Counter-Currents
1,063 words
I recently participated in an interesting discussion with Lew, one of our more insightful commenters. One thread in the discussion was whether or not a future order should reject America’s ideals and institutions altogether or incrementally evolve America’s constitutional and republican framework into compliance with our racialist and Traditionalist principles.
While I understand that outlining our future regime may seem preposterous given our meager position, I also believe that making progress requires arriving at a coherent vision, sketching up a roadmap, and then marching forward . . . rather than merely critiquing the current state of affairs.
While studying user interface design for my programming work, I came across an interesting concept: skeuomorphism. In the context, it was referring to Apple’s habit of borrowing its user interface styles from real world objects. Its e-readers look like books, complete with the crease in the middle and dog-eared pages. Its calendar application is bound with virtual leather and even features the little tatters of ripped pages to help the user feel more at home in the new context.
That’s skeuomorphism: “a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.”
Skeuomorphism in user interface design serves a valuable role in easing the transition from tangible to virtual interfaces. But skeuomorphism is even used between digital contexts. For instance, my latest version of Excel shows a floppy disk as the save icon, despite their being entirely obsolete.
I believe this concept can help frame and guide political discourse, both in explaining historical and contemporary political frameworks and in planning for future ones. I believe we too easily accept political ideals and institutions at face value, failing to distinguish between the underlying mechanisms at work and the superficial interfaces we’re presented with.
Perhaps one prime example of a skeuomorph is “Marxism.” There was never much structural similarity between the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Castro’s Cuba. Most of ideological Marxism is tangential to the real work of designing a functional political order, and much of what it did prescribe proved unworkable in practice. Marxism could be any and every political order which is opposed (at least in theory) to Western capitalists. In some countries, it was a franchise adopted by one ethnic tribe against another. In some countries, it was a franchise adopted by one socioeconomic class against another. In some countries, it was a franchise adopted by ethnic nationalists against foreign interlopers.
I believe our American government has been overthrown multiple times, while always maintaining its skeuomorphic artifice. The founding documents and institutions evolved only incrementally in the wake of the American Civil War, and yet a distributed confederation of sovereign states became a federation of mere administrative districts. Just as you can slide your finger across your iPhone and confirm that its calendar has the texture of glass rather than leather, the texture of our current regime is entirely unrelated to the founding documents it purports to be the emergent product of.
You still have the process of voting for representatives who design laws which are then reviewed by the judicial branch and executed by the executive branch . . . but the process only works in a superficial manner. For instance, voters have consistently opposed the “Dream Act” amnesty. There are certain matters, immigration, monetary policy, foreign policy, and race relations which transcend this process. These are matters that the regnant oligarchy handle directly. They do their best to frame things in the system’s patterns and paradigms, but these things are simple too important to entrust to the people the Constitution entrusts it to.
Like a fool attempting to tear a page from his iPhone’s calendar by pinching at the corner of the screen, we vote and lobby for sensible immigration reform, only to have the oligarchy offer an arbitrary ad hoc rationalization for its decision to grant the amnesty in spite of the process.
Neither party campaigns on a platform of globalist “free trade” policies . . . and yet both parties end up supporting them.
Public opinion polls confirm that the American people are war-weary, and they voted for a President who campaigned on a platform of pursuing a more humble foreign policy. Heck, even George W. Bush himself originally campaigned on a humble foreign policy platform.
No matter which button you press on the interface, this machine will output more immigration, more cannibal capitalism, more globalism, and more war.
This situation is very disconcerting to those who value this country’s founding ideals because it reveals that the ideals are no longer respected by the elites.
For myself and others in the New Right, what’s disconcerting is not that the elites are deciding against the will of the people, but that the elites are deciding against the welfare of the people. The elites aren’t merely second-guessing the people, they’re alien to and hostile to the people.
Were we to take it back, what would we change symbolically? How different would our “America” (or subset of America comprised of former Americans) appear from theirs?
The Jewish and capitalist oligarchs are managing to run a government superficially similar to the Constitution’s specifications without making the error of adopting its principles and parts which are incompatible with their aims. I see no reason why we couldn’t achieve a similar feat, delivering a merely evolutionary change to the government’s exoteric elements while delivering a revolutionary change to its esoteric elements. While walking through a large war memorial in Indianapolis a few months ago, I noticed that the chiseled limestone carving of a bald eagle was confidently clutching a batch of arrows. While it’s not exactly a fasces, its symbolism is integrally fascist.
While we should definitely look forward to toppling the godawful monument to MLK blighting our nation’s capitol, I believe some of the most enduring symbols can and should be adopted and adapted. Keep the bald eagle, but have her defiantly clutching a fasces. Keep the Statue of Liberty, but unceremoniously pry off the subversive Jewish poem attached to her and replace it with an ode to our European fatherlands. Keep the stars and stripes, plucking the stars which will then belong to the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Republica del Norte, New Liberia, or whatever. We can’t guess at this early hour exactly how the revolution will take shape, but I won’t object if that shape superficially resembles what our people are comfortable and familiar with.
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15 comments
As most people here probably know, the Statue of Liberty originally had nothing to do with immigration. It was a gift from France celebrating US independence which would include the American peoples right to control immigration. It was only years later that that Jew poem was attached to it and the whole media and education establishment turned the Statue of Liberty into a open borders symbol.
