Counter-Currents
2,903 words
Translations: Danish, Estonian, French, Greek, Spanish
Author’s Note:
The following essay is a reworking of two earlier essays for republication in my forthcoming book New Right vs. Old Right. I am publishing it now as it is something of a companion piece to my recent essay “Premature Populism.”
On the question of violence, White Nationalists need to demand both moral strength and intellectual clarity from our leaders.
The Illegitimate Question of Violence
These reflections on violence were provoked by two events in January of 2011. First, there was the wholly spurious attempt to link American Renaissance to the January 8 killing spree of Jared Lee Loughner in Tuscon, Arizona. Second, there was the equally baseless attempt to link Harold Covington’s Northwest Front to the bomb placed along the Martin Luther King Day parade route in Spokane, Washington on January 17. The bomb was safely defused, and Kevin Harpham, who had no ties with Covington, was eventually arrested and convicted.
Jared Taylor’s response to the attack on American Renaissance was entirely appropriate. He pointed out that it had no basis in fact and that the characterizations of American Renaissance were incorrect. It was also appropriate for Harold Covington to respond to the attempts to smear him.
But I do not think it is appropriate for other White Nationalists to respond to such smears by protesting their own innocence and posting legalistic disclaimers of violence on their websites.
These White Nationalists condemn violence, of course, because they are aware of the state’s awesome power to inflict violence on us. They desire to deflect this violence by telling the state: “You’ve got nothing to fear from us. We’re cute, harmless little fuzzballs. We’re chumps who will scrupulously obey the laws concocted and enforced by the people who seek to exterminate us. We don’t think violence will ever be necessary to get our people off the path toward extinction. We think that genocidal anti-white policies are all just a hideous misunderstanding. We’re all men of good will here, our rulers included. We think that the people who put these policies in place will yield power someday if we just get our act together and vote them out. And of course if we ever got power, we would not dream of making them answer for their crimes. We’ll just shake their hands, like the good sports we are, and say ‘Good show old boy. Better luck at the polls next time.’”
When people in our movement are falsely smeared as linked to terrorism, our first instinct should be to defend those who are attacked by pointing out the speciousness or groundlessness of the claims and the blatant anti-white bias in the media and law enforcement.
If, however, one’s first instinct is to say “I am against all violence,” that smacks of throwing the accused under the bus and covering one’s own ass. Protesting your innocence when you have not been accused of anything also smacks of a guilty conscience, which subtly concedes the legitimacy of the attack. That’s not leadership.
Rather than getting defensive, leaders should counter-attack.
One should never allow the enemy to control how an event is framed. If you allow the question “Do White Nationalists advocate violence?” to be posed by the enemy, it does not matter what your answer is. We lose either way.
The proper response is to change the question, to reframe the issue, and to put the enemy on trial: “Why do the media and law enforcement have a bias against racially conscious white people, such that they will run unsubstantiated smears linking us to violence committed by leftists like Loughner or unknown parties like the Spokane bomber?”
Anything less smacks of moral weakness and uncertainty.
The Legitimate Question of Violence
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here
The issue is complicated by the fact that violence is a legitimate topic for political theory and strategy, no matter who raises the question. But in the context of a hostile society, we should be the ones who raise the question and determine the parameters of debate, not axe-grinding middlebrow media demagogues.
As I see it, politics is about power, and power always reduces to violence or the credible threat of violence. Therefore, no credible political movement can renounce violence, for the renunciation of violence is tantamount to the renunciation of politics itself.
This is true even if one aspires merely to participate in a political system that seeks to govern force with law and provides legal procedures like election or impeachment to challenge and replace people in power.
The law may provide for the orderly transfer of power, but what ensures that the people in power will respect the law rather than void elections they do not like and tear up constitutions they find too restrictive? Ultimately, it is fear of legal or extralegal retribution, i.e., violence.
Bad Arguments Against Violence
1. Is violence immoral in itself?
Obviously not. Most people recognize circumstances where violence is legitimate, and self-defense against genocide is the best justification of all. Just look at the state of Israel and Jews around the world. Jews pretty much have a moral blank check for bullying and aggression, all in the name of self-defense. Meanwhile, mere verbal advocacy of white interests is automatically branded hate. Why is that? Because Jews have power, which comes down to violence or a credible threat thereof, and we have none.
