Counter-Currents
1,455 words
The aim of Counter-Currents Publishing and our journal North American New Right is to create an intellectual movement in North America that is analogous to the European New Right. We aspire to learn from the European New Right’s strengths and limitations and to tailor its approach to the unique situation of European people in North America. Our aim is to lay the intellectual groundwork for a white ethnostate in North America.
To achieve this aim, we must understand the proper relationship of social theory to social change, metapolitics to politics, theory to practice. We must avoid drifting either into inactive intellectualism or unintelligent and therefore pointless and destructive activism.
Guillaume Faye’s visionary new book Archeofuturism, newly translated into English and published by Arktos Media, offers many important lessons for our project. Chapter 1, “An Assessment of the Nouvelle Droite,” is Faye’s settling of accounts with the French New Right. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Faye was a leading thinker and polemicist of the French New Right before quitting in disillusionment. In 1998, after 12 years, he returned to the battle of ideas with Archeofuturism, which begins with an explanation of his departure and return.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Nouvelle Droite, led by Alain de Benoist, was a highly visible and influential intellectual movement. The Nouvelle Droite published books and periodicals like Nouvelle École and Éléments; it sponsored lectures, conferences, and debates; it engaged the intellectual and cultural mainstreams. The Nouvelle Droite did more than receive coverage in the mainstream press, it often set the terms of debates to which the mainstream responded.
The Nouvelle Droite was deep; it was highbrow; it was radical; it was relevant; and, above all, it was exciting. It was based on the axiom that ideas shape the world. Bad ideas are destroying it, and only better ideas will save it. It had the right ideas, and it was increasingly influential. Its metapolitical strategy was a “Gramscianism” of the Right, i.e., an attempt to shape the ideas and ultimately the actions of the elites—academics, journalists, businessmen, politicians, etc.—as envisioned in the writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
However, according to Faye, as the 1980s came to a close, the Nouvelle Droite became less influential: “Regrettably, it has turned into an ideological ghetto. It no longer sees itself as a powerhouse for the diffusion of energies with the ultimate aim of acquiring power, but rather as a publishing enterprise that also organizes conferences but has limited ambitions” (pp. 24–25). The causes of this decline were based partly on objective conditions, partly on the movement’s own weaknesses.
Two of Faye’s points seem particularly relevant here. I should note that even if these points do not turn out to be entirely fair to the Nouvelle Droite, they still contain universal truths that are applicable to our project in North America.
1. The rise of the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen caused a decline in the visibility and influence of the Nouvelle Droite, whereas one would have thought that the Front National’s good fortunes would have magnified the Nouvelle Droite. After all, the two movements share much in common, and there can be little doubt that the Nouvelle Droite influenced the Front National and brought new people into its orbit.
Faye claims, however, that there are many “airlocks” that seal off the different circles of the French Right. Faye claims that the Nouvelle Droite never really tried to engage the Front National, because its members fundamentally misunderstood Gramsci. Gramsci’s cultural battle was organically connected with the economic and political struggles of the Italian Communist Party. The Nouvelle Droite, however, treated the battle as entirely cultural and intellectual. Thus they were not really Gramscians. They were actually followers of Augustin Cochin’s theory of the role of intellectual salons in paving the way for the French Revolution. Under the autocracy of the old regime, of course, one could ignore party and electoral politics. But after 1789, one cannot.
The North American New Right aims to change the political landscape. To do that, we must influence people who have power, or who can attain it. That means we must engage with organized political parties and movements. No, in the end, white people are not going to vote ourselves out of the present mess. But we are not in the endgame yet, and it may be possible to influence policy through the existing system. Moreover, there are other ways that parties attain power besides voting. Just look at the Bolsheviks.
We know that the present system is unsustainable, and although we cannot predict when and how it will collapse, we know that collapse will come. It is far more likely that whites can turn a collapse to our benefit if we already have functioning political organizations that aim at becoming the nucleus of a new society. Yet we will not have functioning political organizations unless we engage the presently existing political institutions, corrupt, sclerotic, and boring though they may be.
