Hegemony

2,603 words

Translations: French, German, Polish

In September of 2001, just after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I flew to Paris to attend the Front National’s Fête des Bleu–blanc–rouge, a political rally and fair attended by tens of thousands of French nationalists, plus well-wishers from around the world. Before the event began, I attended an impromptu meeting of Anglophone nationalists from the US, Canada, and Great Britain.

When the topic of 9/11 came up, there was a very instructive disagreement. The Americans wanted to emphasize the role of Jewish domination of American foreign policy in causing 9/11. England, however, has a much larger Muslim population per capita than the US, and many of the Englishmen present had witnessed the jubilation of Muslims at the attacks. So they emphasized the problem with Muslim immigration.

Of course they were both right. The 9/11 attacks could not have happened without Jewish domination or Muslim immigration. As I listened to the discussion becoming more and more heated, it dawned on me that no matter what side one takes on the question, “Do we blame the Jews or the Muslims?” white people cannot really lose, since we want to free ourselves of both Jews and Muslims.

Framing the Argument

I had always thought of politics as a matter of winning arguments, i.e., being on the prevailing side in debates about political issues. But it occurred to me that there is a power greater than that of winning an argument. That is the power to frame an argument, to set the parameters of debate, so that one always wins, no matter what the outcome. It is a case of saying, “Heads I win, tails you lose.”

A couple of years later, Mike Polignano and I went to a movie in Berkeley. Before the trailers for upcoming films, they showed advertisements. One ad featured a contest between Coke and Diet Coke. I smiled and remarked, “That is a contest that the Coca-Cola Corporation cannot lose.”

Getting people to debate questions like, “Do we blame the Muslims or the Jews?” is a form of political control. Once the public argues within these parameters, we don’t need to worry about the outcome. Whites really cannot lose.

Or, to be precise, the only way we could lose is by failing to understand the nature of the question, taking one side too seriously, and developing hard feelings toward our “opponents.”

To avoid that outcome, one must not only frame the question. One also needs to control both sides of the debate. One must not just script political theater. One must also stage it. But one needs to make sure that the actors don’t take their roles too seriously. This is Nerfball, not hardball. Stage fighting, not real fighting. One guy takes a swing, the other jerks his head back, and the sound effects guy creates a smack. It just has to look real to the people in the audience. The ring announcers and talking heads do the rest, selling people on the idea that what they are seeing is a real contest.

Controlling the political realm by framing and stage-managing political debate is a form of what is called “hegemony.”

Hegemony

“Hegemony,” from the Greek hegemonia, means leadership, domination, rule. But it is not just any kind of rule. For the ancient Greeks, hegemony referred to imperial or federal leadership, in which the hegemon rules over other states with regard to foreign and military affairs but leaves domestic matters in their hands. For the man in the street, therefore, hegemony appears as a distant, indirect, mediated, “soft” form of domination—although, of course, hegemons had the power to make war on recalcitrant followers.

Hegemony can also take a cultural form, ruling over the political realm by shaping the values and ideas that set the parameters and goals of specifically political activity, including debate. In other words, cultural hegemony is a matter of “metapolitics.” Thus hegemony is a key concept for the metapolitical project of the North American New Right.

If political power ultimately comes from the barrel of a gun, metapolitics determines who aims the gun, at whom it is aimed, and why. If political power is “hard” power, because it ultimately reduces to force, metapolitical hegemony is “soft” power that ultimately reduces to persuasion. (Persuasion is a matter of rhetoric, which involves but cannot be reduced to rational argument.)

Jewish Hegemony

Cultural hegemony is the secret of the soft form of Jewish totalitarianism, “liberal democracy,” that won out against the hard form, namely Communism. In the West, our masters discovered that they could maintain total power on all the issues that concern them while leaving the illusion of freedom of choice. How? Simply by making sure that all options were Jew-safe and Jew-approved.

In Genesis 32, we read that Jacob, who had robbed his brother Esau of his birthright, was frightened to learn that Esau and 400 men were approaching his camp. So Jacob divided his camp in two, reasoning that if one group were attacked, the other would survive. Furthermore, Jacob sent part of his camp to Esau’s camp, while he remained behind. These followers of Jacob came bearing gifts for Esau, but they could of course also act as spies to help Jacob, and even if Jacob’s people were attacked and destroyed, some of them would survive in Esau’s camp.

