Counter-Currents
Alt Right meets New Right: John Morgan with Alain de Benoist at the 2013 NPI conference.
3,873 words (Greek translation here; Hungarian translation here)
The following is the text of the talk that John Morgan was scheduled to deliver at Identitarian Ideas IX in Stockholm last Saturday, but was unable to due to circumstances beyond his control. As such it was intended for a primarily Swedish audience.
Today I want to talk about two schools of political thought that on the surface seem similar, but that are in fact quite different in a number of fundamental ways: namely the Alt Right and the European New Right. Although I’ve titled this talk “Alt Right versus New Right,” I don’t want to make it sound like I am suggesting that there is an inherent conflict between the two, as obviously there are many points of overlap and potential for cooperation. However, I do believe that they are two distinct, if interrelated, phenomena, and I hold that it is important to understand that the Alt Right is a uniquely American creation that can’t be exported wholesale into other cultural contexts, just as the European New Right is something very particular to Western Europe. I understand that, given all the media attention it’s been receiving lately, there’s a temptation to adopt the term “Alt Right” universally. I, however, insist on viewing the Alt Right as something exclusively American, and the New Right as something particularly European.
One thing that the two movements certainly share is a difficulty in determining what exactly they are. Especially in the hands of the mainstream media, “New Right” and “Alt Right” are two terms that have been used to refer to everything ranging from Tea Party-style populism to outright neo-Nazism, and everything in between, a problem that was inevitable given that neither group has a central authority that can pronounce who is and who isn’t orthodox, we might say, nor even what exactly that orthodoxy is. For my own purposes today, by New Right I mean the current of thought centered upon Alain de Benoist’s GRECE movement in France and its various offshoots since 1968, which represents a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.
The Alt Right is a much trickier animal to pin down. The New Right has produced literally hundreds of books outlining its beliefs and positions over the past half-century. The Alt Right, on the other hand, is a culture primarily of blogs, memes, podcasts, and videos. It has yet to produce a single book or other statement of principles that everyone involved would agree is the quintessence of the Alt Right’s worldview. This is a natural outgrowth of the anti-intellectualism inherent in Anglo-American political and cultural discourse, as opposed to the more innovative and livelier – dare I say superior – Rightist political tradition that you have here on the Continent. In attempting to think of a book that could in any way lay claim to being the Alt Right manifesto, the only thing I could come up with is Greg Johnson’s New Right versus Old Right, which has fortunately been translated into Swedish as well. Otherwise, the shelves of the Alt Right library remain pretty bare, although hopefully that will soon be changing. (It has a lot of catching up to do.) So for the Alt Right, I will draw on some ideas from that book, as well as from a meme that was circulating online last summer called “What Does the Alt Right Want?,” which presents nine theses of the Alt Right – unfortunately I don’t know who originally wrote it, so my apologizes for not crediting it properly.
The main thing that the Alt Right and the New Right share is, first of all, a recognition that the legacy of fascism and the Second World War was a fiasco for the “true Right,” and that it is something that must be transcended. Groups and individuals who want to refight the Second World War, or who insist on reusing the iconography and rhetoric of that era, are soundly rejected by both. In no way can neo-Nazis be regarded as Alt Right or New Right. At the same time, however, both the Alt Right and the New Right must not allow themselves to become caught up in apologizing for or addressing the crimes and mistakes of the past. As Jonathan Bowden once called for us to do, when our opponents keep throwing them in our path, we should simply step over them. And as Markus Willinger says in his book Generation Identity, to those who constantly try to trip us up by bringing up the legacy of the Second World War, we simply have to respond that we no longer see it as relevant to what is happening in the world today. We are only interested in addressing the problems of our time.