2. Even though the Nouvelle Droite did not engage with organized politics, it was organized according to “an outdated ‘apparatus logic’ of the type to be found in political parties, which was not appropriate for a movement and school of thought, as well as journalistic or editorial policy, and which led cadres to flee on account of ‘problems with the apparatus’” (p. 27). By an “apparatus logic,” Faye seems to mean a hierarchical organization in which an intellectual and editorial “party line” is promulgated.
Although Faye does not say so, the inability of the Nouvelle Droite to interface with the Front National may in fact be based on the fact that they shared the same structure and thus naturally perceived each other as rivals promulgating slightly different “party lines” and competing for the adherence of the same public.
The North American New Right is an intellectual movement with a political agenda, but it is not a political party. We do not have a rigorous and detailed party line, but we do share certain basic premises:
(a) Ideas shape history and politics.
(b) The survival of whites in North America and around the world is threatened by a host of bad ideas and policies: egalitarianism, the denial of biological race and sex differences, feminism, emasculation, racial altruism, ethnomasochism and xenophilia, multiculturalism, liberalism, capitalism, non-white immigration, individualism, consumerism, materialism, hedonism, anti-natalism, etc.
(c) Whites will not save ourselves unless we (i) speak frankly about the role of Jews around the world in promoting ideas and policies that threaten our race’s survival and (ii) work to reduce Jewish power and influence.
(d) Whites will not survive unless we regain political control over a viable national homeland or homelands.
These premises leave a great deal of latitude for interpretation and application. But that is good. As an intellectual movement, we embrace a diversity of opinions and encourage civil debate. We believe that this is the best way to attract talented and creative people who will advance our agenda. We also believe that debating diverse perspectives on these issues is the best way to arrive at the truth, or a workable approximation of it.
The North American New Right, therefore, is not a hierarchical intellectual sect. Instead, it is a network of independent authors and activists who share certain basic principles and aims. We collaborate where collaboration is possible. Where differences exist, we seek to build consensus through dialogue and debate. Where differences persist, we agree to disagree and either change the subject or part ways. Because we are a loose network, we can overlap and interface with any number of hierarchical organizations without competing with them.
Even though the North American New Right is a metapolitical movement, and everything we do bears in some way on politics, there will be times when the connections will seem remote and tenuous. Thus we will surely be mocked as pointy-headed, ivory-tower intellectuals or apolitical dandies, poseurs, and wankers.
That’s fine. A vibrant and effective intellectual movement has to be exciting to intellectuals, and intellectuals get excited by the damnedest things. Besides, I have learned from ample experience that bullet-headed pragmatists who see no value in any ideas that cannot contribute to an immediate change in poll numbers tend to give up or sell out anyway.
What does that mean for the editorial policy of Counter-Currents and the journal North American New Right? It means, first of all, that those of you who might be holding back because you imagine you diverge from the party line around here can relax. There is no party line beyond the basic agenda outlined above. Second, it means that we welcome civil debate and commentary on our articles, interviews, and reviews, including this one (here are the guidelines).
31 comments
This is great news! Thank you.
“Besides, I have learned from ample experience that bullet-headed pragmatists who see no value in any ideas that cannot contribute to an immediate change in poll numbers tend to give up or sell out anyway.” This is true.
If people are to act right, first they must think right, which is why they must have the right ideas – STRONG ideas, that keep them on their feet and in the fight when the wind of opposition blows on them.
Interesting post. As I see it the NANR diverges at least on point ‘c’ from the classical European New Right, and I wonder how prudent it is to really have that much focus on the ‘Jewish question’.
All foreign influence on media and politics should of course be limited if at all possible, but that goes for all bad influence, so I have a hard time understanding why singling out Jews will help propel this movement forward, since raising this question makes NANR an ‘easy target’ when it comes to blatant accusations of racism, anti-Semitism, and crypto-Nazism.
As for organizing and influencing politics I am wondering how the NANR/OP feels about ‘American Third Position’ which I see as the party coming closest to promoting the ideas outlined above.
