Counter-Currents
A Call for a Spiritual Elite
Conservatism or Radicalism?
William Pierce
Plato and Aristotle, detail from Raphael's "The School of Athens," 1510–1511
3,765 words
The following text is a transcript of the talk given by Attack! editor Dr. William Pierce at the weekly meeting of the National Alliance on January 16, 1977.
Conservative and right-wing political groups are concerned with a number of problems these days: forced school busing, taxes, gun control, street crime, inflation. They oppose these things in various ways: through public demonstrations; through propaganda efforts with leaflets, magazines, or newspapers; through lobbying; and through election campaigns. And they gain members and supporters from those elements of the population who are also opposed to these things.
In general, the more concrete, specific, and immediate a problem is, the larger and more enthusiastic will be the public response to right-wing efforts. Some of the ad hoc organizations opposed to forced school busing claimed more than a million members at one time. The National Rifle Association, which is certainly the principal group opposed to gun control, has more than a million members now, I believe.
The people who joined the anti-busing groups did so, generally, because they felt immediately threatened by a specific and concrete menace. The people who support the NRA because of its opposition to gun-registration and gun-confiscation laws feel—and rightly so—that their fundamental right of self-defense is in immediate danger of being taken away from them.
When the issue becomes less immediate or more abstract, right-wing groups can still gain support—but not so much. American foreign policy in the Middle East and in Rhodesia is horrendous, but there is far less organized opposition to it than to busing or gun control.
Even more abstract issues, such as miscegenation and non-White immigration, still bring forth a good bit of right-wing rhetoric, but there is almost no public response to this rhetoric.
Now, everyone has observed this, and the consequence is that people or groups who want to win public support for themselves, for whatever reason, honest or dishonest, concentrate their propaganda on immediate, concrete, specific problems. That wins elections. And it brings the contributions rolling in to the money-hungry, “conservative,” fundraising outfits.
But, interestingly enough, the immediate, concrete, specific problems remain with us and continue to grow worse. Why is that?
Why is it that with so many people belonging to or supporting organizations opposed to forced busing, we have every year more and more school districts being ordered by the Federal courts to bus White children into Black schools?
Why, with all the rhetoric against taxes and with so many conservatives and right wingers supporting anti-tax organizations, do income taxes and social security taxes and property taxes become worse practically every year?
Actually, there are two ways of approaching the question. We can say we have more and more busing every year, despite all the opposition to it, because the enemies of White America want to mongrelize the country, and they are stronger, with all their money and their control of the media, than the busing opponents, and they have slipped their allies into the Federal judiciary over the years, and they have brainwashed the public, and conservatives won’t work together, and so on. And we can answer the questions about taxes and gun control the same way.
But answers of that sort, about the mechanics of the struggle, are not what I’m interested in tonight. We have a general and fundamental question before us, which is: Why do the enemies of White America keep on winning? Why are they stronger than their opponents? How is it that they have been able to slip the sack over our heads so easily? Why does the White majority always lose?
The answer we want to understand tonight is this: Right wingers, and conservatives, and the White majority generally, have been losing battle after battle—and are obviously losing the whole war as well—simply because all they are really willing to fight for are immediate, concrete, and specific things—and, in particular, things which affect them personally. That is the answer we must understand.
I was talking to our guest, Ed Fields, after our last meeting, and he told me about a speech he gave at an anti-busing rally in Louisville, Kentucky, last year. He had been talking for about 10 minutes, he said, about the importance of preserving the White race and saving White culture and stopping non-White immigration and halting intermarriage, when he was interrupted by a shout from someone in the crowd who yelled, “We don’t care about all that crap! Tell us how to stop this busing!”
Now, I believe that was an extreme case. Most opponents of busing and certainly most ordinary, decent White people do care about the things Ed Fields was talking about. They just don’t care enough about them to leave their TV sets and go to rallies and risk being labeled “racists” by a yapping pack of Jewish media hounds and their liberal camp followers. They’ll only put out that effort and take that risk to oppose something which they see as an immediate and personal threat.
So, the big conservative and right-wing groups concentrate on those things—the immediate, concrete, and personal things—and the White race keeps losing the war.
The problem is a matter of motivation, of priorities, of values.
The great majority of our people who are not liberals—that is, who have not joined the enemy—are not really concerned with winning the war. They just want to avoid becoming personal casualties. No army in history with that sort of motivation has ever won a war. And we won’t either.
When a man has a personal problem to solve—a truly personal problem—then self-interest is a proper motivation. But when a whole race is faced with a major problem, self-interest is no longer a proper motivation, and it will no more solve the problem for the race than an attitude of “every man for himself” will win a war—or even a battle—for an army.
And yet self-interest is what the conservative and right-wing organizations keep appealing to, because that is what gets an immediate response.
The essence of the problem is this: The man who is against busing is generally a man who is fairly well satisfied with the other things around him. Let’s solve this busing problem, he thinks, and then I can go back to my TV. Or let’s defeat this gun-control law, and then I can go back to what I was doing before.
If you read conservative publications, you are overcome by the stench of this attitude. American Opinion, the magazine of the John Birch Society, reeks of it. And so does the weekly tabloid published by Liberty Lobby.
