Joshua Blakeney Interviews Greg Johnson, Part 2

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François di Nomé, The Tower of Babel [1]

François di Nomé, The Tower of Babel

Part 2 of 4

Editor’s Note:

This is a transcript by V.S. of Joshua Blakeney’s interview with Greg Johnson, which you can listen to here [2]. The topics discussed in this segment are: Social Darwinism, imperialism, colonialism, ethnonationalism, partitions and population transfers, the question of racial survival, and the relationship of the New Right to the Western intellectual and political tradition. 

Joshua Blakeney: Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, welcome back to the second segment of this episode of The Real Deal. I’m still your host, Joshua Blakeney, and I’m still here with Dr. Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing. Prior to the break, Dr. Johnson was delineating or expounding his philosophical paradigm. It’s obviously a racialist perspective that’s completely expunged from Western academia. If you met someone on campus at university and they said, “I’m doing a graduate studies thesis on White Nationalism,” the presupposition would be that they were authoring that from a very hostile point of view, from a critical point of view and so I do think that obviously when you have a worldview that’s completely eliminated for political reasons it’s important to provide a platform to the exponents of that paradigm to explain exactly how they view things in the world.

I think many people who have gone through Western academia would say, “Oh, White Nationalism, it’s the same thing as social Darwinism, it’s the same thing as colonialism, as imperialism.” Many people would be interested to hear you distancing yourself, for instance, from imperialism, which you stated earlier that you support the self-determination of all peoples. If it’s good for you, it’s good for other peoples. So, one question I would have would be what exactly is social Darwinism and why do you reject social Darwinism and, additionally, and this may be a separate topic, but you just did mention that there are blacks in North America, there are Native Americans who were there prior to the arrival of white settlers, so how would you relate to them? How would your ideal world exist relative to blacks and natives and so on, people who are indigenous to the polity that we now call the United States of America?

GJ: Those are good questions. First of all, let me just address the issue of social Darwinism and imperialism. Social Darwinism, basically, is simply the idea that might makes right. That is a very ancient idea, but in the 19th century when Darwin came along and talked about the survival of the fittest and selection in that way, people started to say this was the way to evolving a better species, that you have a struggle for survival in an atmosphere of scarcity and the strongest survives, and that’s somehow a good thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

I’m an old fashioned moralist. I follow Plato and Aristotle and natural law ethics. I believe that it is possible through reason to understand what is good. It is often the case that the strongest party in a dispute is not the party that has right on his side. So, I simply reject the idea that the ancient Sophists had, for instance, that might makes right, that “justice is the advantage of the stronger,” which is the phrase that you get from Thrasymachus, who was a Sophist arguing against Socrates in the first book of Plato’s Republic. This is a very old idea. Social Darwinism is just a 19th-century, scientifically bedecked version of this idea. But I don’t think that it’s a defensible idea. Again, being strong and being good are not necessarily the same thing. Now, of course, it’s good to be strong, it’s good to be healthy, and so forth. I think that a kind of classical Greek ethical outlook can incorporate those ideas. But the simple idea that might is right — the stronger in whatever conflict, the one who triumphs is therefore the one who has right on his side — is a very primitive and peculiar idea.

So, I reject that notion, and I reject what it has been used to defend, which is namely imperialism. I think that a man who defends imperialism is basically telling his neighbors that he intends to be a murderer and a thief. I know that many great empires were built by Europeans, and Europeans are very proud of them. However, I sympathize more with the people who were conquered. The reason why I guess I sympathize with the conquered is because I look around the world that I live in today and I see my race, my people as basically a conquered people. A conquered people can’t say, “No!” They can’t say, “No,” when their enemies demand things of them, and whites are basically today a conquered people. We can’t say, “No!” We can’t say, “No!” to Jews, we can’t say, “No!” to non-whites, we can’t say “No!” to white misfits and cranks who are allied with Jews and non-whites. We are really in the position of a conquered people, and I sympathize therefore with conquered people, and I believe in a kind of old-fashioned universalism in ethics: that if something is true for me, it’s true for others. And notions like the Golden Rule make sense to me. If I don’t like being mistreated by people, I don’t want to mistreat others in turn.

So, I think the most ethically defensible idea is a kind of universal nationalism, which is a term that Frank Salter uses in his work on genetic interests. Basically, it’s the idea that if you recognize that you would be better off if your people, your ethnic group was sovereign in its own homeland, that it would be easier for you to live according to your historically and racially defined identity, then that’s true of other people as well. If it’s true for the English, it’s true for the Scottish, and it’s true for the Indians, and it’s true for the various tribes of Africa and so forth.

That’s what I defend. I defend a universal nationalism. I think that imperialism is a bad thing. I sympathize with the victims of imperialism and colonialism.