Simultaneously, however, we should not allow our opponents to decide what we can and cannot talk about. The mere fact that an individual or a group is Jewish, for instance, as with our old friend George Soros, does not mean that they are therefore above criticism and that we are Nazis if we do criticize them. Kevin MacDonald has done brilliant work in showing how we can discuss the role of Jewish power in our societies without resorting to theories about the Elders of Zion or otherwise dehumanizing Jews, but rather understanding them from a realistic rather than a supernatural perspective, as a group with specific interests and desires that occasionally conflict with our own. To reduce all of our problems to a question of Jewish influence, however, is just as absurd as those who ignore the question altogether.
The other crucial insight that the Alt Right and the New Right share is the understanding that, since the 1960s, the liberal Left rapidly assumed control over the cultural institutions of Western Europe and North America, which soon led to them securing dominance over our political institutions as well. This is why the conservative Right in our countries gradually came to adapt itself to this new reality, continually ceding ground until it became “cuckservatism,” to use the parlance of our times. This is something which the mainstream still seems to struggle with at times; namely, that we regard the liberal Left and liberal conservatism merely as two heads of the same monster. The Alt Right and the New Right are in lockstep in recognizing that the struggle to defeat this monster is as much cultural as political, in fact more so, and that creating the groundwork for the revival of a healthy culture is the necessary soil out of which a genuine non-liberal political movement will eventually grow. Hence why the intellectual and cultural work that we are doing is so important, and why even now, when we see some signs of stirring in the world of politics, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to political activism alone. Things are getting better, but we still have a long way to go. Seeing Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen get into office and then reducing ourselves to a cheerleading squad for them is not the end for us. To paraphrase Churchill, their victories are not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it may perhaps mark the end of the beginning.
But while the Alt Right and the New Right are coming at the problem of liberalism from similar angles, they do remain divided by several fundamental issues. First and foremost is race. The American Right (just as the American Left, albeit in different ways) is absolutely obsessed with race: evolutionary theories, comparative IQ scores, crime statistics, and the like. In America, this has led to the development of the term “white” to refer to anyone of European descent. This makes sense in America, where people whose ancestors came from Europe generations ago, regardless of whether they came from Sweden or Sicily, in most cases have become virtually indistinguishable in a cultural and ethnic sense, and all have come to be defined in terms of their alleged “privilege” over those of non-European races and ethnicities. And “White Nationalism,” in the American context, is a sensible attempt to make everyone of European descent in America realize that they have common interests at stake. However, I do believe that the attempt of some to import this idea of “White Nationalism” into Europe, and who in some cases have even called for political unification between America, Europe, and Russia, is a severe disservice to the diversity inherent in European civilization. The issue for Europe, as the New Right has always understood, is as much based in ethnicity, language, and culture as it is on race. We can’t pretend that an Irishman and a Russian are interchangeable. This is not to suggest that there is no basis for Europeans and those of the European diaspora around the world to work together towards common ends, but I believe this can only be rooted in the specificity of particular nations, regions, and traditions, otherwise we will simply be exchanging the cosmopolitan homogenization of global multiculturalism for a “white” form of homogenization. The various European peoples and their offshoots have specific needs and identities, and these must all be respected and nourished under separate and unique institutions. So while I would never suggest that studies of or concern with race are without value, I believe that ethnicity has to take first priority over race as we consider what we are fighting for.
A related issue to this is a belief in ethnopluralism. The New Right has always advocated for the right of all peoples, and not just those of European descent, to stand for and fight, if necessary, for their particular identity and political autonomy in the face of globalization and foreign aggression. In the aforementioned nine theses of the Alt Right, we find “protection of cultural diversity” and “protection from international corporate oppression: we support nationalist economies with a focus on local industry and small businesses.” This is the Alt Right at its best, when it understands that the struggle of the European peoples is the same as the fight of all peoples around the world in the face of coca-colonialism.