They are outraged about the Federal bureaucracy because of the way it interferes in their lives. They don’t want the government meddling with their property rights. They want to be left alone so they can continue making money and spending money the way they want and doing what they want without interference.
And about the last thing they want to do is have a revolution. Why, that would be even more of a nuisance than busing, gun control, and all the Federal meddlers put together. That would really keep them away from their TV.
Remember, there are literally tens of millions of people out there, a substantial portion of them conservative, patriotic Americans, who really care whether Liz will leave John and go back to Dick again and whether the Dodgers will win the World Series.
I said it’s a problem of values. Let me give you a couple of specific examples. In American Opinion a few months back there was an article complaining about Federal forced-housing efforts. The author didn’t want anyone to think he was a racist, and he said that no true conservative has any objection to Black neighbors, so long as they are good, quiet, middle-class Blacks. He said conservatives would rather have hardworking, middle-class Blacks for neighbors than poor Whites, or, as he put it, welfare-class Whites.
The conservative objection to forced housing, he said, is only that it is forced, that conservatives don’t want to be told they have to have Blacks for neighbors, especially dirty, disorderly, welfare-class Blacks, whom they regard in exactly the same light as poor Whites.
Well, we certainly must admit that there are some Blacks who would make quieter, cleaner, more orderly neighbors than some Whites. And if that’s all we care about—that and not having the government tell us what to do—then we have to agree with the Birch Society.
But we believe—all of us here believe, I hope—that there is much, much more at stake in the forced-housing issue than property values and freedom from government interference. We have a set of values and a motivation which are fundamentally different from those of the Birch Society. And yet so many people can see only the superficial resemblance between us and the Birchers that comes from our having similar stands on certain issues.
Let me give you another example. In this week’s issue of Newsweek magazine there is a guest editorial by a White conservative complaining about the ridiculous extent to which the courts and the Federal bureaucracy—especially the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—have gone to assure minorities a better-than-even break. Reverse discrimination, he says, is un-American.
Of course, we’ve all heard the Jews yelling the same thing, as soon as Blacks started demanding their share of jobs in those occupations in which Jews are overrepresented, such as journalism and university teaching. With the Jews it’s clearly selfishness, pure and simple, because they’re all for reverse discrimination when it’s the White plumber or electrician or sheet-metal worker who has to give up his job to a Black or a Chicano or an Asiatic.
But I don’t believe the White conservative writing for Newsweek is worried that some Negro is going to get his job. His worry is simply that the Jews and the guilt-ridden liberals and the corrupt politicians who cater to the minority vote are overdoing the “equality” racket and are generating a backlash among Whites which is undoing what the Federal equality laws were supposed to do, namely, to create a society without discrimination of any kind, a color-blind society.
He sees the EEOC fanatics stirring up a hornet’s nest of hostility, of racial conflict, of divisiveness. Forcing equality on people, he says, is disuniting the United States and unmelting the melting pot. And that means trouble and unrest ahead. And, like conservatives in general, he doesn’t want trouble. He wants unity and prosperity and peace at any price.
Now, perhaps we should try to be charitable and not accuse such conservatives of being motivated by nothing but egoism and materialism. Perhaps the fellow writing in Newsweek is basically a patriot who simply wants a strong and peaceful and united United States above all else, completely aside from what these things will mean to his own income and safety and living standard. And perhaps he really believes that a truly color-blind government, which discriminates neither in favor of Blacks nor Whites, will make America strong and peaceful. Maybe he really believes that. I am sure a lot of conservatives do.
But even if they were right—and, in the long run, they certainly cannot be—their values and their priorities are totally wrong.
Prosperity and harmony are nice. Peace is nice—but not peace at any price, certainly not peace at the price of racial mongrelization.
And, in fact, our values are so totally different from conservative values that I say we would not even be interested in peace if we could be guaranteed that it would not lead to mongrelization. Not even if the country or the world could be divided up into little enclaves for Blacks and Whites and Chicanos and Jews and so on, every one respecting the rights of his neighbors and staying inside his own boundaries. That, again, is the dream of a conservative soul, and it is a false dream.
Our dream is a progressive dream, a dream of unlimited progress over the centuries and the millennia and the eons which lie ahead of us. It is no conservative dream of peace, no sheeplike dream of ease and consumption and safety, but a dream of the achievement of our Destiny, which is Godhood. It is the only dream fitting for men and women of our race; it is the spirit of the Creator, it is the Universal Urge within us, expressing itself through our race-soul.
You know that is true; you know that is the only dream for us, that what I am telling you is right. Yet, when you leave here tonight it will be all too easy, I am afraid, for you to slip back into old ways of thinking, into wrong ways.
I’m afraid of that because I receive letters all the time from our members, who’ve been paying their dues and receiving their bulletins regularly, who apparently do not understand what is written in those bulletins. They are teachers and policemen and lawyers—people for whom our message certainly should not be too abstract or too complicated to grasp—but they are also people thoroughly enmeshed in contemporary society, thoroughly involved, every day, with other people whose values and ideas all come from their TV sets.
And because our values are so different from the TV values, it may be hard for some of our people to make the transition, to clear the conservative cobwebs out of their minds, so that our dream, the dream of the White race-soul, comes through loud and clear.
