Dennis Fetcho Interviews Greg Johnson (2012), Part 1

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Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V.S. of my interview on Dennis Fetcho’s Inside the Eye back when he was on the Oracle Broadcasting Network. I removed transitions into and out of breaks, as well as chit chat on such topics as the weather. I want to thank Dennis for having me on and V.S. for his transcription.    

Dennis Fetcho: Good morning, everybody! From Amman, Jordan and streaming globally across the World Wide Web this is the Fetch and you are Live Inside the Eye! Today’s date is Saturday, September 8, 2012. [. . .]

Our guest today, Greg Johnson, holds a PhD in philosophy. He is the editor-in-chief of Counter-Currents Publishing. That’s Counter-Currents with a hyphen. He is also the editor of the journal North American New Right which appears online and as a printed volume.

He is the author of Confessions of a Reluctant Hater. He is the editor of Alain de Benoist’s On Being a Pagan, Michael O’Meara’s Towards the White Republic, Michael Polignano’s Taking Our Own Side and Colin Cleary’s Summoning the Gods among other books. His fields of interest are intellectual history, philosophy, religion, and the European New Right.

Greg, welcome to Inside the Eye Live!

Greg Johnson: Thanks, Dennis, for having me on!

DF: Well, thanks for coming! I think you were recommended to me by one of our listeners, but you’re probably one of the few who actually contacted me. I think the last guy who contacted me to be on was Harley Schlanger from the Lyndon LaRouche people.

GJ: Well, I guess that puts me in dubious company, maybe, but I have been trying to do more interviews and reach out, so I took my friend Roger’s advice, and I got in touch with you, and I also got in touch with Deanna Spingola and we had a really good conversation.

DF: Yeah, indeed, you appeared recently with Deanna Spingola, and for those of you out there who have not heard that interview it’s really quite an entertaining interview. I probably caught about 60% of it, and it sounded very entertaining. And Deanna, of course, is very focused on what she does, so I thought the two of you hit it off very well, Greg.

GJ: Yeah, I did, too, and I’m going to be back on her show next week, actually on September 10th, so I imagine we’re going to be talking about September 11th.

DF: Ah, very good. I actually didn’t prepare anything for September 11th for you because, guys, there’s a programming change here at The Oracle Broadcasting Network. The Fetch is now live every Monday from 3:00 to 5:00 PM in the afternoon in America. That’s Central Daylight Time, so if you don’t know about that show yet make sure you tune in Monday’s 3-5 PM and we’ll get into 9/11 I am sure.

Greg, I figured we would just skip that. There’s enough of that in the alternative media and mainstream media this week. We’ll focus on you and your work. Now, you’re the editor-in-chief of The Occidental Observer?

GJ: Actually, The Occidental Quarterly. The Occidental Observer is something that Kevin MacDonald runs.

DF: OK. He runs it, but you were editor-in-chief for quite some time.

GJ: Of The Occidental Quarterly, yeah. I ran The Occidental Quarterly from 2007 to 2010. A little more than two and a half years and I also created their online presence, which I edited for a year. That’s toqonline which is basically now mothballed. It’s kind of an archive of old issues and previously published work.

DF: And then now you have counter-currents.com?

GJ: Yeah, Counter-Currents Publishing is something that Michael Polignano, who’s my business partner, and I started in June of 2010. It went online June 11th 2010. We are a publishing company and we also have a strong online presence. The Counter-Currents website has a webzine associated with it, it’s all on the front page there, called North American New Right. Five days a week we have new material going online, sometimes multiple new items.

Our goal is to create an intellectual movement in North America that is analogous to and influenced by the European New Right and that includes people like Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. Mostly French writers, some German and Italian writers. But what they’re trying to do is revive elements of what I call the Old Right, by which I mean basically Fascism, in a new context, in a post-war context to show that their critique of modernity, democracy, and so forth has continuing relevance and it’s even better founded in facts and history and science than ever before and that it provides a lot of solutions to a lot of the quandaries of contemporary politics. So, they’re trying to expand people’s political imaginations in Europe and we think that we really need to expand their imaginations in North America as well. So, that’s our goal.