That said, historically speaking, I live in a colonial society. So, how do I reconcile things with that? Well, the United States was founded by English settlers primarily, and some Dutch and some Swedes. And, unfortunately, England was ruled by a very, very unjust political system, and there were lots of whites who were basically swept out of England through poverty, through the destruction of the old feudal tenancy system, through indenture, and they were basically slaves in the New World. My father’s ancestors, my paternal line, arrived in Virginia in 1612 as indentured servants, and I’m just very glad that they didn’t end up in the Caribbean where they probably would have died.

So, I look at the settling of the New World as something that was in many ways driven by an extremely evil model of capitalism. Whites were swept up into this model, non-whites were swept up into this model, the natives were swept up in it, and, of course, African blacks were imported due to it. The net result in North America, the United States and Canada, was that basically a Northern European Anglo-Saxon society was created.

The Native American populations were quite sparse north of the Rio Grande, and my attitude towards them is that there was plenty of room for whites to settle on this continent. There are many things that were regrettable that took place. Both sides fought against one another. I think that the only decent thing we can do is help maintain these people with a sort of ethnic reservation system, and that’s really all that I think can be done at this point.

As for the blacks that were imported here, well, they came as slaves; they were imported in large numbers; they have grown to very large numbers in North America. My desire is to create an ethnostate or ethnostates, meaning racially and ethnically defined states, in North America, and I think one of the sensible and decent things to do for blacks is to give them some area of their own.

I do believe that the creation of ethnostates requires that borders be redrawn and that populations move around. I think that the ends, namely the creation of societies where different peoples have autonomy and societies where whites can maintain themselves and continue to exist well into the future, those ends are so important that the means are totally justified. I think that moving populations around and redrawing maps can be done in a completely humane way, and so that’s what I am for.

I look upon the solution in North America as basically whites maintaining their domination of most of North America. We created the system here. It’s a fine system for us. The natives, I think, should have their set-asides and privileges. I think the black population, especially the people descended from slaves, probably need an area to themselves. I think that post-1965 mass immigration from the Third World should be simply reversed and that over a period of 50 years or so that all of these people and their descendants can be sent back. They could be repatriated.

So, what I would like to see eventually in North America is a number of homogenously white societies and a number, one or two maybe, homogenously Black societies, and a system where there are reservations and a certain quasi-autonomy for indigenous peoples, Eskimos, Indians, and so forth. That’s what I envision. I think that’s a perfectly decent and doable thing.

As for immigration into Europe, Europeans are the autochthonous native people of Europe. I don’t think there is any reason for there to be large non-white, non-European populations in Europe at all. And so I think White Nationalism in Europe should never give up on the idea of repatriating these people. I think that in 50 years’ time London can be as homogenously white as it was 100 years ago or even 50-60 years ago. It was massively white. That can happen again.

We don’t need to think of this as something that has to be accomplished overnight. There’s a lot of negative and, I think, destructive revolutionary fantasy literature like The Turner Diaries and things like that where people imagine some quick, violent explosion of ethnic cleansing or something like that. I think that’s unattractive. I think that turns a lot of people off. And I think it’s unnecessary.

White demographic displacement was carefully and slowly engineered over decades, over generations, and I think that it can be undone over decades, over generations. I don’t think we need to be in such a big hurry over it. And I think that as long as whites know that things are on the right path again demographically that’s going to be a huge boost in our morale anyway. I think that in 50 years’ time we might have homogeneously white societies all over the globe and that there will be no danger in the future of whites dwindling down and disappearing through low birthrates, sub-replacement birthrates, hybridization, mass murder, and things like that, which are things that we really are threatened by today.

JB: The ethnostate, as I said, that I am most familiar with is Japan. One thing you notice in Japan is everything is good quality. It could partially be because Japanese have a very high mean IQ, but it seems to me that one of the positive sides of ethnostates, and I would say multicultural states have their pros and cons and ethnostates have their pros and cons, but one of the tremendous positive sides of Japan is that the ruling class feels shame. You see with the Fukushima disaster, the CEO of TEPCO comes on the TV screen and he’s almost crying and he’s bowing and he feels ashamed. We’re ruled currently by people who have an ideal of chutzpah, shamelessness, which is why I think you see this McDonald’s junk culture especially in North America.

So, I was going to ask you what if a cynic said, “Greg, why is it so important to preserve the white race?” Why, in your opinion, does this matter? You’re proposing things like repatriation, which would cause, no doubt, some upset in certain communities and so you have a choice between two wrongs here: the loss of the white race or uprooting those who have settled in formerly white societies. Why should I care about the loss of the white race? What would your response be to someone who would say that?

GJ: Well, why should we care about the loss of the Jewish race? If somebody raises that question they can be thrown in jail all over the world. Why should we be concerned about the loss of the Ainu or the Japanese or any other group? Why should we be concerned about the death of Bengal tigers and exotic birds and so forth?