People may have some sort of innate moral sense, but the moral sense of the public is not independent of power. The people always pretty much adopt the moral judgments preferred by the people who hold the whip. If the power relations were reversed, people’s moral sensibilities could be changed as well.
2. Is violence bad because we stand for “the rule of law” against the “barbarism” of power politics?
That is naïve. The people are ruled by law, but the government obviously is not. We are ruled by men, not laws. The men who rule make laws for the rest of us. And the people who rule us now have legislated conditions inimical to the long-term survival of our race.
Law is not independent of power, and power just means violence or the credible threat of violence. Law is a product of power. The people who have power make the laws. The people who don’t have power obey them. If White Nationalists gain power, we will make different laws. Until then, we obey their laws because they have more power than we do.
3. Is violence bad because it will turn people against whoever uses it?
Again, this is naïve. Like I said, people may have some innate moral sense, but most of the moral judgments that come out of their mouths and guide their actions are shaped by the people in power.
People are not innately “anti-violence.” People condemn violence against non-whites because the television and the newspapers tell them to. They do not lose any sleep over that fact that on an average day in America, 100 white women are being raped by black men, because they are kept unaware of that fact, and if they were aware of it, they would keep their mouths shut and not “go there” for fear of being branded racists.
The moral sensibilities of the public are manufactured by people in power, and power reduces to violence or the credible threat of violence. If White Nationalists had power, we could spin the propaganda dial the other way and people’s moral sensibilities would follow.
4. Is violence a bad idea because it might bring bad publicity?
This is just a variation of point 3 above. Jared Taylor has never advocated violence, publicly or privately. I know this, because I have discussed it with him. Yet that did not stop him from being “linked” by liars to Jared Lee Loughner. Harold Covington writes books filled with revolutionary violence. But publicly and privately, he does not advocate violence under present conditions, and those conditions are likely to attain for a very long time to come. Yet that did not stop him from being “linked” by liars to the Spokane backpack bomb.
Do I really need to spell this out? No matter what we do, no matter how nice we are, we are never going to get good publicity from a media and government controlled by our enemies. Again, good publicity is not independent of power, and we all know what power is. The people in power are capable of telling lies about us and making them stick. Yes, the internet has weakened the control of the establishment somewhat. But do you really think, when push comes to shove, that they are going to allow themselves to be “tweeted” off the stage of history?
Whites will only get good publicity when we have the power to control the media. And we all know what power is.
5. Is violence a bad idea because the state might arrest or kill those who use it?
Should we never use violence because we might get hurt? People who think that way are natural slaves. The people who rule us are of course willing to use violence, even if they might get hurt (or, more often, their underlings might get hurt), because that is how people gain and keep power.
If White Nationalists are serious about gaining and keeping power, then the people who rule us naturally conclude that we too are willing to risk using violence. Our rulers are not going to be fooled by putting legalistic disclaimers on White Nationalist websites.
Furthermore, the government arrests and imprisons dissidents who have not advocated or committed violence. Matt Hale will spend the rest of his life in prison, even though he did not advocate or commit violence. (It was a federal agent who did that.) Edgar Steele did not advocate or commit violence, but he will probably die in jail, even though it is increasingly clear that he was framed by federal agents and informants.
Folks, if this is getting too scary for you, you need to bail out now.
The Lesson so Far
You can buy Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right here
We are pacified by pious illusions about limited government, the rule of law, and fair play. We are doped with religion, sex, and TV. But ultimately we are ruled by violence and the threat of violence.
If you believe that the system needs to be replaced or radically overhauled, or if you merely believe that we need to throw the bastards who are running things out, our rulers will try to stop you, because they know that none of these things will happen except over their dead bodies. They believe that your very thoughts and aspirations, even if entertained merely in the privacy of your own skull, bear the seeds of violence against them.
They will begin with soft measures: mockery, shunning, job discrimination, and the like. But if you persist, and if you constitute a credible threat, then they will work their way up to harsher measures. This has always been the case. America was founded by violence, expanded by violence, held together by violence, ruled by violence, and exports its violence all over the globe. (It is about the only thing we export nowadays.)
