, there were substantial numbers of WASPs who opposed immigration restriction.)

In the 19th century, this liberal WASP tradition could be seen in their attraction to utopian communities and their strong moral revulsion to slavery that animated the cause of abolition. Ideas matter and are worth fighting for–even if more than 600,000 White people died in the battle –“Let us die to make men free” as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” urged. They had the idea that people are able to fashion moral ideals and then bring them into being as a result of political activism. They were individualists who saw the world not in terms of ingroups and outgroups, but as composed of unique individuals. Their relatively tepid ethnocentrism and their proneness to moral universalism — ethnic traits in my view and in  the view of many WASPs in the 19th century — made them willing allies of the rising class of Jewish intellectuals who came to dominate intellectual discourse beginning at least by the 1930s.  Even by the 1920s, the triumph of Boasian anthropology meant that appeals to WASP ethnicity would fall on deaf ears in the academic world.

And now that the forces of liberal cosmopolitanism have won out, the WASPs — even the liberal ones — are being rapidly jettisoned by our new, substantially Jewish elite. The replacement of Stevens by Kagan is deliciously paradigmatic.

Kaufmann points out that one of the defining features of the  WASPs is the tendency to believe that as a result of assimilation everyone would be just like them. Immigrant Catholics would shed their religion and become proper Protestants. In fact, becoming a WASP wasn’t all that hard if you had enough money, dressed right, joined the right clubs, and became an Episcopalian or Congregationalist. As I wrote about growing up in Wisconsin:

I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. … But the divisions didn’t seem very important (ethnicity wasn’t an issue) and there was a certain amount of mobility among the groups. In any case, no one felt like an outsider. We certainly did not have the intense hostility toward the WASP elite that has been so typical of Jews.

I suspect therefore that Stevens and Souter think, perhaps unconsciously, that the people who replace them will be just like them in the sense that they will uphold the same ideals. The republic will live on but with different faces–a utopian idea, to say the least.

In fact, it is far more likely that now that the WASPs are gone, the Supreme Court and every other important institution will be divvied up as an ethnic spoils system, especially for the Democrats as they try to appease the various parts of their ethnic coalition. And the Republicans will doubtless appoint at least some non-Whites to show that the principles of WASP idealism are not dead.

The reality is that the  various non-White ethnic groups jockeying for power in America are not like the WASPs at all. Their powerful sense of ethnic identification means by definition that they are unprincipled–that they can be reliably predicted to see things in terms of what is good for their ethnic group. Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment comes to mind, and Kagan’s strong ethnic identity implies that she, like the rest of the Jewish community, will be mainly motivated the old dictum of “what’s good for the Jews”: the Supreme Court as a lifetime legislative appointment to be used to advance the interests of their ethnic group. Kagan’s unprincipled views on issues such as free speech are entirely within the mainstream of the Jewish community. Indeed, in one of her law review articles she anticipated the recent hate crimes legislation that was pushed so strongly by the ADL and supported by the rest of the organized Jewish community. The most glaring aspect of Jewish political behavior now is their remarkably unprincipled support for the multicultural left, including massive non-White immigration in the United States while at the same time providing unquestioning support for an apartheid, racialist Israel with laws that make Arizona’s immigration laws pale by comparison.

Stevens and Souter are naive. Their devotion to ideas and principle along with similar attitudes of a very large number of like-minded Whites will cast a long, deadly shadow as we head into the  future.  All the research shows that ethnically divided societies are prone to conflict and have less of a civic sense — for example, people in ethnically divided societies are less likely to contribute to public goods like health care. The new elite is much more likely to act out their historical grudges against the White majority than to uphold WASP ideals. Ethnicity matters.

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Kevin MacDonald: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's “The 1920s.” Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together

The English translation of Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together, “The 1920s,” is now available. (See here, and notice the link requesting donations.) It has a very different feel from Chapter 20, on the Gulag. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag stresses his own experiences, this chapter relies on a wide range of academic historical writing to paint his picture of the USSR during the critical decade of the 1920s. His account is therefore based on mainstream scholarship and overall is similar to other accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. However, it goes beyond other accounts in several important ways and provides a great deal of new information for Western audiences. It is a very long chapter (>26000 words). In the current TOO article, I summarize some of the main points and draw analogies to the current situation in the West. I encourage comments on Solzhenitsyn’s chapter and my article here.