Finally it is interesting that you bring up the failure of the European New Right in connection with the at least temporary success of Front National. It seems a similar case or ‘potential’ has recently arrived in Sweden, where the Sweden Democrats have recently entered into the Swedish parliament. Sweden has a growing group of ‘identitarian’ and New Right people (among them the ‘Nordic Alliance’ whose website is currently only available in Scandinavian languages: http://www.nordiskaforbundet.se/ ). The question one could ponder is how such New Right alternatives could and should try to influence a mainstream political party. Only through ‘metapolitics’ — through blogging, publications etc, or also by actually joining the party and working directly to achieve the desired aims.
(1) RE the Jewish Question, it is naive to think that if we do not pick a fight against the Jewish community, they will not pick a fight against us. In fact, they picked a fight against whites long before any of us reading this were born. Jewish enmity toward non-Jews, and Europeans in particular, is thousands of years old and reinforced by all aspects of Jewish culture and education, religious and secular. It is, moreover, a hatred that Jews have acted on whenever they have the power, from the massacres of their ancient neighbors in the Middle East to their leading role in the implementation of genocidal immigration policies in European lands worldwide.
The futility of advocating white interests without mentioning the role of Jews in attacking and undermining them is made clear in a classy, reasonable, and pragmatic essay by John Tyndall in his magazine Spearhead here.
I don’t think that one can simply lump Jews in with other “foreign” interests and influences, if only because in North America our culture and politics are so corrupt that we would be much better off if we were controlled by practically ANY foreigners, even non-Europeans: If Bollywood bought out Hollywood, this country would be much better off.
You are right that stressing the JQ is an important difference between the NANR and the ENR. But it is a function of the differing conditions in North America and Europe. The United States is the citadel of Jewish power in the world. Jewish power is projected in Europe primarily through the US. If the US were to collapse, or if NATO and the EU were to be dissolved, Jewish influence on Europe would not disappear, given the existence of diaspora communities, economic power, and media influence, but it would be greatly reduced. Thus the ENR can focus on generic “foreign” influence, or talk about US influence, NATO, and globalism, because the Jewish Question has become so organically bound up with the “American Question.” But if we are to reassert our own identity in North America, we really have to be more discriminating and forthright.
If the Tea Party movement gets labeled racist, anti-Semitic, and crypto-Nazi, then so will the NANR. Nothing we could say or do will prevent that. So we might as well speak the truth and act effectively. The Right in America has tried everything else.
As for the editorial policy of Counter-Currents and the North American New Right journal, the Jewish Question will play less of a role here than it did when I was editor of The Occidental Quarterly, simply because nobody covers the JQ better than Kevin MacDonald, whereas my interests run more toward philosophy, religion, literature, art, music, history, sociology, sexuality, and popular culture/media criticism. The same is true of revisionism, race and race differences, economics, and foreign policy: Others handle those better than I do.
(2) I like the American Third Position. I know and respect the people who run it.
(3) People plugged into the NANR network can influence political activity BOTH through metapolitics and direct participation.
Greg, thanks for this interesting and useful statement.
I especially appreciate the clear statement of shared premises and absence of a party line.
Clearly formulated objectives increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.
Magnificent. I just linked this entry at the top of my blog. Perhaps a new symbol for the North American New Right may be useful, just as the old, Nouvelle Droit Républicaine used a revolutionary symbol.
I agree that some sort of symbol or logo is necessary, but so far the muse has not visited.
I really like the photographs of the stone sculptures at the Leipzig monument at the Battle of the Nations. Something along those lines would be inspirational at the same time as it is solemn. Are you a graphic artist as well Greg?
I wish I were a graphic artist. We need more such people in the cause. I visited the Battle of the Nations Monument near Leipzing in 2006. I thought it was actually quite brutal and massive, everything that 3rd Reich architecture is accused of being but wasn’t. This building was completed in 1913, and is a product of the 2nd Reich. But the photographs of the sculptures inside are most evocative.
I would have called it the North American New Center. I’m a centrist, and as far as I’m concerned this is a centrist movement. Right-wing? What’s that? I’m normal. That’s all.