DF: OK. Now, counter-currents.com, you’re reaching, I think I saw some stats out there, Alexa ranks you at 164,000 worldwide, which is very healthy. You had 110,000 visits in April, which is the last stats I could find. Over 421,000 page views. You’re reaching a pretty strong audience there, Greg.

GJ: Yeah, we have about 50,000 unique visitors come to us every month. I can’t really calculate the number of people who are hardcore, but 50% of the people who come to us come to us from some kind of bookmark as opposed to a Google search. So, let’s say we have 20 some thousand people who follow us regularly. Not necessarily every day, but we have people who come multiple times a day, too. But we do have a hardcore following out there as well as a large number of people who come to us through Google searches.

Google, however, in the last month started monkeying with our search output, our search algorithms, however they do that. And suddenly some pieces of ours that were very popular and had been top ten articles for years suddenly disappeared from the search rankings and that pushed our traffic down 20% in one month. However, it’s bouncing back up. So, they’ve delayed us a bit but they can’t really deny us getting our message out there because people want it enough to actually search for it and not just to be satisfied with what pops up on the first page of their Google search results. So, that’s heartening news.

DF: Yeah, it is. Now, you’re subject matter, for somebody who doesn’t really know what you do, and quite frankly I didn’t know what you do until I got introduced to you, what is your subject matter? I hear the term White Nationalism brought up. People might cringe at that, but I see this term. If you were to give yourself a tagline, what would it be?

GJ: Well, I am a White Nationalist. That is a term that I use. Basically, the situation is this: We believe that race is absolutely fundamental for understanding politics and ethnicity. We don’t think that the abstractions like capitalism and communism and free enterprise and things like that are adequate for understanding what’s really happening in politics. If you look at politics in Europe and America, however, through a racial lens, what you see is the struggles of different peoples for dominance, and we believe that the white countries of the world, and that means Europe but also the colonies like America and Canada and New Zealand, Australia, the Whiter countries in South America excluded for these purposes [. . .]

[Break]

GJ: [. . .] We were talking about White Nationalism before the break, and what I basically believe is that you can’t really understand politics without understanding that race is the primary factor in politics. It’s the primary cause of a lot of wars and revolutions and upheavals around the world, and specifically in the white countries what I see happening is this: white countries are under attack. Whites are under attack through affirmative action, through non-white immigration, through the media that denigrates white people and white values and promotes non-whites and non-white values. I believe that ultimately what’s going on here is that non-whites are really being used proxies for Jews.

I think that Jews have engineered in the United States and to a lesser extent, but to a real extent still, in practically every other white country the opening of the floodgates to the Third World, non-white immigration, and they are at the forefront of combatting white efforts to restrict immigration. The reason they’re doing this is that they are basically following a divide and conquer strategy. They are most powerful when they are middlemen in a disorganized, pluralistic, fractious kind of society, a kind of Middle Eastern bazaar society, a sort of Star Wars cantina society. They’re the guys who know everybody and know a few words in every language and can broker deals, and they end up on the top. They stick out like sore thumbs, however, in homogenous societies, and so wherever they show up in societies like that they try to engineer diversity. They’re not engineering diversity because they think it’s good for us. They’re engineering diversity because they think it’s good for them as a tool to gain power over us, and they’ve been very, very successful so far.

So, that’s basically what I mean by White Nationalism. It looks at politics primarily in terms of racial and ethnic struggles and it looks at the Jewish Question, in particular, as really the key to understanding what’s going on in politics in the White countries today.

DF: I saw some latest census figures out of England. 64% of people born in England are considered white English. Only 64% White British people! I mean, 35% people born in England are not considered white British English. This is probably what you mean by this war.

Now, I heard you on Deanna. I like the concept of how really this is conquering in a very subtle way, a form of conquering a society or a country but in a very inverse, long-term strategy. It’s covert, not overt.

GJ: Well, yeah, a lot of conquests throughout history have been slow. The Roman Empire: they didn’t know that they were falling at the time. They thought they were very cleverly playing a game of inviting in these Germanic tribes because they would do work that the Romans wouldn’t do. Specifically, they were putting them in their military and things like that. It took a very, very long time for the Roman Empire to collapse as a result of policies that were predictably ruinous. You and I would have predicted these policies for ruinous, but in the short run they looked like a good deal.