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Hormonal regulation of ingroup altruism

A recent paper by Carsten K. W. De Dreu and colleagues in Science shows that the hormone oxytocin makes people more inclined to help their ingroup (“The Neuropeptide oxytocin regulates parochial altruism in intergroup conflict among humans”; Science, June 11, 2010; not available online without subscription). The paper is important for several issues related to group conflict. It begins with the simple statement that more than 210 million people were killed by state action in the 20th century, typically because they were seen in ingroup/outgroup terms. It also cites Darwin’s famous statement that “groups with a greater number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other … would spread and be victorious over other tribes” — a classic argument for group selection. They also cite several studies showing that oxytocin is linked to trust: people with high levels of trust have more oxytocin receptors in their brain, and receiving oxytocin makes people more empathic and generous.

The contribution of De Dreu et al. is to show that all this niceness is reserved for the ingroup — what they call “ingroup love.” Oxytocin increased people’s willingness to contribute to a common fund even though they would lose money in the process. However, it didn’t make them more likely to contribute to a fund where the they would benefit their ingroup at the expense of an outgroup. Oxytocin therefore promotes “ingroup love,” not “outgroup hate.” A second experiment showed that this effect occurred even for people who were not personally inclined toward altruism.

The third experiment is particularly important. Here the game was rigged to distinguish the motives of greed (large upside to non-cooperation if the other person cooperates compared to the downside if they do not cooperate) and fear (large downside to cooperation if the other person doesn’t reciprocate compared to the upside if they do reciprocate).

The greed motive is exploitative: it represents the desire to take advantage of a trusting outgroup; the fear motive is defensive: it represents the desire to protect the ingroup against possible exploitation by a non-cooperating outgroup. Oxytocin activated the fear motive: Under the influence of the drug people were more inclined to not cooperate with the outgroup, especially in the fear condition. In other words, they were defending their ingroup. Oxytocin did not affect greed.

So what does this all mean? First, realize that the ingroups and outgroups in the study are not genetically based, say, on ethnic differences. It would be interesting to see if the ingroup defensive effects of oxytocin would be increased if the ingroup and outgroup were racially homogeneous but of different races. We would also expect that there would be less altruistic donating to the ingroup in the first two experiments if the ingroups were ethnically diverse.

But because ethnicity was not manipulated and groups were randomly constructed, it means that the research is relevant to understanding the biological basis of social identity theory.  Social identity research shows that even randomly composed ingroups show ingroup biases — what De Dreu et al. term “ingroup love.” The ingroup and outgroup are like two ethnically-based football teams with different colored uniforms rather than two groups that differ on the basis of ethnicity. I have argued on the basis of several pieces of evidence that social identity mechanisms are an evolutionary adaptation for between-group conflict, and these results certainly provide further support for that.

The results don’t really provide any reason for optimism for White advocacy. We already know that whatever psychological mechanisms we have for loving our racial ingroup are failing miserably throughout the Western world. One reason is that Whites do not identify with other Whites as an ingroup, so they don’t show ingroup love specifically toward Whites. In the experiments, it’s quite clear who the ingroup is, but at least for the last several decades few Whites seem to consider their race as an ingroup. Whereas the experimenters made it very clear who the ingroup was, in the real world we are constantly be told by the media that Whites are not a legitimate ingroup. Once again, “it’s the culture, stupid.”

The result is that Whites do not feel empathy for other Whites who have been victimzed — as noted in a previous blog on empathy research (“Whites lack of empathy for other Whites“). Discussions of the consequences of public policy never mention negative effects on Whites, only the negative effects on other groups. For example, the effects of amnesty are discussed only in terms of what’s good for the illegals as an oppressed, deserving group — not on the long term political and cultural viability of Whites. When public policy results might have positive consequences specifically for Whites, there is enormous anxiety among the chattering class. (This happened not long ago when people realized that tweaking the University of California admission standards to help Latinos and Blacks would likely inadvertently help Whites at the expense of Asians. Asian activists were not happy.) Whites have come to see themselves as an illegitimate ingroup.

The problem with social identity mechanisms is that because ethnicity is not relevant to defining ingroups and outgroups, these mechanisms are manipulable by the wider culture, and that is exactly what we are seeing.

The result is that the most empathic and altruistic among us fail to defend their racial ingroup. I suspect that most Whites with naturally high levels of oxytocin are expending their empathy and altruism on people quite a bit unlike themselves — adopting African babies and other such altruistic acts. And besides the gratification they get from helping others, they also get a great deal of social approval as an added bonus.

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