It is easier for us, here in our little community, to understand our Truth, and it may be necessary for many of our other members, scattered all across the continent—all across the world now, in fact—to also have the moral reinforcement which comes from living and working together with others who have the same dream before they can achieve the same degree of understanding we have.
I am sure that will be necessary for some, but not for all. For some the dream is strong enough so that it is sufficient for them to receive our publications and listen to our meeting tapes—that is, to be members of our community in spirit, even if they cannot be here in the flesh.
But the problem that remains for us is this: our dream is a radical dream, and the dream of the masses is a conservative dream.
We want a revolution which brings about a permanent transformation of the values and priorities and goals of our society and lays the groundwork for the building of a whole new world. They want a quick and easy end to certain concrete and specific annoyances, so that they can go back to their TV.
Even the least selfish and most thoughtful of the conservatives base their programs entirely on the TV values, the TV philosophy, the TV religion. At most, they want to annul the social and racial changes of the last few decades and restore what existed before the last war.
So this great gulf lies between us and them, between our Truth and the materialist-conservative view of life. And yet, they are our people. It is from them, from the great masses, that we must recruit the new members upon which the growth and even the continued existence of our community depend.
We certainly have not reached the point where we can afford to wall ourselves and our families off from the rest of society, where we can isolate our community from the Jewish Babylon around us and depend upon our own reproductive powers to continue building our community. We may never reach that point. So we must bridge the gulf.
How? Do we put on a conservative mask and continue putting out leaflets and publishing a newspaper which talk about busing and gun control and racial job quotas and the media monopolies and the other things conservatives are interested in—as we have been doing—but without the radical overtones which frighten or confuse or bore them?
That is, do we deradicalize our public image? Do we become a sort of conservative front group?
Remember, we talked a couple of meetings ago about making it easier and less frightening for prospective recruits to join us. We talked about the necessity of growing faster than we are growing now.
But there is also something else to remember. And that is that there are dozens of conservative groups already out there, experienced, well-financed, well-organized conservative groups. And at least some of them are run by real conservatives, men who think and feel the same way those do they are trying to recruit.
Should we imagine that we, outsiders who think and feel on an entirely different wavelength, can be more successful at that game? I think not.
And even if we were more successful, by being cleverer or more energetic or more ruthless than the others, would we have a real success?
We would have a structure without a foundation, a structure held together by pretense. Is that what we want for the long haul ahead? I think not.
Now, I am certainly not ruling out the use of front groups and ad hoc organizations. They are perfectly good and useful tools, and we expect to use them at a certain stage of our development.
But for the achievement of our long-range goals, for the principal vehicle for our revolution, for the organization which embodies the fundamental Truth expressed in our Affirmation, we must have a foundation of the hardest stone, not of sand. And that stone must be cemented together with truth, not pretense
We do not bridge the gulf between our community and the masses of our people by pretending to be something we are not. If we have made a mistake in the past, it has been trying to sit on two stools at the same time, trying to be both conservative and radical. And if we are to correct that mistake in the future, it must be to abandon conservative pretenses. It must be to become completely truthful in our recruiting efforts.
So, let us light a beacon of truth and let us always hold out a friendly hand of understanding to the masses of our people who do not yet share our outlook. But let us make no compromises with the falsehoods which now govern their lives. Let us make no pretense that we believe that busing or taxes or racial quotas are really fundamental issues. Let us make it clear to everyone that these things are only symptoms of the disease, and one does not cure a disease by treating its symptoms.
What this means for us now and in the near future—that is, as long as we are working through one organization and are not yet ready to use fronts—is this: We will concentrate our resources on fundamentals and will be obliged to a very large extent to let other groups attack the symptoms. We will concentrate on reaching the masses of our people with our Truth in its most fundamental form, and we will let the National Rifle Association fight gun control and the National States Rights Party fight busing, and we wish them well.
Another way of saying this is that we will be uncompromisingly radical rather than conservative. Of course, if the word “radical” still frightens you, you may substitute “fundamental”—which means exactly the same thing—for it.
And does this make sense when we so desperately need to grow faster than we have been? Does it make sense to try to reach people ruled by materialism with a message which is essentially spiritual? Does it make sense to be more radical when some of our own members even now are still thinking in conservative terms?
Well, let’s concede first that, although we will be preaching to the masses, we understand that only a minority, only a spiritual elite, will be capable of responding to our message. We want to light a beacon and we want to make it burn as brightly as we can, so that it will cast its rays over all our people, but we know that only a few will actually see our light, will actually understand and respond to our Truth. We concede that.
But this is the way it has always been. Every great and positive revolution of human history, every conscious step upward on the never-ending Path of Life symbolized by our Rune, has been the work of a minority, of an elite. Masses don’t make revolutions—determined and committed minorities do.
We don’t hope to make revolutionary idealists out of the egoistic and materialistic masses, but we do hope to awaken and inspire and recruit that minority of our people in which the Divine Spark already burns brightly enough to illuminate their souls and their minds so that they can grasp our Truth. And the way to do that is to present our Truth to them as purely and as plainly and as clearly as we possibly can—not to dress it in a conservative disguise, which leads only to confusion.