So, conquest doesn’t necessarily have to be fast, and genocide doesn’t have to be fast. The United Nations defines genocide not just as a quick, hot slaughter of a whole group of people, but rather as creating conditions that over the long-run will make it impossible for a people to preserve its distinct identity. That would include things like swamping them with immigrants, promoting miscegenation so they blend themselves out of existence, bombarding them with propaganda that makes them feel self-hatred and guilt for being who they are. All those are forms of genocide because if they are applied long enough to any people that people will cease to exist.

I believe that not only are we being conquered, but we are being exterminated or obliterated because if we don’t get a handle on these trends there will simply be no white people left anymore. We will be blended out of existence.

DF: Question. I agree with everything that you’re saying in this regard. I agree for the most part with what you’re saying, I should say. But me, I’m German/Irish. I married a long time ago a Chinese gal. We had a son, who is now Chinese-American, but Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, German, and Irish. Why should people who are not of a pure ethnic white race or ethnicity care about White Nationalist ideas and interests?

GJ: Well, in a way, they shouldn’t. Because we’re really not trying to represent their interests. But, in a larger way, though, I think that they can look at it as something that’s of interest to them in this sense: we think that nationalism is good for everyone, for all peoples. We think that every people should have its own place where it can go and live according to its own life, develop according to its own inner genius, have its own destiny and so forth.

Now, as a white person, I am particularly interested in this for my own group, but I recognize that this is also true for every other group, that we’re all better off if we have a place of our own. People who are of mixed race, I don’t quite know how to fit those in. There will have to be some places, large cities . . . Throughout history, commercial ports and things like that have always been places where people of mixed race would be born or would gravitate because they feel more comfortable there.

This is the vision of what I call the New Right has: Envision a world where there are thousands and thousands of flags, thousands and thousands of nationalities, places where people can go to live according to their own nature.

One thing I do want to get away from, though, is this very destructive white grandiosity which goes from believing that it’s alright for other people to have their own homelands to saying that it’s the white man’s burden to go out and make sure that everyone’s living the right way and doing the right thing. I think that’s been a very bad thing for us in the long run. Our empires have turned around and are now colonizing us, for instance, so that was not a good thing to do from the point of view of the present.

So, I want to say everybody has a stake in nationalism. I would like to have the most cordial relations with other peoples. I don’t see any reason to hate other peoples. In my book, Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, I really argue that hatred between groups is an inevitable consequence of forcing them to live together and compete in the same system, and therefore the solution to racial hatred and strife is to allow people to form their own independent states. I’m the last person in the world to have negative feelings towards other groups, but I found that when I was living in California I started having negative feelings towards other groups because I was forced to live with them and there was constant everyday friction.

[Break]

DF: Welcome back, everybody! This is the Fetch and you’re listening to Inside the Eye Live here on the Oracle Broadcasting Network. [. . .] Really, Greg, I think the main issue that a lot of people have… Now, White Nationalism, you’re looking at, it sounds almost like the segregation of races.

GJ: Yeah, most definitely.

DF: You believe that’s a viable plan?

GJ: I think that in the long run it’s the best way to preserve the distinctness of different groups, racially and culturally, and also to lower the amount of unnecessary and tragic strife and conflict in the world.

If you look at the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. What was the USSR? It was a multinational, multi-ethnic empire, and when that empire fell apart all these constituent units left and formed their own countries. Where do you have strife in the Russian Federation today? You have it in the Caucasus. And why is there strife? It’s strife between Muslims and Russians, the Chechens and people like that. Those people were not allowed to leave, they were not allowed to form their own Republics or their own governments, and they’re fighting to this day.

Or you look at Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia fractured pretty neatly on ethnic lines. The Slovenes and the Croatians went their own way fairly quickly. There was war, however, in Bosnia. Why? Because Bosnia was a multi-ethnic area. There were Croatians and there were Serbs and there were Muslims in Bosnia. Especially the Serb minority, which was about 40% of the population, just could not see themselves being ruled in a Muslim state, and so there was civil war there.