Only whites have that question lobbed at them. “Why should we be concerned about your extinction?” Somebody simply has to say, “There’s a grave danger that the Northern White Rhino will cease to exist in a few years,” and there are people writing checks and demanding something be done. No one says, “Would it really be a tragedy if the Northern White Rhino ceased to exist? Are they really so different from the Southern White Rhino?” No one says that. They only say that about the white man. So, that’s the first thing I need to register.

Only whites are being asked to be disinterested about their long-term survival. I think that’s rather extraordinary. That indicates in itself that the culture, that the dominant ideas are rigged against us. When people say this they are simply responding to their sense, their little spider sense, of what’s permissible. No one ever says, because everyone knows it’s impermissible, “Why would it be a disaster if Jews perished?” When somebody like Alan Dershowitz sounds the alarm about Jewish intermarriage and says, “Jews are going to cease to exist as a people,” people are somehow sensible enough not to say, “Well, would that really be a tragedy if Jews ceased to exist?” Now, people know better than that. But it’s fine to say that about whites, and I want to change that cultural hegemony, that consensus that makes that question raiseable, and raiseable from whites. A lot of whites will say this. “Isn’t it our turn maybe? I mean, let’s be good sports about it. We had our day.” That kind of disinterested attitude towards our own existence is a decadent, devitalized, alarming idea that’s being pressed upon us.

I think that underneath all of our cultural programming and this disinterested idea that we can somehow contemplate with equanimity our own demise as a race, there’s still an organism there, right? We’re still animals, and every healthy animal strives to maintain its existence, strives to reproduce itself. I think we need to get whites in touch with our healthy, animal natures again, and I think that’s the first thing.

The ultimate reason why I am concerned with the survival of the white race is simply because it is my race. It’s my people. Now, I could say things like, “The white race brings incalculable gifts to the universe.” That’s true. I can say things like, “The white race is the race that’s concerned with preserving tigers and rhinos and elephants and rare flowers and things like that.” And that is true. I do think that we have brought great gifts to humanity in terms of our culture, our political systems and things like that. I think that the world would be very poor without whites. But that’s really trying to put this in an altruistic, universal sense. That’s fine, but ultimately for me, even if we were the sorriest bunch of people on the planet, even if we were as dumb and ugly and uncultured as the most primitive peoples on the planet, I’d still want us to continue to exist simply because it’s us, it’s me, it’s our identity, and as a healthy organism that is my birthright. It’s my birthright to strive to perpetuate myself and my people, and the idea that we have to listen to people saying, “Well, would it be such a tragedy?” is the thing that I reject. I want to live in a world where people don’t dare utter that notion. Not because we’re going to haul them off to the gulag or something like that, but simply because there’s an understanding that that’s simply not a permissible thing for a healthy organism to contemplate.

JB: Yeah, and the way you talk today is heterodoxy, is heresy, but there was a time not so long ago, a couple of generations ago, where discourses like the one you deploy were very mainstream. One thing Counter-Currents has done which I very much appreciated is to republish many of the thinkers of the Old Right who I, for instance, as a sociology student at a university in North America wasn’t presented with to read. People like Evola and Pound and Schmitt and Yockey, Spengler. So, why don’t you talk about those upon whose shoulders you are standing right now? The people who provided you with a kind of philosophical underpinning in the last five minutes before the next break.

GJ: I’ll make it really brief. The fact of the matter is that the multicultural establishment ideology that rules today is completely out of sync with Western tradition. It is abhorrent and insane from the point of view of the Western philosophical, political, cultural tradition. There’s no serious thinker who ever argued that diversity and multiculturalism are strengths. It was simply understood by people like Plato and Aristotle and others that diversity, faction, anything that introduces division into a society is ipso facto bad. So, the idea that somehow multiculturalism represents the acme of sophistication is just absurd. It is an abhorrent, insane idea, and most of the Western tradition consists of people who are, by today’s standards, Right-wing extremists. In their time, they might have been on the Left. John Stuart Mill would be a Right-wing extremist in today’s university and yet he was a Leftist in the 19th century.

So, really, one of the projects of the Counter-Currents/North American New Right publishing house and webzine is simply to recover our tradition and for us to recognize that it is the Western tradition that we stand on: the entire Western tradition, not just a few 20th century thinkers who were a little out there like Ezra Pound. He was a great poet. But we stand on the whole Western tradition. It’s on our side, and the people who are running the universities today are basically opposed to Western civilization and Western culture, and they’re increasingly open about it. That’s what has to go.

We are the exponents of Western civilization. We are the people who will make it survive. The academy today, the university today, the establishment today is out of sync with and really on a collision course with Western civilization. It’s slated for destruction along with our race and we want to stop that.

JB: I think on that note, Greg, we’ll go to the second break of this episode of The Real Deal. I hope the listenership is enjoying this very original analysis. Like you say, there is a strong tradition that is consistent with what you are espousing, but unfortunately in this day and age you’re on the fringes. So, I am very pleased to enable you to disseminate your message, but we will go to the second break now, ladies and gentlemen, and we’ll be back shortly.