We want everyone to know that we understand that what’s really important is not whether we can elect a government which won’t try to impose racial quotas on us or whether we can achieve domestic tranquility but whether the Truth that is in the race-soul of our people shall overcome the alien falsehoods which rule us now, so that that Truth can guide us once again to the upward Path, to the Path of the Creator’s Self-Realization, and so that we can once again become agents of the Universal Will—except this time fully conscious agents—and resume our never-ending ascent toward our ordained Destiny.
That’s what’s important, and that is what must be achieved. Then everything else—all the conservative goals—will either have been taken care of automatically or they will have become irrelevant.
So, once again, the immediate question before us is not whether to be more radical or more conservative in order to grow faster, but how to present our radicalism—our Truth—in the best, in the clearest, in the most appealing way, how to avoid confusion, how to minimize negativism, how to reassure those who are timid and hesitant.
We understand that we are casting our net very wide and expecting to catch only a few. But we want to be sure that we do catch all those who are fit for catching. And the way to catch those who are fit is with the pure and unadulterated Truth.
Source: Attack!, no. 51, 1977
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23 comments
The essays of Dr. Pierce are timeless and this one is no exception. In order for whites to triumph they will need an all encompassing racial/spiritual worldview to guide them. It simply isn’t enough to profess love and reverence for the Constitution, the free market or supporting the latest conservative cause celebre. There were plenty of people then as now that are doing those very things and I fail to see how WN’s can make, for example, the NRA more successful at defending the second amendment or Numbers USA more effective with state and federal legislators.
If some WN’s think that donning a conservative disguise and speaking in tongues is the way to gain the trust of aracial Republicans then I say go for it. But it will take much more than one arrogant little blogger who thinks he’s found the secret sauce and his 5-10 kool-aid drinkers to have any meaningful impact using this tactic.
I really appreciated Pierce’s point that White Nationalists who are merely pretending to be conservatives are not going to be competitive against sincere conservatives in attracting support.
Timeless indeed! Thanks for republishing it. Pierce was indeed a national treasure. Ice-clear transparency of thought is breathed in his writing: precisely what I breathe when contemplating the painting by Caspar David Friedrich that you chose as a sort of avatar, Greg. It reminds that some time ago the “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” oil-on-canvas was used to illustrate Penguin’s Ecce Homo, the most tragic book by Nietzsche.
@ “Does it make sense to try to reach people ruled by materialism with a message which is essentially spiritual?”
No. As Lincoln Rockwell put it, a white nationalist is someone concerned with his race. A conservative is concerned with his money.
His money and his precious ” Judeo-Christian morality.” Both are dead-ends for our people!!
That’s right Uncle Fritz: both are the curse of western man. One of my favorite articles republished in C-C (originally posted at The Occidental Observer) interpreted both Wagner’s and LOTR’s ring as the corporate capitalism, a temptation that the West did not resist: the cause of our fall.
But the other side of the “ring” is a later form of Judeo-Christianity: liberalism, including the so-called neo-conservatism.
Just one example. Before my WN transformation of a year ago I had started blogging in a counter-jihad site named Gates of Vienna (GoV). It struck me greatly that despite his vast knowledge of economics, politics and the humanities the pious Christian who runs the site never dared to break away from (suicidal) philo-Semitism, let alone daring to confront the race issue. The GoV administrators fancy themselves as conservatives fighting against immigration but with their Star of David on their blogsite they’re in fact neo-cons.
It’s not only that westerners have become cowards as Pierce noted. Presently it’s their very moral grammar what’s killing us. That’s why, in contrast to the WN sites that have gone mainstream, we need to revaluate our axiology like the “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”.
I’ve always enjoyed reading Dr. Pierce’s world-view of our race as being on an evolutionary path toward Godhood. Cosmotheism was Pierce’s name for it but Nietzsche and Hitler also held the same world-view under different names (Superman for Nietzsche and Nazism for Hitler).
That world-view is not new or even original. It was he same ‘call to Godhood’ that our pre-Christian pagan ancestors (Spartans, Romans, Vikings, the whole Germanic tribal community etc.) heard and followed. It is as old as our white race, the Aryan race, itself. It has as its end result the colonization of Space, High Culture on Earth as well as attainment of higher states of consciousness. The Jews actions and Zionist actions are primarily to ensure it never triumphs.
And like Uncle Fritz says its true. Christianity is a dead-end for our people. It is one of Zion’s many philosophies, like its secular variants of jewish liberalism, Marxist Socialism or Communism, Freudianism and on to stop our Volk from becoming what we have been appointed by Destiny to become.
The thing that strikes me is; from the cosmic perspective Lincoln Rockwell, Pierce, Lane will be like giants of our race who walked this Earth alongside millions of insignificant ‘ordinary’ Judeo-Christian right-wing whites who’s thoughts and actions will likely count for little in our race’s History and eventual Destiny (if we achieve it).
@ “I’ve always enjoyed reading Dr. Pierce’s world-view of our race as being on an evolutionary path toward Godhood.”
Are Pierce’s essays collected anywhere, a book I can purchase or a blog I can visit? This seems exactly my own ideology and it’s surprising that an intellectual has already developed it long ago! (Those in the WN blogs that have “going mainstream” will never get that only the activation of a dormant archetype in our people’s collective unconscious can save our race.)