Being naïve, or merely pretending to be naïve, about the nature of politics and the people who rule us will not save you. Naïveté will probably just get you in more trouble.
A Credible Repudiation of Violence
Merely verbal disclaimers of violence are silly and pointless. If White Nationalist groups and individuals wish to repudiate violence in a credible way, then they should purge their ranks of mentally ill people, the kind of people who flip out and go on shooting sprees.
White Nationalists, despite our professed elitism, tend to be very, very indulgent of mental illness. Perhaps that is because we know that the establishment paints us all as crazy, so we are loath to make distinctions. But we can and must make distinctions. White Nationalists would be crazy not to get depressed from time to time, given how genuinely depressing our situation is. But no serious movement can afford to depend on people with serious mental illnesses and personality disorders like schizophrenia, manic depression, paranoia, narcissism, etc.
We may feel compassion or affection for such people. They may have talents and money. They may want to do their part for the cause. There is no need to be mean to them. But we can’t afford to depend on them, much less place them in positions of trust and responsibility.
Why Violence is a Bad Idea for White Nationalists
My friends will no doubt interpret the following as a mere rationalization for the pathological squeamishness of a grown man who still covers his eyes when something violent happens on the screen. But attend to my arguments. I think they are sound.
1. Violence is futile.
Setting aside all considerations of morality and legality and calculating merely in terms of forces and potential outcomes, violence against the system is completely futile. Yes, free men take risks. But only fools pick fights that they can never win.
As I never tire of reminding you, White Nationalists are a tiny, voiceless, powerless, despised minority. We are poorly funded, poorly organized, and poorly led. Our enemies control the greatest instruments of propaganda and coercion in history. We cannot beat them with violence. In fact, they need us to commit violence. They feed on violence, which is why they manufacture violence to blame on us.
Violence is futile, not merely because the enemy can catch and punish the perpetrators, but even more so because they can control how people perceive and react to it. The enemy has the power to assign the meaning and morality to our acts. We will never be seen as freedom fighters or romantic outlaws or heroic martyrs. We will be seen as kooks, sadists, nihilists, and terrorists—and with some justice, unfortunately.
We already have enough martyrs. We do not need any more. And martyrdom accomplishes nothing when the enemy determines its meaning. Yukio Mishima’s death meant something in Japan, where the samurai tradition is still strong. Here, he would be branded a kook and a loser, and it would stick.
2. Fortunately, violence is unnecessary.
Politics is about power, and power reduces to violence or the threat thereof. But what if it is too early for politics? Specifically, what if it is too late to reform the system and too early to replace it?
Then White Nationalists need to focus on metapolitics, specifically (1) the intellectual development and cultural propagation of our worldview and (2) building a White Nationalist community—a community that is wealthy, powerful, resilient, and dedicated to the perfection and empowerment of its members; a community that can aspire to be the foundation of a future White Republic.
This approach is valid even if the present system could be expected to remain strong for the foreseeable future. In that case, our community would simply have to become very big and very strong to mount a political challenge to the system.
But fortunately there is every reason to believe that the system is in steep and irreversible decline. Nothing lasts forever, especially a society that violates all the laws of nature. I don’t know when the system will fail, but it will almost certainly be within the lifetimes of most of the people reading this. Honestly, is there anything that White Nationalists could do to destroy the system better than its currents masters? Frankly, my greatest fear is that the system will collapse too soon, long before our community is powerful enough to create a white homeland.
We are few, scattered, voiceless, and powerless. The system is vast and powerful, but it is destroying itself. Time may be short, e.g., we may have only a few decades. So we need to focus our time, energy, and resources not on destroying the system but on creating an alternative. But that requires the discipline not to waste our lives and resources in premature and futile confrontations with the system at full strength.
3. Power isn’t everything.
Throughout this essay, I have stressed the importance of power. In politics, power is more important than legality, public opinion, or moral sensibilities, because those in power create laws and shape people’s opinions, including their moral opinions. They have power and we don’t. As long as this condition persists, they will be able to do what they like with us.
But power isn’t everything. Truth also matters. There are moral opinions, and there is moral truth. There are the laws of men, and there are the laws of nature. (Although Machiavelli was right to observe that unarmed prophets always fail; only the armed prophets succeed.)
