Failing to Connect

2,232 words

Spanish translation here

I wish to draw attention to some of what strike me as obvious and repeated failings of what may loosely be described as “the Movement” or “the Cause,” that is to say, those who in principle would adhere to the trinity of values of survival as laid out in my first essay.

These failings are many, and the list here is unfortunately not exhaustive. However, if considered sensibly and without prejudice or emotion inspired by the urge to rush, I believe it will no longer seem surprising to anyone that the Cause is in the doldrums and will remain so until these and other failings are addressed.

1. The Lack of Metapolitical Foundations

The first failing, the most fundamental, from which arguably the others ultimately stem, is a lack of understanding of the trinity of individual, race, and planet, politically — freedom, biological realism, ecological balance, and the ability to distinguish between these three untouchable, fundamental elements of the trinity on the one hand, and all the manifestations of political and social and cultural life on the other. Racial identity is a special case not because it should enjoy priority in this trinity, which many in the Cause wrongly give it, but because it alone is widely rejected as a principle. Individual freedom and the survival of the planet are widely accepted as goods “devoutly to be wished for,” racial survival by the majority of people, certainly the majority of whites, is not.

A lack of ideological bedrock, the trinity, opens the way to the many failings of the Cause. Adherents of the Cause time and again fail to distinguish between the primordial knowledge of what is immutable and the many challenges of politics and belief, which may change and which are constantly open to negotiation and compromise. Put simply, there is a small core of beliefs which must be adhered to and that small core relates to the survival I discussed in the first part of this essay. The rest is in constant flux.

2. Cranks vs. Conformists

Much of the politics of the Cause strikes me as repeatedly foundering on Scylla and being sucked into Charybdis. A movement always accused of extremism should be moderate in resolving many of its dilemmas.

One such opposition is between the crank and the conformist. The crank is the party bore, the embarrassment. The Cause seems unable to mute the crank — at every meeting there is surely someone who is obsessed, whose obsession dismays the curious, who acts as a scarecrow to frighten away new members. Jews, the Illuminati, Spaceships, the Eastern Front 1942 — whatever his obsession (it is usually a he), he will insist on it, returning to it, turning every organization and every person with whom he associates into a caricature.

His opposite number is the conformist, the one who will one day be sucked into the whirlpool of everyday life, caring for nothing so much that he will sacrifice anything, least of all a career, for it. When career or advantage beckons, his political commitments will become but a memory of past youthful effusion, a subject of light amusement and complacent disdain.

3. Pessimists vs. Optimists

The pessimist (who is very often a crank as well) gloats over gloom and doom stories, stories to paralyze all talk of action. The pessimist is filled with Messianic, End-of-the-World gloom. He revels in disaster and stories of disaster. There was a now defunct American publication which embodied the pessimist: readers of its pages were offered neither hope nor the solace of sacrifice. It featured a regular series called “Majority Renegade of the Year.” When this writer suggested a series “Majority Hero of the Year” he was dismissed with the remark, “There aren’t any.” When Robert Mathews died, the magazine, whose politics were at least as extreme as Mathews’ own, condemned his violence as “futile” and “counterproductive.”

The optimist is more likely to be found at the head of a political or activist organization. He (again usually a he) inspires the troops, and his language may well be couched in military terms, with promises of a coming breakthrough. Like the pessimist, he believes in coming explosions, breakdowns, and catastrophes. But he believes that these will herald a “new dawn” for the cause. His predictions of political earthquakes and a people rising up in anger are ludicrously exaggerated, as is the significance of his movement as a whole. The Establishment is usually described as “anxious” and “threatened” by the slightest initiative or success of his group.

The pessimist deters followers by embarrassing them (“I don’t want to be associated with that”) and the optimist deters by wearing down the patience and exhausting the hopes and money of his followers (“We’ve heard that before”).

Anyone enthused with the three principles and permanently aware of them will have little time for optimism or pessimism. What must be done must be done, win or lose. The optimist and the pessimist, confronted with a world which seems to reject them, retreat to a bolthole, a sort of ghetto, like the members of that race they affect to despise and like whom they revel in their exclusivity, their enlightenment, a separation from the rest of humanity which provides them with an excuse to avoid interaction or political compromise with the outside world of those not chosen to be enlightened.

This attitude inevitably leads to contempt for outsiders, and contempt is a poor recruiter and a poor proselytizer.

4. Resentment

Along with contempt emerges another failing, one perhaps more damaging even than optimism and pessimism because more insidious, much less commonly recognized. I mean resentment, sour grapes: resentment that “we” do not have power, that “they” have power and enjoy the benefit of power and the wealth and prestige which accompanies it, a wealth and power which “we,” the chosen people, should be rightly enjoying but of which our enemies have deprived us.

When Diana Princess of Wales died in a car crash and Britain went into a state of extreme grief, “movement” commentators were quick to sneer and condemn someone whose life had impinged much more deeply on more people than theirs was likely to do. She was a media fake, they wailed, instead of asking themselves what had made her so loved.

Some years ago, the leader of a nationalist party in Britain, reporting back on a speaking tour of the USA, remarked that he had been confronted there with widespread admiration for Margaret Thatcher. “I repeatedly had to explain to them patiently,” he recalls pedantically, “that Thatcher is weak, not strong.” There was no mention of what everyone might learn from her.