The same with Elis Island, it was built to restrict immigration and weed out the criminals, the insane, sick, etc and send them back to their own countries. But once again the media and education establishment have used their propaganda machine to turn it into another open borders symbol.
A good re-statement of the obvious (new wine in old bottles), Matt, and a very wise one at that. The nostalgia and identification with things familiar (heritage) is something that has to be handled wisely. A White revolution to ‘restore the republic’, could be cover for something far more sweeping.
If the ideal is not dirrivitive of or supports my highest ideal, “the survival and ascension of the white race,” it must be eliminated or revamped! All present institutions will have to be stripped to the core and restructured on racial survival christianity, will have to be expunged from all institutions.
Symbols of Freemasonry, which are in public view everywhere, should be torn down and replaced by Traditionalist Catholic and other sympathetic religious symbols upon victory. We start with the Washington Monument, but keep D.C. and redesign it as a museum to the false era and move the new Capital city to whichever city became the first Nationalist stronghold in the former “United States.”
Sounds good and is probably necessary since most people are too sentimental too really adopt anything new. We’ll need some new Ammendments and also to repeal others. For people who actually do read and think, we could explain that we are trying for original intent: that the Founders were implicit White Nationalists and had no idea that something so obvious had to be make clear in statute.
Nice article. I read through it quickly. I’d still be tempted to ditch everything that pertains to the “old” and “new” United States of America though. I don’t know why, but I just don’t have much nostalgia for our American heritage. Perhaps it’s because the Conservatives are always acting like they have a corner on it, and I can’t stand them. I do love the National Parks though.
When Augustus first became consul, it was under a banner of restoring the Republic. The American founding stock and fathers took much inspiration from both their classical and English heritage. (A good site to read on that topic is http://www.imaginativeconservative.org) America had the opportunity to be a new English and North American Rome, but it became instead a republic of merchants and oligarchs. The founding fathers had little knowledge of Traditionalism, and as for racialism, there is a variation among the founders on the matters of the inherent English and white nature of America (Hamilton is an example of one who was similar in many respects to modern multiracialists, though not multiculturalists). The language and banner of restoring the old Republic may be useful, but American new rightists must in the end transcend its faults as well.
All this talk of what our new flag will be, how to add a new veneer to the Constitution, new capitals…it’s so artificial. Our ethnostate (if it arrives) will bear the symbols of men who shed blood in her name. She’ll take on the character of White men who set history right again. Let’s take care of Whites living in a zero-sum, judeo-liberal, plutocracy first. By the time average Whites are on our side restructuring the flag will be our smallest worry.
This makes the most sense.
A ‘mythos’ can only come from the extra-ordinary, and symbolism can only ‘imitate’ what has already been.
An ethno-state, however, is possible.
If I read the essay correctly it is about tactic of subterfuge.Probably many “conservatives” and “tea parties” members believe in this approach.The experience so far has been not in favour of whites.Unless a large number of whites,that is close to 90% or more suffer and experience humiliation there will be no hope for the whites.I hope I am wrong.
“I believe our American government has been overthrown multiple times, while always maintaining its skeuomorphic artifice.”
Nice piece. Garet Garrett called it “revolution within the form:
http://www.amazon.com/Ex-America-Anniversary-Peoples-Pottage/dp/0870044427/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1348534330&sr=8-16&keywords=garet+garet
Aristotle observed that “People do not easily change, but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small degrees only that one thing takes the place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution in the state.”1
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Revolution_within_the_form
“For myself and others in the New Right, what’s disconcerting is not that the elites are deciding against the will of the people, but that the elites are deciding against the welfare of the people. The elites aren’t merely second-guessing the people, they’re alien to and hostile to the people.”
This is because they need to transform us from a free people to a globalist one. I look around, seems like they are getting the job done!
Trainspotter’s comment was interesting to me. Allow me to quote at length:
“Frankly, I don’t believe that any system, any mere mechanism, is beyond corruption or system failure. To think otherwise is buying into a mechanistic and “progressive” worldview that we can achieve perfection if we only build a better clock. Not so. The best that can probably be done is to create a system that, at least at the system level, is capable of reforming itself and reversing errors. A truism is that unsolved problems accumulate over time. This is true for an individual, as it is for a nation. The system that we suffer under today cannot solve problems, and it can’t reform itself. We must avoid that trap and the ossification and decay that results. In other words, we can safely assume that whatever system we devise will degrade at some point or another. The only relevant question is can it, again from a systems perspective, recover?”
So far, so good. But then:
“The White Republic should therefore have a “Sampson Option” of sorts. It should be explicitly writtin in the Constitution, and taught in the schools, that there is an affirmative duty to revolt, by whatever means necessary, if the government violates its primary purpose of securing the existence of our people and a future for white children. ”
Sounds right, but also eerily familiar … oh yes, here it is:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Civilization: too fucking complex to follow some idealistic toubabs’ plan.
Uh, I have the right to have rights. Says who? God. God who? God wont like you if you don’t give me my rights. I don’t believe in God. Ok, then I wont like you. I’m ok with that. So no rights then? Right.
Powerful ideas. This is linked and commented on here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2012/09/symbolism-and-old-right-and-new-right.html
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