Counter-Currents
773 words
German translation here
One can be explicitly pro-White and support mainstream initiatives that are favorable to our cause. One can achieve quantifiable goals for our people while being explicitly pro-White. One can achieve quantifiable goals for our people while being implicitly pro-White. One can do useful work for the cause on the Internet. One can do useful work for the cause on the street. Doing intellectual work for the cause can add value, as long as it engages reality. Doing real work for the cause can add value, as long as it’s thoughtfully executed.
There is surely more than ONE TRUE WAY to fight for our people. Those making a case for their specific form of activism ought to make a positive case for why their way is more effective, not merely a negative case deriding the alternatives as ineffective. Political reality is a complicated thing, and those who have a simple plan in mind are probably simple-minded. If anyone in the movement is to be attacked, let it be those who invest the majority of their time and energy in attacking other White Advocates.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: But what about costume clowns, Matt? Shouldn’t we attack them?
A: No. Those on the radical fringe of the movement come in three basic flavors: cops, kooks, and the confused. Even if every single WN recognized the importance of projecting respectability tomorrow, there would still be enough cops to keep the groups going and the media would still showcase them to frighten the masses. Kooks are actually seeking negative attention, so attacking them only energizes them. Additionally, some of these people in these groups, especially the very young and very old, are honestly misguided and in need of mentorship – not vilification.
Q: But what about mainstream sell-outs, Matt? Shouldn’t we attack them?
A: The only time one ought to go on the offensive with mainstream types is when they say or do something anti-White. And even then, it’s intelligent to attack the sin instead of the sinner. You never know if one of these apparent “sell-outs” is a future Vladimir Putin biding his time for the right moment to strike. That’s admittedly unlikely, and most apparent sell-outs are either bonafide sell-outs or outright enemies. But to the extent that they’re rocking the boat in a pro-White direction (even if not necessarily for pro-White reasons), we should try to rock with them.
Q: But what about the polarization strategy, Matt? Shouldn’t we radicalize people? Shouldn’t we shake them off the fence?
A: In some limited cases, a well-organized political movement with an established infrastructure can benefit from polarization and ‘attacking the middle’. Even under this ideal circumstance, the tactician is taking a risk that the fence-sitter will jump to the other side of the fence and should use this tactic with caution. However, when those doing the polarizing have no political machine whatsoever and when the fence-sitter is almost guaranteed to fall on the other side of the fence, this will be an intellectually disabled disaster.
Q: But what about all these anonymous radical Laptop Luftwaffe types, Matt? Shouldn’t we badger them away from being explicitly pro-White and toward influencing viable mainstream movements like the Tea Party?
A: It’s ironic that the Tea Party keeps getting thrown around as the quintessential mainstream movement. It’s the brainchild of the most ideologically rigid and radical statesman in American political history – Ron Paul. It exists because White conservatives finally got fed up with attempting to achieve their goals by influencing the GOP from within and built up a monolithic nationwide movement that began with a tiny ideological vanguard merely a couple years ago.
In the perennial debate between vanguardism and mainstreaming, the success of the Tea Party movement is a damning indictment of those who allege that we ought to work exclusively within the respected mainstream institutions. It’s a compelling case that today’s poorly-attended meet-ups and conferences could well be incubating tomorrow’s political juggernaut. Those who remember the 2008 election will remember just how insufferably pervasive the legions of “Paultard” keyboard commandos were. They were like a swarm of libertarian locusts on every comment thread and discussion forum. At the time, political insiders blew them off as a fringe Internet phenomenon.
Now they’re the outsiders.
Q: But my feelings are hurt, Matt, and I want to throw a childish tantrum at everybody in the movement.
A: Hurt their feelings in an ideologically and politically neutral way. For example, one could hurt my feelings by calling attention to my overbite. This would effectively hurt my feelings without hurting White America in the process.
Fair and Delightsome, September 24, 2010
7 comments
At the suggestion of William Gayley Simpson, I’m reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I get the parts that Simpson and Savitri Devi would have endorsed regarding remaining strong and not falling for a religion of weakness, obviously re Christianity. But the rest of it is illogical, nonsensical, and absurd. What am I missing that makes Nietzsche so important to us?
Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s worst book. People who recommend it as an introduction to Nietzsche’s thought have done incalculable harm to his reputation. I would begin with The Antichrist. Then I would read Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche said that BGE is the prose equivalent of Zarathustra: a complete presentation of his thought.
Put down Zarathustra and pick up The Antichrist. Then read Beyond Good and Evil.
If you want to read more after BGE–and I hope you will–I would then read Twilight of the Idols, The Genealogy of Morals, The 2nd and 3rd Untimely Meditations, and then The Birth of Tragedy, in that order.
Julian Young’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion is a good introductory book. H. L. Mencken’s book on Nietzsche is useful as well.
I have read all of Nietzche’s works, many of them multiple times. I have also read a lot of the secondary literature (too much of it, truth be told). I am always willing to share my two bits if you have questions.
Sir, you are generous and helpful. Thank you. I heard you say on TPC that your race is your religion. Devi is near scripture for us, but we need an essential Manifesto or blood-based Creed, and binding Ritual to give power to our symbols. We need community.
“Zarathustra” is a drunken masterpiece and is best read as poetry. Which means that a lot gets lost by translation.
Greetings from Germany,
Zarathustra is really only comprehensible to an initiated Nietzschean — and even then it’s opaque and intemperate, even by Nietzsche’s exceedingly opaque and intemperate standards.
Either Beyond Good and Evil or Genealogy of Morals make for the best primers. I’m going to have to disagree with BG&E and recommend GoM.
I read Nietzsche in my late teens, and it’s difficult in hindsight to know how useful his insights could be to somebody who already sees through modernity. In my opinion, Nietzsche’s best contributions were when he philosophized with a hammer, but his attempts to offer alternatives to what he destroyed were sort of feminine, poetic, and intangible — perhaps intentionally so.
Dr Johnson,
I am reluctant to enter the Nietzsche debate now since I gave up Nietzsche, my favorite philosopher in my late teens, long time ago.
I agree with you that, pace Nietzsche’s high view on it, Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s worst book. I’d recommend Ecce homo as the starting point. I mean, as the starting point for not taking Nietzsche so seriously.
My approach to Nietzsche is the diametrically opposite to Heidegger’s. Heidegger ignored the real man (as he ignored the fleshy and somewhat nutty Kant in his commentary of Kant’s philosophy) in a scholarly, two-volume treatise on Nietzsche’s “metaphysics” (yeap: full of it, even taking seriously Nietzsche’s eternal return of the identical). Conversely, I focus on the man Nietzsche and read Cult Paul Janzen’s biography as well as Werner Ross’ thick book. But not only until I came across with Alice Miller’s apparently modest psychobiography on Nietzsche did I understand the poor man. Incidentally, addressing you at OD I recently mentioned Stefan Zweig’s lyric psychobiography of Nietzsche, The Struggle with the Daimon. When I lived in the U.S. the book was out of print. But Zweig’s lyric prose made it worth a trip to a large American library.
Also, as anybody who has read Nietzsche’s latest books can attest, he vigorously opposed the anti-Semitic movement of the Wagnerian cycles and even in his extended family. He was completely on the wrong side with regard to German nationalism. So wrong in fact that in Ecce homo he lies by claiming he has pure Polish blood.
Oops. There’s a name misspelling above. Should have written “Curt Paul Janz”. Sorry.
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