To me, the visual experience of Nordish female beauty intuitively “proves” a sort of teleological, evolutionary panentheism. That is why the current anti-white zeitgeist, which implies the extinction of the evolution’s crown (if we imagine it as idealistically as the most inspired painters depict the eternal feminine) is the sin against the holy ghost. Hegel and Schelling would come handy here, but only if we feel Nature’s divinity through, say, Wordsworth’s eyes.
@”Are Pierce’s essays collected anywhere, a book I can purchase or a blog I can visit?”
http://www.archive.org/details/CosmotheismTrilogyByWilliamLutherPierce
There is also ‘Who We Are’ Pierce’s evolutionary theory, similar to Charles Darwins’ and more in keeping with the original intent of Darwins theory than the watered down, mainstream zionist version we know today.
http://jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/WilliamLutherPierce Who We Are.pdf
The dormant archetype in the European collective unconscious was successfully awoken in Germany gradually throughout the 20’s and 30’s. Carl Jung called it the activation of WOTAN, the chief god of the pagan northern European (Germanic or Deutsch) tribes. He wrote about it in his 1936 essay on Wotan which you can find on the internet. Basically it would be the dominant god of each European tribes pantheon e.g. for the Greeks Zeus or Apollo, for the Latin’s Mars or Jupiter, for the Celts Taranis. For the Germans it is Wotan. Whatever tribal-god we call it, it is the same Archetype. It is like our race’s ‘all-seeing eye’ the Aryan ancestral collective unconscious that links us with our past (Histroy) and guides us toward our future (Destiny). Jews have always tried to ‘neutralize’ it
but the European Folk-Soul has continued its struggle throughout the centuries.
Awake the Archetypes!
David Lane’s 14 Words resonate strongly with it. I believe that was his intent.
“The great majority of our people who are not liberals—that is, who have not joined the enemy—are not really concerned with winning the war. They just want to avoid becoming personal casualties. No army in history with that sort of motivation has ever won a war. And we won’t either.”
Thus the curious phenomenon of the ‘celebrity’ who, despite having achieved money, fame and influence to last a lifetime, will grovel before the cameras to beg forgiveness for some perceived “gaffe”. I wonder what would really happen if a Mel Gibson said, “Of course Jews start every war, are you people idiots?”
Conservatives are merely reactionary; therefore they depend on the left for those things to react to. Their participation actually gives support to the left by legitimizing bizarre leftwing postulates through polite discussion. Look at their handling of college entrance discrimination. Without the left they would have nothing to do. Such dependency is clearly subordinate. They are, in a real sense, nothing more than hand maidens of the left.
Like most radicals, Pierce generally focused on ends while glossing over means. If there is no means to implement an idea, then the idea has little real value in practice until such means are identified. Attempting to awaken a spiritual and cultural elite to the existential struggle for race survival is necessary for survival but not sufficient. Many in WN circles seem to view an awakening as sufficient when it isn’t. In order to survive, we need an approach that the combines the right end with an attainable means.
William Pierce:
LEW: Presently the radicals do have a pragmatic plan. Are you familiar with it?
Chechar, I see HAC as an exception among the radicals because he is both radical and pragmatic. He focuses on both the means (migration and secession) and the end (an ethnostate). Most radicals tend to focus only on the desirability and necessity of the end.
For example, consider this very essay by William Pierce. According to the heading, there are 3748 words in this essay. Out of that total, Pierce spends about 320o words focusing on what will not work (conservatism), about 600 words discussing in very broad generalities what he believes will work (largescale spiritual transformation led by elites), and zero words discussing a practical implementation plan for what he claims is the only approach that will work.
This is typical radical discourse.
I think the practical aspects of bringing about racialist communities or an ethnostate in N. America was beyond the scope of this article. I suggest you consult with a former member of the NA under Pierce to learn of any specifics you feel are lacking. I can tell you that from following the NA from 1995-2002 its mission was primarily educational and not focused on winning elections.
Pierce believed that a revolution in thought and values must precede any revolutionary and lasting changes to the present system. After all, a countervailing worldview/ideology is needed to fight the radical left and what passes for one in conservative quarters rarely extends beyond the economic realm.
What is Occidental Dissent offering in the way of specifics these days other than throwing bombs at “vanguardists” of all stripes and promoting conservatism? When will the strategy for infiltrating the conservative establishment come to fruition? Has it even commenced yet? How will OD wrest control of conservatism from the ruling neo-conservatives?
The devil is always in the details.
OD’s readership is so small (down 45% since June), and so geographically spread out, that I defy you to find a political race so close that its readers could make a difference by participating in the political process. Yet through the magic of make-believe, Hunter Wallace claims that “we” are taking our country back.
There is more to pragmatism and practicality than electoral politics. An implementation plan is necessary even for radicals who reject elections as having no value for Whites.
Again, consider the example of HAC. He is a radical who totally rejects electoral politics, yet he is also pragmatic. In his podcasts, he spends at least as much time encouraging people to act now by migrating to the northwest, without waiting for a mass spiritual and cultural transformation, than he does discussing the need for a transformation and a new vision. HAC clearly understands the need for a vision because he is trying to articulate one through his fiction, but articulating the vision is not his only or even main focus. So I’d say HAC is closer to a winning formula than Pierce was during his life because he emphasizes both dimensions of the struggle.