As a Traditionalist, I believe that truth is ultimately the source of power, that truth empowers and lies weaken. A civilization rises when it is in harmony with truth, reality, nature, and the life force. A civilization declines as it strays from them. As Spengler points out, a society, like an individual, gains the greatest external wealth and power once it is over the hill and the life force is dying within it.
We have truth, but no power. They have power, but no truth. But the life force surges in us as it ebbs in them, for they have strayed from nature’s way. Our power will wax as their power wanes. Then a day will come when we can revisit the question of violence. But today, that question is closed.
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10 comments
I think you are absolutely right. Gratuitous violence does nothing to advance our cause nowadays because we cannot control the message. Just recently in the news is the trial of Die Nazi-Braut, Beate Zschape in Germany. In most people’s eyes she is just the same as the Baader-Meinhof(sp) gang. Nut jobs on the fringe and vilified. All the sordid details are interpreted by the press as pathological. It may well be. Sort of like the adulation of Charles Manson. I do have some sympathy for the generation of Germans who cannot abide their country’s capitulation. (both right and left) Yet, nowadays, sympathy is always reserved for the non-white victims. There is a kind of equivalence in this — beyond right and left and beyond good and evil. Germany again gives us a lesson. I am not sure what it is, but it is there.
I think if you had even a thousand dedicated people fighting hardcore guerilla warfare against the system inside America violence could work right now. They can crush any small scale localized resistance, true, but they rely heavily on keeping the masses pacificed. If you forced them to become so paranoid they started openly abusing everyone nation-wide it wouldn’t matter what the media said, people would see it right in front of their eyes and start fighting. The question is, do we want to speed up the collapse? I’ll get back to that in a second.
I mean hit and disappear tactics, look at what a few men did in Boston, shut down the entire city and drew an incredible amount of local government’s resoruces and focus, now imagine if that was going on and instead of sticking around the guys disappeared before anyone had confirmed their identities and the police were fully mobilized, or if one of them sacrificed himself and drew the police while the others escaped, and meanwhile there were 999 more people spread all over the country hitting government/racial targets and then disappearing, and none of these people would be connected by anything except ideology, each person or small group acting when and as they saw fit, so that if one was compromised they would not know enough to harm any other group or person. I think the Government would flip the hell out and as days and days went on with no progress the police and the people would grow increasingly restless, clashes would happen, blacks would riot, white people would be abused… more and more people would become radicalized and start acting. I think if you kept that up for a few years(maybe less) the beast would starve.
but do we want to do that right now? I don’t think so. It’s like you said, there is no infrastructure in place to step in and restore order after the system is gone.
Such a guerrilla that you describe would only be successful if it had a clear purpose and would have the sympathy of the people. The Vietcong in Vietnam had a clear purpose (kicking the Americans out) and it had the sympathy of the people. Your kind of guerrilla would have neither. It’s violence would be pointless, and its perpetrators would be considered not as “freedomfighters” but as despicable criminals.
I wrote an article that basically makes the same argument that violence doesn’t work and is unnecessary.
http://systemssymbols.wordpress.com/non-violence/
What you wrote about presenting a better vision for the future is very important. The Mantra and BUGS message is grinding down the anti-White system. What we need is something to capture the imaginations of the folk to direct them to as the anti-White system falls. This is where art comes in. We need books and movies bringing our ideal society to life. WE need neo-Romantic painters and poets providing images of our ideal society.
For the economic aspect of the society, I suggest reading the work of John Robb with his Resilient Communities idea.
Political power is certainly an important factor in maintaining the status of opinions and values, but such things are not maintained by simple power. Many regimes in the past which were very powerful and attempted to control public opinion, but which were not seen as legitimate or moral by the common people and which did not achieve any “inner domination” (examples including Communist dictatorships and King Carol II’s dictatorship in Romania), could not control the thoughts of the people regardless of how hard they tried. Whenever a government relies on totalitarianism (which is always by definition mechanical and inorganic, whether it is “soft” or “hard”) or simple coercive force to maintain itself or its ideas, it has stepped on the road to its inevitable collapse, regardless of how long that road seems to be. Othmar Spann thus once rightly said that “history teaches us that it is the validity of spiritual values that constitutes the spiritual bond. They cannot be replaced by fire and sword, nor by any other form of force. All governance that endures, and all the order that society has thus achieved, is the result of inner domination.” The comment at the end of this essay (“On Violence”) about the importance of truth in maintaining a state, which is more promising, seems to me to go more in this direction of thought.