Well, if we called ourselves “Centrist” in five minutes we would be unmasked as “Rightists,” and we would look like fools for trying to dodge the label.
Nothing to do with “dodging the label.” It’s not our label.
I don’t mouthe lies the overlords assign me to mouthe as “truth.” For example I reject the term “feminism” to refer to promotion of masculinity. Originally in the ‘60s U.S. it was called “women’s lib” then was changed to “feminism” in the ‘70s in search of a name with better PR value. If in search of a name with better PR value the Nazis had re-named themselves the Movement for the Preservation of Jewish Power in Germany, would I have used that? No.
We are the center, not something called “the right.” Calling us the right is a lie. The Jews have succeeded in re-centering discourse to make it appear as if they, Diaspora-Jewish-led government-enforced “one-coffee-colored world” blah-blah-blah, are the center. They’re not. We are. They are the extremists, the genocidalists, the sick. We are the normals, the moderates, the middle-of-the-road, the political center, the thing ordinary normal people see as ordinary, healthy, and normal.
( http://delightsome.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/white-america-has-lost-its-mind/#comment-512 )
The Vatican, in the UK the Tories and Labour, in the U.S. the Democrats, the Libertardians, the Republicans, the Limbaugh-Hannity-Beck-Palin Conservatives, the Liberals, in France Sarkozy’s party, in Germany Merkel’s, are extreme left-radical fringe. The WNs, the French “Identitaires,” the German National Socialists 1933-45, the Vlaams Belang, Nick Griffin, Le Pen, the Israeli Kahanists of today, are in the political center. I see no political right. There is none. Maybe there was. There isn’t now.
I think Right and Left are the political polarities of a modernity that is now on the skids. There are aspects of each polarity we will want to preserve (remember that nationalism, socialism, and national socialism were more Left wing than Right).
The appropriate designations for our age, I believe, are nationalist, identitarian, anti-system, anti-cosmopolitan, etc.
“Melinda Jelliby,” a self-described “liberal” and proud Euro race partisan and defender, explains how in the old days “liberals” used to be clear-headed about race and can be again, nay will have to be again if this race mess is to be solved:
http://www.amren.com/ar/2000/04/index.html .
The good news: she appears to be saying they will be again and there are a lot of them like her out there.
I will have to read this. Thanks.
“The good news: she appears to be saying they will be again and there are a lot of them like her out there.”
I don’t know, though, if that is the good news. Melinda Jelliby is an anachronism.
Liberalism is the political ideology of the modern world. As it begins now to deconstruct itself, right before our eyes, you can say that Melinda may be a good person, on our side, blood-wise, but her ideas are being made irrelevant by the first glimpses that we’re getting from the crackup of modern liberal “civilization.”
Racially conscious or not, liberal principles are now part of a collapsed world — the world, incidentally, responsible for that horror of horrors, the Judeo-Negro years of early 21st-century America.
I prefer to see ourselves as New World Europeans. America was a terrible European idea. Better to let it die.
Next time, we will self-consciously proclaim the White Republic. We can call it the Northwest American Republic or, better, the Northwest European Republic or the NW Aryan Republic — something along those lines. But the “United States” for me will always be remembered as a repulsive Jewish enterprise.
Mikey, isn’t this what Joe Sobran was sort of trying to say in his essay on his conversion to a belief in anarchist ideology. Maybe the “America” you hate so much was the result of the coup d’etat that resulted in the Constitution and not the original revolutionary idea itself.
Stronza,
If you don’t hate America, then you don’t hate what has been done to European Americans.
Either we reject the American Dream — rooted in egalitarianism and in all the other liberal modernist illusions of which the United States has been the foremost historical representative — or else we continue on our programmed path to destruction.
Do you see a choice here?