However, there are certainly elements associated with the Alt Right who have an unfortunate tendency to glorify colonialism and its attendant exploitations, such as slavery, and in some cases call for a return to those times. Besides the fact that globalization essentially represents a continuation of colonialism through other means, I believe that both the New Right and the Alt Right must resolutely reject this sort of colonialist nostalgia. This is not to say that we should hang our heads in shame, as the liberals would have us do, at its legacy, or deny that there was a great deal of positive achievement in it that went along with its negatives, as one can see in the development of social institutions and infrastructure in India, for instance. (It is no less true, of course, that colonialism also had a detrimental effect on the colonizers, as anyone who has walked the streets of London, and seen the legacy of the Commonwealth of Nations firsthand, can surely attest.) Nevertheless, we are entering a new age, and calling for the imposition of rule by one people over another against their will is not just wrong, but it’s anachronistic. Therefore, we should afford no tolerance towards neo-colonialists in today’s Right. Empire can be a noble form, but empires should only consist of ethnically and culturally compatible peoples, and not be built purely on economic expediency, as were the great European transcontinental empires of the nineteenth century. The Alt Right and the New Right are united in recognizing the right of all the peoples of the world to maintain their own beliefs, cultures, and traditions – in their own lands, of course. This is why we reject mass immigration, since the importation of large numbers of people from fundamentally different cultures into a single system can only lead to a sense of alienation, dissatisfaction, and natural hostility, both on the part of the native population as well as among the immigrants themselves.
And speaking of cultural alienation, another reason why I warn Europeans against embracing the Alt Right label is that the Alt Right is born out of the very specific American context. America was founded on liberalism; this is an undeniable fact. “All men are created equal” is among the first words in our founding document. It’s not too difficult to see how the history of America since then, and most especially over the last half-century, has been the consequence of that principle, even if it’s taken two centuries to see its full implications play out. In Europe, your nations have histories which stretch back into primordial, mythic times, and you have traditions of political organization and hierarchies that go back just as far. You, as Swedes, know who you are. You have thousands of years of historical and cultural heritage to inform you about who you are. Even today, you have political institutions which predate the coming of liberal democracy to your country and the attendant notion of “all men are created equal” that you’ve imported from us.
To be an American, on the other hand, simply means to be an individual invested with vague notions of “rights,” and anyone from anywhere who shows up in America today only needs to take a basic civics test in order to become just as much an American as someone whose forefathers fought in the American Revolution. When the Alt Right is at its best, it draws on the pre-liberal European legacy of political and cultural thought, in particular European notions of natural hierarchies and identity. I don’t mean to disparage the so-called “Alt Light” too harshly, but one can see in much of the Alt Light’s rhetoric an inability to think beyond the liberal principles upon which America is founded. To be frank, American constitutionalism and exceptionalism are not going to be the vehicles that rescue European-Americans from multiculturalism and ultimate displacement as the architects of our country. We need to get back to the ideas that our ancestors left behind in Europe. Like the French revolutionaries and the Soviet Communists, the fathers of the American Revolution thought they could rebel against nature and establish something new – but we can see now that this dream was just as ill-conceived as the utopian dreams of those others. To save ourselves, we Americans have to reconnect with our European roots and with European ideas. In short: white Americans need you a lot more than you need them. Of course it would be good for everyone, and Europe in particular, to get America to a point where it stops harming the rest of the world with its endless geopolitical machinations. But we’re going to need your help in order to get there.
Which brings me to two more deficiencies of the Alt Right project, at least as it has played out so far: it lacks any solid economic or geopolitical viewpoint. It’s too focused on problems at home and on identity politics to be worried about the larger picture, but it will eventually need to engage with these matters if it is to really tackle the problems it has set out to address. Again, this is someplace where the New Right has excelled. The Alt Right seems very hesitant to be critical of capitalism, which I think stems from the fact that globalist capitalism and the American Right became very closely intertwined during the Cold War, in opposition to Communism, and remain so today, which is why all political arguments in the US usually can be boiled down to differing views concerning how best to grow the economy. The simple fact is that we will never be able to achieve the changes we want to see while retaining economic growth as the sole measuring stick of political success or failure.
Alain de Benoist has been quite vocal in insisting that we must seek changes in our economic system if we want to restore our nations as places for our own people to grow and thrive, something that we hear a faint, if insufficient, echo of in Donald Trump’s own protectionist proposals, or in the Alt Right’s support for tariffs to protect domestic goods. As Benoist famously said in his essay “Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital,” “Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.”