Excellent reworking of an already must-read piece.
Note to the editor:
In the first paragraph of 4. I believe “attain” should be “remain.”
To me it seems obvious that for now, the main goal of American WNs must be to convince the population that it would be best to have proper ethno-states instead of the hellhole that is modern-day America. And in that context, it’s puzzling to me that you guys appear to be so absolutely unwilling to cooperate with Black Nationalists.
Take the Nation of Islam for example. They demand territory for forming an independent Black nation-state, they are against miscegenation, they rally against the Israel Lobby and international finance, wrote a couple of books that shift much of the blame for slavery away from WASPs, and some of their more crazy sub-groups have turned it into a hobby to make Jews and libruls cry. So there’s obviously a lot of common ground. And more generally, unless I’m missing something here, Blacks are the closest thing to allies you can have, as they are the first to suffer from illegal Mexicans taking up all the unskilled jobs, have a vested interest in opposing the general Mestizo takeover, are being showered by the controlled media with a degenerate pop-culture that makes their situation worse by idolizing criminal behavior, and from what I gather aren’t really big fans of dying in all those wars for your “greatest ally.” Not to mention that you have several hundred years of shared history.
Yet instead of trying to cooperate with Blacks, I mainly see WNs trying to antagonize them, and I don’t just mean the behavior of those costumed neo-nazi and KKK types, but also incidents like more sophisticated people such as Scott Terry arguing they should be thankful for slavery. What’s the point of this? Surely you don’t think it’s the Blacks who control your media and use it to lead our race into oblivion, who opened the floodgates of immigration, and make you fight wars against Europeans and Arabs on behalf of Africa?
Surely it would be far more productive to team up and argue for racial segregation through ethnostates on a Black & White bipartisan basis, as that would to a large extent render useless the media’s tactic of framing you as evil hateful nuts who just want to kill anyone who doesn’t look like you. Hell, if you form a political party and combine this with an appealing economic platform like the one Greg Johnson outlined, you might even be able to vote yourselves out of this mess and take over the government without having to fire a single shot — or at least have a decent degree of support in the population if the fecal matter does collide with the ventilation equipment.
I hear American WNs advocating the deportation of all Blacks to Africa (where they would be completely alien culturally, and due to their European admixture even genetically), I hear the immediate and complete genocide of all non-whites in America being advocated, and I hear all this talk of throwing yourselves into a suicidal guerrilla war to carve out a tiny White Republic in the Pacific Northwest.
What I don’t really see discussed is granting Blacks a fair share of maybe 10%-15% of US territory to build a “Blackmerica” technically capable of sustaining their population, so that once you’ve deported the Mexicans back to their home country you can enjoy a “Whitemerica” that would encompass far more territory than what Harold Covington’s unlikely scenario promises. Why not?
Reisender:
I am replying to your comments because of their obvious sincerity, and wish to make a few brief points. Your comment regarding the ideas of Harold Covington speaks volumes, and very well, to the depth of your seriousness.
Reisender in blockquote:
We seem to have trouble cooperating with other self-identified White Nationalists, just as black churches find trouble in cooperating with Minister Farrakhan, who orchestrated the Million Man March, and showed them a side of themselves they did not feel comfortable seeing.
More to the point, we are seeking our unique Path, and there may be overlap in our ultimate ends. However, we have known that the best of the self-identified Black Nationalists lurk here looking for useful ideas. Good.
See above. Rockwell met with, and spoke at, the Nation’s meetings and appeared on the same stage as the Nation’s leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I suspect this might have really scared certain third parties, as this was at a moment when the orchestrated American Political System was fragmenting with various successful Third Party initiatives. McCarthy scared Johnson, and Wallace scared everyone.
The strongest threat to the status quo was Dr. King, who realized, after his stunning defeat in Chicago at the hands of the Daley Machine, that he made the same mistake we made, until Covington, counter-currents, and Bob Whitaker – we always played THEIR Game by THEIR Rules, and never wondered why we always lost. I call this “Lucy’s Rules Football,” after Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comics.