This bit of Unholy Scripture is a model of Jewish hegemony to this day. In the early 20th century, Jews were overwhelmingly political leftists and supported the Leninist model of hard totalitarianism. But once their golem Stalin turned on them, many Jews began to re-evaluate Communism as a tool of Jewish ethnic interests. Thus, to hedge their bets, a series of Jewish Communist “defectors” (defectors from Communism, but not from the Jewish community) joined the American conservative movement and quickly moved into positions that allowed them to redefine conservatism after World War II.

For instance, two Jewish ex-Communists, Frank Meyer and Eugene Lyons, were among the surprising number of Jews who influenced the founding of William F. Buckley’s National Review. (On the Jewish founders of National Review, see George H. Nash, “Forgotten Godfathers: Premature Jewish Conservatives and the Rise of National Review,” American Jewish History, 87, nos. 2 & 3 [June–September 1999], pp. 123–57. Online here.)

By far the biggest influx of Jewish defectors, however, were the neo-conservatives, most of whom came from the Zionist wing of the Trotskyite movement, i.e., the most ethnocentrically Jewish wing of the most ethnically Jewish faction of the Communist movement. (On neo-conservatism, see Kevin MacDonald’s essays “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement” and “Neoconservative Portraits” in his Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism [Atlanta: The Occidental Press, 2007]).

Now that Jewish intellectual movements have redefined American conservatism to accord with Jewish interests on all important issues, it really doesn’t matter all that much to the Jewish community whether Republicans or Democrats win elections. Yes, most Jews still prefer Democrats to Republicans. Yes, some of them still act like every Republican is an existential threat. Some of them even believe it. (But Jews face every issue as if their very survival depends upon it. It is a form of delusion and hysteria that has served them well.) But the truth is: from a Jewish point of view, both major parties are the same on all essential issues, and any differences between them do not make a difference for Jewish survival. That is real power, total power, yet “soft” power.

As a corollary, Jewish hegemony means that, from a White Nationalist point of view, both major parties are the same on all essential issues as well: they are opposed to our racial survival and flourishing. All the differences between them make no difference to us on the most important, existential issue.

Of course Jewish hegemony extends well beyond two-party politics into all realms of culture—education, religion, the arts, literature, pop culture, economics, etc.—ensuring that whites are distracted with an endless array of options, as  long as they are trivial options that do not threaten Jewish hegemony. This is what we celebrate as “freedom.”

But freedom does not consist in the multiplication of trivial options. Freedom means being able to choose momentous options. And the most momentous option for whites is to choose to get off the road to extinction and back on the road to godhood.

That is a choice denied us by Jewish hegemony. Being “free” under Jewish hegemony is nothing more than being happy slaves. For whites, Jewish freedom means being entertained right up to the point that we cease to exist as a people. If we are to survive, therefore, we must break Jewish hegemony.

White Nationalist Politics

How can whites in North America regain control of our destiny? This is the question of how we organize what we call—out of a hope that springs eternal—the White Nationalist “movement.”

The most popular movement model has been the political party, which comes in two colors, the democratic (such as the American Nazi Party, the Populist Party, the American Third Position, etc.) and the revolutionary (the National Alliance, the Northwest Front), i.e., those who seek to come to power within the system and those who seek to overturn the system. Of course, there is no contradiction to pursuing both aims. The NSDAP and Communist Parties world-wide have done both. But still these are different aims which require different kinds of organizations. Thus every party will tend toward one option or another.

Ultimately, we will have to gain political power, and keep it. Thus I believe that whites need political organizations and political experience. But I have no illusions that we are going to vote our way off the endangered species list. (Wolves don’t let lambs vote on what’s for dinner.) Nor do I think that white nationalists will be able to launch a revolution or a war of secession against the system as it stands today. So what can we do in the meantime?

Furthermore, political parties, whether revolutionary or democratic, are not for everyone. Some people don’t “qualify” for membership. Others don’t like being part of hierarchical groups with ideological orthodoxies, not to mention the church-like interpersonal “drama” that comes with such groups. What can these people do for our cause?