There is one positive point of convergence here, though: the New Right recognizes that, as Rightists, it is our duty to be stewards of the Earth and its environment (which, as Roger Scruton has written, has always been something more natural to the Right than to the humanistic Left); this is paralleled in the nine theses of the Alt Right, which state, “We support regulations designed to preserve our natural heritage.”
Again, however, the Alt Right falters when it comes to geopolitics. The mere isolationism proposed by the Alt Right in international relations, while certainly an improvement over America’s destructive legacy of interventionism, will be insufficient to deal with the problems that lie ahead. The true Right must be able to forge new alliances and perhaps name new enemies if it is to undo the damage that globalism has already wrought across the globe.
I may have sounded very critical of the Alt Right in this talk, and indeed, I think it still has a long way to go before it can be taken seriously as a political movement worthy of contending for actual power, as opposed to the vague influence it exerts today. But I don’t intend to disparage it completely. In it, we do see the first glimmerings of a revolution against liberalism; they just need to be fanned until they burst into real flame. To do that, it will have to attain a much greater degree of inner discipline and intellectual maturity. That’s where we need help from Europe. In short, we need you to help us to grow up. The European New Right is not something that can be exactly replicated in America, I concede, given our different cultural contexts, but I believe that the two have more commonalities than differences, and in fact the communitarianism that has been suggested by GRECE as a solution to the problems of mass immigration is perhaps even better suited to the American context than to the European, given that America has been communitarian in nature since its inception: groups of different peoples living side by side, but according to different traditions and customs.
But the one area where the Alt Right has already proven its mastery is in the metapolitical arena. If you had told me a year ago that Pepe the Frog and triple parentheses were going to become flashpoints in the 2016 presidential race – a race that our guy won, a fact which still amazes me – I would have suggested that you switch from liquor to beer. But the forces of the Alt Right mobilized a youthful vigor and a wicked, creative sense of humor, and tapped into the American collective unconscious in a way that was unparalleled in modern times. I wouldn’t say that the Alt Right won the election, but it was certainly a significant factor. And this is the one way in which you in Europe can perhaps take lessons from us Americans. The European New Right has built an elegant intellectual edifice over decades that is unmatched; the problem is that its call for metapolitical battle has never truly left the pages of books and articles and been manifested in the real world. The Alt Right needs to learn from Europe, that much is clear. But what we also need now is for you Europeans, with the strength of your ideas and your traditions, to link up with the guerrilla prankster spirit that drives the Alt Right. I already see signs of this coming into being, but you need to take it much further. And don’t just copy the Alt Right, but come up with your own ideas, exclusive to your own needs. Come up with your own answer to Pepe!
So I will leave you with one, final warning. The Alt Right’s relationship to the Trump Administration is not the first time in recent times that the true Right has flirted with genuine political power. In the mid-1980s, many veterans of GRECE ended up going to work for the Front National, but unfortunately it was more of a divorce than an example of influence, as the activists, such as Guillaume Faye, grew frustrated with the thinkers’ lack of action, and the thinkers grew contemptuous of the lack of intellectual seriousness and rigor on the part of the activists. I think it’s possible we may see a similar split in the Alt Right before long, as the harsh realities of politics become apparent. Greg Johnson wrote a brief essay on what happened in France in a short essay called “Theory and Practice.” He writes:
[Faye] claims that the New Right never engaged the Front National, because its members fundamentally misunderstood Gramsci, whose cultural battle was organically connected with the economic and political struggle of the Italian Communist Party. The New Right, however, treated the battle as entirely cultural and intellectual. Thus they were not really Gramscians. They were actually followers of Augustin Cochin’s theory of the role of intellectual salons in paving the way for the French Revolution. Unlike the men of the old regime, however, we do not enjoy the luxury of ignoring party and electoral politics. . . . [W]e must influence people who have power, or who can attain it. That means we must engage organized political parties and movements. No, in the end, white people are not going to vote ourselves out of the present mess. But we are not in the endgame yet, and it may still be possible to influence policy through the existing system. Moreover, parties do not exist merely for the sake of elections. They provide a nucleus for the new order they advocate. Finally, there are other ways to attain power besides elections.