To return to my original point, articulating the idea, goal or spiritual vision in a compelling way is only necessary not sufficient for change. I’m not denying that those things are necessary.
So, LEW, you think Covington is PRACTICAL?
Hmm.
Review of Harold Covington’s Podcast dated 3 February 2011
by Hadding Scott
Covington’s analysis of the Egyptian situation seems reasonable and it’s pretty much what I would have said if I had been interested enough to say something about it. What you have in Egypt is a populist uprising against a US-backed oligarchy. The government that replaces it is not going to be a liberal democracy, because liberal democracies are too easily taken over by money and foreign influence, and also because the character of that region’s population is fundamentally intolerant and unsuited to representative government of the kind that barely works under the best circumstances in Northern Europe. It will be another authoritarian government but probably one that is closer to the sentiments of the people outside of the present oligarchy, which means among other things, not friendly to Israel and less susceptible to US influence.
History is Covington’s strong point, and he really sounds on the ball until he says that he thinks MOSSADEQ was ruling Baghdad when Saddam Hussein participated in a failed a coup-attempt in 1959 (against General Qassim). Why doesn’t Covington check these things? Besides, I thought everybody knew that Mossadeq was the IRANian head of state that Eisenhower had the CIA overthrow. This should be ingrained in the mind of anybody that lived through all the talk about the Shah in the late 70s, but then Covington at that time was very busy with other things (with Frank Collin’s NSPA and all the drama surrounding that).
Then Covington goes advocating violent revolution, which he does frequently. The reality is, nobody is going to “remove the United States from power” until the U.S. Government is essentially defunct anyway. The Confederate States of America had a reasonable shot at secession if they could have gotten some powerful foreign assistance. I don’t see any state or collection of states having that good a chance at unilateral secession until the Federal Government has already withered into total impotence, which it may do, but probably not until some decades from now.
Defeatism regarding the possibility of establishing racial communities is a constant theme with Covington. How can Covington maintain that the giant goal of a breakaway republic is feasible if the much humbler and clearly feasible of voluntary racial segregation is not?
To say that racial communities will not be viable until an independent White republic has been formed is to demand that a goal be reached without any of the steps that lead to it. It is like telling Hitler in the 1920s that he is wasting his efforts on the NSDAP because the government will never allow it to succeed, that he must first become head of state so that the party’s existence will be secure. If you can just become Emperor of the Universe, then your problems will be solved! Why didn’t we think of that?
There are de facto racial communities all over the country already. Whole regions even (and not just the Northwest). Otherwise there would be no point to “White flight.” Blacks are concentrated in big cities, coastal lowlands, and river valleys. Voluntary or happenstance self-segregation of races is a fact of everyday life.
Part of Covington’s argument here is based on the assumption that the people in a White community will obediently comply with Federal pressure. He makes the either/or assumption that anybody not wanting to buy into his “Northwest Republic” pie in the sky ipso facto has no will to resist at all.
The resistance put up by Southern politicians against the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in their efforts to force racial integration was unnecessarily lame. No state governor took an uncompromising position to set an example for the people of his state. No state politician chose prison over submission to Federal will, as they should have done. That would have trumped the moral-martyrdom posturing of “civil rights” demonstrators getting arrested or hosed down in the street. It would have been a giant headache and embarrassment for the Federal Government to put a duly elected governor of a state in prison, but Wallace, Faubus, and Barnett after staging a token resistance unfortunately didn’t stand their ground. It should not have been that way.
Covington indulges some talk about committing sadistic acts of violence against Blacks. Setting them on fire, etc. This kind of talk seems designed mainly to attract attention. It’s rather irresponsible, and I’ll let George Lincoln Rockwell explain why:
“I feel that terrorism is a valid weapon in guerrilla warfare, or any kind of warfare; and under the circumstances in which our country finds itself, I would favor terrorism if it could be complete — if it would work. A hundred years ago, I’d have been a Klansman with a rope and a gun and the whole business. I’d have really gone all out during the Reconstruction to save the white South.And make no mistake about the terrorism: It did the job. But today, it plays directly into the hands of Martin Luther Coon; it manufactures martyrs for the Northern press, for the liberals, and it doesn’t scare the niggers out of hell-raising anymore.” [Playboy interview, 1966]
Covington was pretty clearly winking at the Jared Loughner shooting spree immediately after it happened, on the false assumption that it was somehow White-Nationalistically motivated. Here he seems to be encouraging that kind of counterproductive behavior, that kind of “partial terrorism” as Rockwell called it, again. If that is not Covington’s intention then he is just blowing hot air for the sake of appearing radical (and probably to sell his fantasy novels).
Either way, is this really helpful?
Chechar: “Timeless indeed! Thanks for republishing it. Pierce was indeed a national treasure. Ice-clear transparency of thought is breathed in his writing: precisely what I breathe when contemplating the painting by Caspar David Friedrich that you chose as a sort of avatar, Greg. It reminds that some time ago the “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” oil-on-canvas was used to illustrate Penguin’s Ecce Homo, the most tragic book by Nietzsche.”