Today, sacred day September 30, 2010, I printed out this article, drove to a local coffee shop, and while surrounded by the most intolerable Diversity, which is unavoidable around here, I read it, then with Greg Johnson’s inspiration, I prepared for my celebration of Savitri Devi’s 105th birthday. I drove to a local Confederate Memorial, and there said prayers, lit a flame, and adored her, along with praising our defiant battle flag and the great Generals Robert Toombs and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
(Robert Toombs, “the Lion of Georgia” and staunch defender of Southern Whites against the tyranny of Black Rule, was eternally “unreconstructed,” and remains a role model for all White Ethno-Nationalists. He led the Whites of his native state of Georgia in overturning the illegal black power Reconstruction state constitution, giving us an organic Whites Only home rule state Constitution in 1877. Today’s Southern White Nationalists don’t expect our brothers in the North, Midwest, and West to share our passion for singing “Dixie” and reveling with us in our Lost Cause religious memory, but you must admit that our losses have been your losses. What has been done to us through All Men Are Created Equal, Emancipation, the 13th, corrupt 14th, and 15th Amendments, Brown v. Board, Integration, Civil Rights, Affirmative Action, Diversity Is Our Strength, Multicultural InterFaith Dialogue, Inclusive Tolerance, Radical Hospitality, and Compassionate Communities Centered on “the Other,” has also been done to you and originated and mandated all your dispossession. We’re all Southerners now. Get to know our loveable Lion at http://tiny.cc/i8dfr9u8nq : “…to make a constitution by which ‘the people’ shall rule and ‘the [blacks]’ will never be heard of.”)
It was a glorious and uplifting ceremony today, but sadly, no one else there was doing the same thing, proving the Dark Gloom of our present Age. But I persevered, returned to the nest of the Diversity Curse, and completed my first reading of her Gold in the Furnace.
Then to dinner, where I enjoyed a rare and greatly appreciated moment of being surrounded by 100% White customers, unheard of in this afrotropolis. Before I finished, the blacks started pushing into the restaurant with their Federally enforced Integration, all for the sake of making White Humanity miserable. Blacks have an uncanny voodoo sense, a “special intelligence” that alerts them whenever Whites are gathering without the supervision and watchful eye of Diversity. Blacks simply will not tolerate any Whites Only activities. That’s why ours are held in secrecy.
After enjoying all those refined fellow White faces in the restaurant, having to witness in person the jungle hostility of Africa genetically etched onto the faces of the blacks by the irons laws of nature, the contrast was more than pronounced and thoroughly intolerable. I left as soon as I could, and was saddened that the other Whites didn’t join the boycott. In the coming Golden Age, we won’t have that problem
I owe Greg Johnson for my devotion to Savitri Devi. After hearing him interviewed on James Edwards’ The Political Cesspool, I followed him on the Internet and eagerly anticipated the arrival of Counter-Currents. Through his blog, I started reading Revilo Oliver, who approvingly referenced Savitri Devi’s Pilgrimage. Once I encountered her unrelenting and exalted devotion to the ideals of the best of higher White Humanity, I was forever elevated into better realms.
Our dear, blessed, distinguished, esteemed, and renowned Savitri Devi, September 30, 1905 – October 22, 1982, the truest and best heroine of White Humanity.
Wow, I am honored. I need to get back to work on my biography of her.
Very rarely do I read an essay in which I agree with everything in it. So Bravo!
Yet, much of what you wrote Greg can still be expanded upon. That makes this insightful essay even more impactful. Please keep moving forward on these simple yet elegant points.
You and Counter-Currents are on to something. Keep pushing hard. This is not a hobby. This is a movement. We have each other and that is more than enough to move forward without flinching. We must get off the internet and start meeting face-to-face all over North America. That is for certain.
Thanks!
Thanks. I am working on expanding and extending this essay this very night.
Unfortunately, my project of encouraging face to face meetings through TOQ Editor’s dinners came to an end with that job. The last such dinner took place in October of 2009. I tried to get them restarted this month with a Counter-Currents Banquet and book signing in Southern California, but I had to pull the plug because I simply could not afford to bear the financial risk, and it looked like we would take a loss.
There is a message here: We need a patron. In a year or so, perhaps we will have done enough to persuade one to step forward. Stay tuned.
Greg,
How much do you estimate you need? There may be many who would be willing to help.
We need a fund of $1,500 that we can risk on one of these events. Generally, the events pay for themselves and actually generate some money. But there is always risk. Counter-Currents just can’t take the risk right now.