King realized he had to go outside the system, and was preparing to become a antiwar activitist. He was going to put tents up on the National Mall, and stay there until the Vietnam War ended. The idea of King giving speeches TO the troops in Viet-Nam AGAINST the war in Vietnam was too much for Johnson.
Further, King and McCarthy COULD have formed a very effective Third Party based on class lines, another though that would have scared Johnson to death. Again, by NOT playing their Games, by their Rules, a new, creative path to Victory would have been established, and major elements of the Establishment would have lost credibility, and political power.
So, as water follows its own path to its own purpose, so do we. No more “Lucy’s Rules Football.” That will take us to Harold Covington.
Our Solution to the issues of “cooperation with blacks” is to simply get our acts together first, and the best of them will take the best of our ideas, and creatively meld them within their political framework to fulfill their ends.
Open antagonism to blacks is simply a waste of our time and efforts. Why bother?
We have the Mars Colony to build.
We will never be able to “vote ourselves out of this mess.” We will not be allowed to. Covington quotes the former head of Britain’s National Front on tis” We will be allowed to do everything but organize politically.”
So, we organize metapolitically, and wait and work for the organic formulation of new political structures along those lines. Think about it. Isn’t that what the Nation is doing with the writings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and Minister Louis Farrakhan? Isn’t that what we could be doing with writings of Rockwell, Yockey, and Uncle Wolf?
You hear men who could not lead Marines to a bordello, with someone else’s American Express card, engaging in the fantastic thinking of fools.
The exact means by which the Northwest republic will I repeat WILL come into being, is a matter for speculation. That guerilla war is not suicidal – ask the people of Afghanistan, where eighteen year old boys with hundred dollar Kalishnikovs are putting us to rout – is all too obvious. Ask the IRA, as clumsy and inept a gang as you will find we see Gerry Adams in Stormont. Mr. Covington’s works of fiction merely describe one solution to the problem of forming an independent ethnostate. There are more; indeed, as many as we need.
One, “Blackmerica” is here, today, and reflects the values and choices of Black people. You already have it. Atlanta? Check. Detroit? Check. The list goes on.
Two, the border lines of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo have been conquered by the Reconquista. Their demographic conquest continues apace, and it is the fantasy of fools who believe we can turn back the clock to Ward Cleaver America to think otherwise. This will be as successful as Mexico. This, I suspect, is not by accident. It will bankrupt our social system. That will be exciting.
And remember, as you see the unfolding chaos all around you, the words of Covington’s Mantra:
If this was a White country, this wouldn’t be happening.
To be effective, political violence requires a political culture, a political culture that can effectively use and capitalize on political violence. Otherwise, to paraphrase Karl Radek’s remark on Leo Schlageter, political militants will wander into the void.
As Randall Collins shows in Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, and as should obvious from observation and reflection, relatively few people are violent, and even fewer are competently violent. For violence to be effective, it would be necessary to increase the capacity for violence by weakening the inhibitions against violence, and to raise the efficacy of violence by increasing the art with which violence is wielded, at the level of an suitably sized collectivity.
To put things in terms of tripartition, it is necessary to unite oratores, bellatores, and laboratores — thinkers, fighters, and workers — in a common political project. The warrior function must be combined with the other functions so that it forms an organic unity and harmony. It would be foolish to exclude it from the other functions, or to make it an exclusive function.
What’s needed is a political culture which exalts aggression and transgression against the system. It needs to combine “soft power” with “hard power,” but it should privilege “soft power” today. “Soft power” can be exercised continuously, extensively, and pervasively by many people, much more so than “hard power.” “Soft power” covers a wider area in terms of time, space, and agents than “hard power.”
Exercising “soft power” against the system means many things: undermining its values and ideas, breaking its taboos, transgressing its norms, resisting its soft totalitarianism and depoliticization, engaging in a parallel process of legitimation and delegitimation, exercising independence and initiative outside of and against the system, clearing and occupying cultural and political spaces. This power might not be spectacular, it might give us only limited autonomy, but it should not be belittled on these grounds.
We need to exercise “soft power” in such a way that it exercises a “network effect” (for examples of this, consider the internet or mobile phones) in which growing numbers of people are attracted to our network by its expanding size, capability, and utility.
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