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Dr. Pierce used Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Mists (1818) on the cover of National Vanguard magazine (No. 98), January 1984, with the stRiki-Eiking powder-blue, tinted background. The blurb on that cover reads, “New Heights Ahead: Toward a More Exalted Life.”
One of my most treasured books is the bound collection of all those rare, early editions of NV magazine. These magazines need to be scanned and put on the Web just as someone is now putting up the past editions of Wilmot Robertson’s Instauration magazine. Dr. Pierce occasionally wrote for Instauration under his familiar ‘nom de guerre’, Andrew MacDonald. I notice in looking through NV No. 98 that “WR – Cape Canaveral, FL,” had a long letter to the editor published expressing how moved he was by Vic Olvir’s “Sylvia Plath: Stasis in Darkness” article in NV No. 97 (p. 5): “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read and is a perfect example of what we all should be doing on the cultural front. Obviously, such an article will not expand the number of your [National Alliance] members by any great degree, but it should strike a very sympathetic note in a few hearts.”
Like in the hearts of Dr. Pierce’s “vanguardists,” mayhaps? I haven’t read that Plath thread at C-C yet, but I will. If WR’s letter is not there, perhaps I’ll transcribe it.
Chechar (in another thread): ” Everyone who clicks on my moniker hits my blog and voila, my real name is revealed…”
—
Nice looking blog. Does your given name by chance derive from Roman Law? I notice you promote some “mainstreamer” WNs there along with vanguardist Dr. Pierce, and other alleged “vanguardists.” Guess which alleged “vanguardist” that you promote on your blog wrote this back in 1989:
“I will say this, for the record—in my view, right now Christian Identity is pretty much the way to go for the Movement, so long as Identity is coupled with a political ideology such as White separatism, Southern Nationalism, or National Socialism. – Joshua 1:6”
Those pesky “paper trails” — tsk! tsk. Compare that with this: https://counter-currents.com/2010/10/on-christianity/comment-page-1/#comment-2074 Dr. Pierce, same year, from his February ‘89 National Alliance Members BULLETIN:
“The greatest obstacle to the survival of our race is Christianity. Even with all their malice and cunning, the Jews would pose no real threat to the race were it not for their Christian collaborators. In the U.S. just as in South Africa, the Jews may be pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes, but the troops in the war against the White Race are mainly White Christians filled with religious guilt and obsessed with the need to expiate that guilt by sacrificing their own race on the altar of ‘equality’…Let us never forget…that Christianity itself is an alien, hostile, racially destructive creed of Jewish origin, and in the future most of those who have fallen under its spell will continue to be our enemies and the enemies of our race.”
—
Chechar, you wrote that it does NOT make sense to try to reach people ruled by materialism with a message which is essentially spiritual. Dr. Pierce’s Cosmotheist world view didn’t worship imaginary “spirits,” like ghosts, gods, devils or angels. His National Alliance had a spiritual aspect to it that resonated in the hearts of a small minority; quality always before quantity. The concluding sentence in Dr. Pierce’s essay bears repeating: “We understand that we are casting our net very wide and expecting to catch only a few. But we want to be sure that we do catch all those who are *fit* for catching. And the way to catch those who are fit is with the pure and unadulterated Truth.”
Dr. Pierce strived to attract the ones he saw as most “fit* by telling them the pure and unadulterated TRUTH. From that tiny minority of our most *fit* were chosen the true vanguard, as he saw it. And around that select core of truth-seeking stalwarts his National Alliance would grow the mass movement of will and determination that would renew our race and take back our nation. That’s always what the title of the Alliance’s magazine National Vanguard referred to…until, that is, Dr. Pierce died and his successor went “big tent” like all those who spit the word “vanguard” out of one side of their mouths while lying through their teeth out of the other.
Thanks for the info W.W. It always helps listening to all points of view.
When last year I listened with Pierce’s own voice The Turner Diaries it boggled my mind. At least one person in the world thinks like I do, I told to myself in silent soliloquy.
I am not a religious person but intrinsically am not opposed to Christianity. However, the liberal Christianity we got today betrays the old one. Mel Gibson’s father could be my friend; the philo-Semite, counter-jihad Christians who “fight” immigration are not my kind of pals.
@ “Nice looking blog. Does your given name by chance derive from Roman Law?”
No. “Chechar” is merely a family nick that resonates with my real name “Cesar”.
Joseph Walsh:
@”Are Pierce’s essays collected anywhere, a book I can purchase or a blog I can visit?”
http://www.archive.org/details/CosmotheismTrilogyByWilliamLutherPierce
There is also ‘Who We Are’ Pierce’s evolutionary theory…
http://jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/WilliamLutherPierce Who We Are.pdf
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Thank you so much for sharing those valuable links, Joseph. I didn’t see WLP’s Who We Are at the second link, but jrbooksonline is a great source for race-thinkers. The only place I’ve ever seen WWA online is at Stormfront, put up one chapter at a time by Dave Pringle, here: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showpost.php?p=5523806&postcount=90
The first link you provided that takes the reader to Dr. Pierce’s Cosmotheism trilogy worked, however, and I found this most interesting article there that ties Dr. Pierce’s Cosmotheism to Ben Klassen’s Creativity religion:
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“Cosmotheism is an alternative to the infantile and spiritually unsatisfying Semitic world religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which have brought Western Civilization, White countries and the European peoples over the world to a morbid and terminal state of decline.