I see the political agenda not just as a racist, an anti-Semite, a crypto-Nazi agenda — but also as an Irish nationalist, a National Bolshevik, and a revolutionary white nationalist one, whose most important agenda point is seeing that a new civilization rises from our ideas.
A new civilization is what it will take if our people are to be reborn in the 21st century.
I think we may be entering one of those maistrian moment in which history takes a revolutionary leap back to its inmost being, beyond this stink of corruption and incompetence that is the established order, and toward a sudden coming to consciousness that gets us to where we need to be.
I don’t like the Right. But if the NANR fights for the traditions I identify with my own archeofuturist destiny, then its cause is my cause.
Short-attention-span pragmatists in search of instant gratification do not see that regardless of “immediate results” we are indispensable in a sense, a sine qua non engaged in carrying out a necessary function of honing ideas even when we are not able to directly mend things but must bide our time as we continue to clarify, refine, and plan:
(both quotes by Milton Friedman, http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5001.Milton_Friedman )
The short-attention-span instant-gratification pragmatists don’t understand how what we are engaged in now, as we are forced to bide our time, ensures that when The Day comes when we can act, we will never find ourselves in violation of Alinsky’s Rule #10 for radicals:
When The Day comes, we will know what to do, thanks to what we are doing now, “poll numbers” or not.
Your main concern is that “the survival of whites in North America and around the world are threatened.” This is a worthy concern, but all races and all humans are threatened, and all races have a will to survive, a will to power, or as I prefer, a Will to Godhood.
I do not think we can exclusively and imperialistically promote the supremacy our own race–that always sets us up for the world of races to be against us because they all have the same wish to survive and prosper as we do. If you single out the Jews or Blacks as evil and supremacist, and then turn around and present the whites in a supremacist way, you look hypercritical, as well as making yourself the enemy of all races.
I think that if whites want to survive they need to promote the survival of a variety of races, and a variety of different ethnostates—this is what I liked about the Alain de Benoist approach. Ethnostates might even work with our original Constitution, with States Rights, thereby avoiding revolution, which almost always collapses in on itself. I would not underestimate the power of Conservatism.
When the enemy is supremacy, not racism or ethnocentrism—be it Chosen Jew or Noble Aryan—then the guilty parties are seen for what they are. You can then take the moral high ground.
Stronza, on second thought, I would like to know what that original revolutionary idea was. Also, I missed the reference — knuckle-head that I am.
I suspect that the founders of America (pre-Constitution) knew perfectly well that they were running away from their problems when they decided to reject Britain and monarchy. So, the fewer the rules the better, and that is the original American revolutionary idea, I think.
Of course, even with the warnings contained in the antifederalist papers, it all went bad: constitution or not, we are imperfect and with (or without) the most beautifully formulated, mulled over, and written-out set of Rules & Regulations for the new country called America, rules are made to be broken, as they have been for over 100 years.
Does the formation of a Northwest Aryan Republic depend on its consisting of an entire population of noble character, or is it the only thing that will produce people of nobility, people who know how to behave without a fierce God & government standing over them? It is a chicken-and-egg argument if you ask me.
Stronza,
I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s a matter of some cosmic force, Providence, Being — whose ways are mysterious to us.
This is exciting!!
Many people often post very good comments to the articles, so you might want to consider including some of them in the annual volume. An online policy that states that comments could appear in print might be necessary.
This is an interesting idea. I will consider it.
The leader of the New Right, Alain de Benoist, was severely criticized by Philippe Baillet (Philippe Baillet has translate Julius Evola’s work into French) for his lack of coherence and his detestable intellectual cowardship, in two articles published in 2011 and 2012 in the French nationalist weekly Rivarol.
-“200,000 pounds for paper warriors: the case of Alain de Benoist”, Rivarol No. 2997, week of April 29, 2011.
-“A tartuffe in weightlessness or the holed memory of Alain de Benoist”, Rivarol No. 3062, week of September 28, 2012.
I think posting them on the Counter-Currents website would be a good idea.
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