So, generally where you find ethnic and racial diversity you find conflict. The solution to that is to as peacefully and in as orderly a way as possible divide things up so that people have their own ethno-states.

And the best model of that, I think, was the very peaceful, amicable divorce that happened between the Czechs and the Slovaks. Czechoslovakia was an artificial nation that was put together after the First World War. When it reemerged after the Second World War, it was held together by Communism, but when Communism disappeared after a while these people said, “Well, there’s no need for us to be in the same system.” And so now they’re just good neighbors.

DF: The case of Czechoslovakia is actually a great case, but this is an intellectual, amicable split. Now, where I see a danger, just to give you some insights here into the politics of the Middle East: I’m here in Amman. We have Shia, we have Sunni, we have Christians, we have many different ethnicities. They, quite frankly, do live together in peace and everybody enjoys everybody. The same would be said of Syria. So, what you’re talking about in some respects mirrors the neo-con balkanization strategy. Aren’t you kind of worried that you’re following a strategy that is seen somewhat as a neo-con strategy if you’re going to apply it to places like here in the Middle East?

GJ: I guess the neo-cons can’t be wrong about everything. But seriously now, the neo-con strategy is basically divide and conquer, and they have absolutely no interest in creating a Kurdistan for the Kurds or a Shi’ite Iraq for the Shi’ites and a Sunni Iraq for the Sunnis. All they’re concerned with is keeping these people corralled together in the same country and getting them fighting and hating each other. Why? Because that’s to their advantage.

The Israelis are afraid of strong neighbors. Iraq was a strong neighbor, but Iraq had internal tensions and problems, and once the strong leader at the center was removed it was very, very easy, it was child’s play for these people to get all the Iraqis of different groups fighting with each other and killing one another, and once that gets started, well, it just takes on a life of its own.

DF: That’s a good answer. You gave a great answer.

GJ: Well, thank you.

DF: That’s a very strong answer. OK. Very good. Because yeah, you could have some people trying to say, “Well, we’re trying to create what Greg is talking about by balkanizing all of these parts.” But you’re right, it is more of a divide and conquer and just keep people warring, where Czechoslovakia was an amicable split and something that they’ve actually tried to do in North and South Sudan is create this amicable split even though it’s not quite working.

But, Greg, is it the real problem isn’t so much the ethnicities that we have among places, but it’s the forced cultural diversity plan that’s coming out of the Israeli group or the Jewish groups. Isn’t this the real problem?

GJ: Well, it is true that in more traditional societies you would have the possibility of, and this is especially true in the Near and Middle East, where you have these intensely ethnocentric, closed groups living together. In the past, they had reached a kind of modus vivendi. They could live together in a comfortable way. But they could only live together because they in effect practiced a kind of strong ethnic nationalism. They would only marry within their own groups, they would live in their own quarters, and things like that. I know somebody whose family lived in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem for hundreds and hundreds of years, and they managed to live peacefully with the other Christian groups and the Muslims in Jerusalem for centuries. So, that is possible.

But what that requires is a kind of nationalism block by block, and the other thing that it requires is it requires a certain amount of self-assertion, a certain amount of pride in who you are and so forth. The trouble with the White countries today is we can’t really live with other groups because we have been so bombarded with White guilt and self-hatred. We are so afraid of asserting our own standards and things like that that we simply can’t have other groups around us without coming into conflict with them because we’re not the kind of people that can maintain proper boundaries anymore, if that makes any sense.

You’re right that in a sense part of what causes a lot of conflict is that whites have been so bombarded with anti-white propaganda, and non-whites have been so bombarded with anti-white propaganda too, and they don’t have any trouble asserting themselves. So, what you have is steady encroachment on our standards, on our boundaries, and it’s causing a great deal of psychological turmoil and upset, and eventually it causes strife. So, if you got rid of that it might be easier for people to live in the same system, people of different ethnicities to live in the same system or, what the United States used to have, we used to have minority groups living in the United States, but we maintained white standards. That would make all the difference in the world if we could get that back again.