It reminds me of children having to know if someone is a “goody” or “baddy.” “Margaret Thatcher is a goody isn’t she?” “No, you poor naive Yankee children, she’s a baddy.” “Oh gee, I didn’t know that.”

Exceptionally, the Conservative Member of Parliament, Enoch Powell, famous for his “rivers of blood” speech against colored immigration into Britain, was to a limited extent recognized as a powerful figure in his own right by Movement leaders in Britain, and it is no coincidence that it was his opposition to a multi-racial society and the acceptance of him by movement figures which boosted Britain’s National Front at that time.

5. Sectarianism

Groups which sit comfortably in a ghetto begin to acquire the features of a sect, and like members of a sect, those who hope to promote the Cause, like Freemasons, like to employ two languages, one for insiders and one for the public at large. This is especially the case concerning Adolf Hitler and attitudes towards the Jews. They become so used to preaching to the converted (where they spend, another failing, too much time instead of preaching to the non-converted) that they become disconcerted and affronted on the rare occasion that they get to present their views to the public.

Some years ago a well-known American movement leader was interviewed by the journalist Christopher Hitchens. The leader was asked if it was true that he celebrated Hitler’s birthday each year: “That’s perfectly true.” When asked why (a reasonable question surely) the man became flustered and annoyed. “That has nothing to do with our policies.” Christopher Hitchens (himself part Jewish) had an entirely understandable reaction: “Oh come off it,” he said. Examples of this arrogance and the inability to deal with outsiders’ questions abound.

6. False Flags

The failure to separate very clearly the fundamental from the evanescent and the historically contested shows itself in the lack of caution in using historical figures and flags to boost a cause. This takes two forms. One is the ghetto promotion of historical flags and symbols from Germany’s Third Reich. But this radical caricature is not so destructive as the more widespread and self-damaging appropriation of figures and flags from modern history that are also still used by the opponent.

Churchill and Lincoln, for example, are contentious figures, but much honored by many Establishment commentators and media, who should have no more place in the iconography of the Cause than Hitler. Like Hitler, they are divisive. Arguing about a “good” or “bad” Lincoln and Hitler undoubtedly has its place for those interested in history, but using such people as icons or devils is to enter a time-wasting morass.

Less obviously but potentially even more divisive, is the appropriation of national flags. The appropriation of the revolutionary tricolor by France’s Front National — the flag first hoisted as a symbol of freemasonry, egalitarianism, terror, and regicide — obliges the Front National to appeal to so-called republican values as fundamental. We are back at the confusion of fundamental values and politics.

Neither republicanism nor monarchism are fundamental in the way that the survival of the person, the race, and the planet are fundamental. Despite appearances, republicanism and monarchy, like communism and capitalism, are ephemeral. The use of the Union Jack or Old Glory by any “movement” is also problematic and divisive. Engaging with Establishment figures over “my flag” is not elevating or instructive, and the representatives are going to lose on that every time.

7. Petty Nationalism and Nostalgia

The waving of national flags stresses the most divisive force in the history of the white race, namely nationalism. One may be more or less a nationalist at the mere level of exchange and negotiation of politics, but nation should not become a religion. In Europe nearly every adherent of the “extreme Right” makes it so.

But in today’s world, travel, economics, and technology have reduced the significance of place and strengthened the significance of belief. Consequently “far Right” parties are unable to shake off a shadow of nostalgic gloom, of looking back, of caring more for the past than the future. This is the sad impression that the sight of their national flags and worship of past figures tends to create. But whatever sounds nostalgic also sounds ineffectual politically.

8. The Social Factor: Metapolitics is More than Just Ideas

A frantic attitude to time, fired by the already mentioned optimism and pessimism, leads again and again to over-hasty plunges into politics before the necessary groundwork has been laid. As was rightly pointed out by the French “New Right” movement in the 1970’s and ’80’s, political movements are late eruptions out of earthshaking changes that have first taken place in not the political but cultural climate. But many of the adherents of the French New Right themselves could not exercise the virtue of patience for which they pleaded and drifted off into party politics and polemics, with doleful consequences.

What the French New Right did not grasp is that culture is not merely a matter of intellectual appreciation and debate; it describes a way of life, of social interaction. But the New Right made no attempt to provide a permanent social, not political, “home.” Although the Cause revels like Jews in the politics of the ghetto, it does not take advantage of the positive side of exclusivity as the Jews famously do, namely through the creation of social networks. Creating communities of people adhering to the same beliefs is vastly more important than creating political movements which aim to coax votes away from the disgruntled. That is at the end of revolutionary change and not at the beginning.

An overestimation of the importance of the political and an underestimation of the importance of the social is another key failing of the Cause. The Cause takes its own members for granted, not questioning the sacrifice of its members, not assessing the loss which adherence to the Cause may incur and seemingly hardly caring about it. The call to sacrifice should be compensated by benefits, benefits of friendship and maybe more. Joining the Cause should involve joining a group of friends and supporters. Helping others, supporting them, being sensitive to the sacrifice which others make, should be a hallmark of every group. For such groups people will be willing to sacrifice even their lives, not for abstract principles. Successful revolutionary groups and movements from the early Christians and the Jews down to the present day, know this very well.

It has been all too easy to list briefly some of the failings and not all of the Cause. The destruction of criticism must be followed by the constructive task of outlining more effective ways of advancing the cause of sanity. That is what in the final part of this three part series I propose to do.