“Cosmotheism is a scientific-spirituality based religion, a convergence of White separatist ideologies, cosmic evolutionary theory and human genetic engineering meets religion and spirituality. Because Cosmotheism embraces White racial internationalist goals and European racial separatist philosophies, it is a religion that parallels Ben Klassen’s ‘The Church of the Creator’ in that based on the criteria for membership, exclusively, only racially and genetically conscious White, European or Caucasian stock may join. Therefore, it is not enough to be of European origin and racial stock to be a member, but one must also have eugenic racial consciousness, or embrace the idea that White people must consciously direct their own evolution toward higher states of consciousness and being.
“Dr. William Luther Pierce the founder of the National Alliance created the religion Cosmotheism to teach and explain to European peoples of the world the true reason for their existence and purpose which is conscious evolution towards Godhood…
“William Luther Pierce (deceased) postulates the central core of the race based White religion of Cosmotheism as being for the descendants of Europeans who have populated the world and have a shared race-soul and higher collective-consciousness to join this religion. Each Cosmotheist man and woman becomes like a single cell in a self-aware mind, working together for the future of White people…
“In his speech “Our Cause”, Pierce simplifies the bare minimum saying:
“All we require is that you share with us a commitment to the simple, but great, truth which I have explained to you here, that you understand that you are a part of the whole, which is the creator, that you understand that your purpose, the purpose of mankind and the purpose of every other part of creation, is the creator’s purpose, that this purpose is the never-ending ascent of the path of creation, the path of life symbolized by our life rune, that you understand that this path leads ever upward toward the creator’s self-realization, and that the destiny of those who follow this path is godhood.”
“With the death of Dr. William Pierce and the arrest of Matt Hale leader of the defunct ”orld Church of the Creator’, Some Cosmotheists and Creators have made the decision and a pact to merge both religions into a single religion.
“Dr. Pierce’s Cosmotheism and Klassen’s Church of Creator are now one religion.
“visit: http://www.SolarGeneral.com”
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I don’t know who authored that statement but he’s right, except for the part about Matt Hale. There was a synthesis of Ben Klassen’s Creativity and Dr. Pierce’s Cosmotheism even before Klassen’s death in 1993, well before Hale decided to co-opt Creativity and claim his WCOTC was a successor to Klassen’s COTC.
It’s interesting in light of the fact that the Creativity Alliance — the only Creator faction I recognize as legitimate — has actually adopted Dr. Pierce’s old National Alliance Membership Handbook for its own Church of Creativity – MARK III members. The CA Handbook put back the five pages that Dr. Pierce’s successor as Chairman of NA took out in a lame attempt at a “broader outreach.” I posted those deleted pages at C-C a couple of months ago here: https://counter-currents.com/2010/10/on-christianity/ as “Opposed Ideologies.”
Thanks for bringing to notice those five deleted pages Will.
To be honest, residing in Britain I have never been involved in any NA or Creativity organization. I am aware of the basics of their history however and have read much of their literature.
From what I can remember from reading Klassen’s Nature’s Eternal Religion I can see how a synthesis of Cosmotheism and Creativity was brought about in the late 80s or early 90s. Both held Nature, as opposed to the jewish/Christian/Islamic conception of man or God, as the eternal truth, entirely in accordance with our European ancestors, before Christianity conquered Europe in roughly the 1200s-1300s, by our time of reckoning. Creativity had a more biological-materialist conception of nature from what I can recall, sort of a ‘racial atheism’, whereas Cosmotheism was more inclined toward a spiritual-biological conception using Jungian terms like race-soul.
I feel all pagan WNs have a common religious aim which is the upward spiritual and biological development of our Folk in all areas. Christianity, as Nietzsche and many, many other folk have pointed out, tends to view attainment of Strength and Wisdom (and the subsequent Joy in attainment of them) as sinful or evil which leaves our race with a morbid conscience and works against our advancement as a people.
Although I and many others know Christian theology is incompatible with WN, we simply cannot afford to let religious/political/economic/national or any other issues divide our people at this extremely crucial point in Europe’s history. Our drive is the 14 Words and we can’t divide and separate based on differences, however large (religion) or small (music tastes).
Here’s the treasure trove of 308 audio files of Dr. Pierce telling it to our people as he saw it: http://www.archive.org/details/DrWilliamPierceAudioArchive308RadioBroadcasts
Don’t send your sons and daughters off to college to have their minds corrupted and to become debt slaves to JOG educational loans for years. Have them listen to these broadcasts for free; then test them for comprehension until you know their hearts are properly steeled. That will prepare them for for the grim future they face better than the PC crap and Jewcult they will be exposed to in today’s halls of academia. There are scholastic disciplines excepted, of course, for the exceptional student: the sciences, math, engineering, etc., but students who matriculate to those demanding fields of study also need these vital teachings that Professor Pierce left to them.
I find virtually anything written or spoken by William Pierce to be of outstanding value. When he was alive, I always logged onto his latest Saturday broadcast as soon as I could, and then forwarded it around. His publication, The Best Of Attack and NV, is to this day, one of the best things he ever put out. Every serious WN should possess and read that book
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