Finally, the White Nationalist revolutionary fantasy literature of William Pierce and Harold Covington does not sit well with most Americans, who do not relish the idea of Bolshevik-like revolutionary sects seizing power, establishing a one-party state, shooting everyone who opposes them, and dinning propaganda into the heads of the rest. (Personally, I find Covington’s novels tremendously useful and entertaining. See my review here. Pierce’s novels are useful as well.) The Jews abandoned Bolshevism to pursue “soft” hegemony. Couldn’t some White Nationalists do the same?

White Nationalist Hegemony

It is too soon for White Nationalist politics. So in the meantime, we need to focus on metapolitics, which will lay the foundations for the pursuit of political power. Metapolitics has two elements: (1) propaganda, meaning articulating and communicating our message, and (2) community organizing, meaning creating a community that lives according to our philosophy today and will serve as the nucleus of the new political order we seek to build tomorrow.

What should be our message? Among other things, that whites are a distinct ethnic group with distinct interests. That we live in a world in which there are real ethnic conflicts. That it is right for whites to take our own side in these ethnic conflicts. That multicultural, multiracial societies make ethnic conflict and hatred inevitable. That ethnic conflict can best be ended by the creation of ethnically homogeneous homelands for all peoples. That it is an existential imperative—a matter of life and death—for whites to create or preserve ethnically homogeneous homelands for ourselves by any means necessary.

Our goal should not be merely to make this the common sense of the political right, but the common sense of the whole political spectrum—of the whole culture—so that no matter what political party wins election, our people will never again have to fear for our survival. We do not need to move people in the right direction along the political spectrum. We need to move the whole spectrum in the white direction.

Our goal need not be a right wing, one party state, but a pluralistic society in which we are still arguing about feminism, abortion, environmentalism, etc. But the arguments will all be among white people, and no white group will be able to ally itself with non-whites to gain the upper hand against other members of our extended racial family.

That is real power, total power, but “soft” power: white cultural and political hegemony. And there is nothing sinister about it. It is what existed in America before the rise of today’s Jewish hegemony.

Yes, white hegemony would quietly restrict our options and frame debates to ensure racially healthy outcomes. But most of us accept limitations on our choices to attain greater goods, such as the preservation of endangered species. Well, whites are the most important endangered species of all. We want a society in which you can choose anything you want, as long as it does not imperil the long-term existence of our race.

Divided we Win

How can White Nationalists pursue this kind of hegemony? We too need to divide our camp and go forth to colonize every shade of the political spectrum. We need to find ways to address our message to every white group and subgroup, for all whites have racial interests.

Old school white advocates tend to be captives of political “apparatus” thinking. They believe that the struggle is entirely political, and that we will win only when our political team beats the enemy political team. But before we can engage the enemy, we must build up our political apparatus. We must unify our camp.

This naturally leads one to think that the very existence of multiple organizations and approaches to white advocacy is an impediment to our cause, a weakness in the movement that must be overcome. Thus all too often, the first order of action is not to attack the enemy, but to attack other white advocacy groups in the hope that one can discredit their leaders, smash their organizations, pull away their members and donors, and unite them behind one leader.

The value of the metapolitical path to white hegemony is that it makes a virtue out of necessity, namely the existence of multiple groups and approaches (including political apparatuses). This kind of diversity will always be with us, and combating it is a criminal waste of scarce resources that could be used to attack the enemy. Besides, the best way to attract followers is to attack the enemy effectively, not people who are more or less on our side.

To my mind, a diverse array of White Nationalist groups and approaches can strengthen our cause in two ways. First, even if there is “one right way” to save our race, it has not been discovered yet, and it is more likely to come to light if people experiment with different approaches. Second, we whites are a diverse people, and our movement needs to craft messages that resonate with the full range of white constituencies. The more approaches to white advocacy our movement can embrace, the more white constituencies we can address.

They key to making diversity within our movement work for us is to create discreet channels for communication and coordination among different camps of white advocates. Such back-channel coordination will maximize our impact and minimize destructive infighting and “friendly fire” incidents. This form of organization is the topic of a future article.