Greg is right about this, and it’s a difficult balance we will have to strike: between influencing politics with our ideas on the one hand, while not turning our noses up at everyday politics – which, admittedly, is a dirty and unpleasant business – and eschewing it out of a desire to remain pure to our ideals. Yes, we will have to compromise at times, but a tremendous amount can still be achieved. The current wave of populism across the Western world is an indication of that, and it’s a wave we must ride. In this, I think a marriage between the ideas of the New Right and the techniques of the Alt Right can be a very happy and fruitful one. We have two very different battles to fight, but if we learn from each others’ strengths, eventually we will meet and clasp hands as victorious brothers on the battlefield of history.
Thank you.
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32 comments
“We can’t pretend that an Irishman and a Russian are interchangeable. ”
That canard again. I want to know – who says that? Who believes it? Who advocates that? If ethnonationalists don’t want to be viewed as fundamentally dishonest then you guys really need to stop making the most absurd strawman arguments.
I’ve heard such rhetoric from many people on the Alt Right. Specifically here, however, I’m thinking particularly of ideas that Richard Spencer has outlined in the past.
If Spencer ever advocated such interchangeability, I’d like a quote. In my 20+ years of activism, always with a strong pan-European focus, I’ve only encountered one – one! – person who advocated any sort of “homogenizing” of Europeans – that was Hoffmeister in the introduction to Lowell’s book (and I critiqued him for that on this blog). And even Hoffmeister (insofar as I know) doesn’t believe these groups are the same, he just advocated their intermarriage. If Spencer suggested that all Europeans are the same, I would denounce that also. But don’t pretend or imply that those all people who advocate for a “Big Europe” idea actually believe such nonsense. It is factually incorrect, and its offensive.
One could just as easily look at ethnonationalist squabbling among Slovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians, or the Balt animus toward Russia, and accuse ethnonationalists of all supporting intra-European conflict.
Has he ever specifically said that an Irishman and a Russian are interchangeable? No, although that is the logical outcome of what he is advocating. He has spoken more times than I can count in interviews and podcasts about the need for America, Europe, and Russia to combine into a “new Roman Empire.” The only occasion I can remember offhand is during the Red Ice roundtable that Greg, RamZPaul, and I were on with him about a year ago.
” No, although that is the logical outcome of what he is advocating.”
That’s unfair. You can imagine implications of anyone’s position.
Let’s turn all of this around. Let’s consider the grand ethnonationalist Europe with all the atomized nations with their absolute sovereignty. Let’s take Ireland, since that nation has been mentioned. What if Ireland decides to ditch ethnonationalism and solve its “labor shortage” by importing one million hard-working African Negroes. Do they have the right to import Negroes into a nationalist Europe? Yes or no?
Another one (and more dear to the heart of the Majority Rights Silk Road crowd). Let’s say that Ireland decides to conduct a military alliance with China against England, with Chinese military bases on Irish soil. That OK? Yes or no?
If you say yes, well that’s quite interesting indeed, the “logical outcome” of ethnonationalism. If you say no, then you admit to limits to national sovereignty and a racial veto to destructive behavior of individual nations.
Great essay, would have made for an excellent speech no doubt.
I belong to the ethnonationalist camp but I think Pan-Europeans make a good point. Yockey’s book Imperium stressed the need to draw the distinction between Us v. Them on a racial level, not an ethnic one. The European civil wars (WWI and WWII) were the downside of ethnonationalism, which broke the European spirit. We’re still living under its consequences.
Europe ruled under a single unified state is a terrible, disastrous idea. But we do need to make sure that we never let ethnonationalism plunge Europe into a suicidal war with its neighbors when the greater danger is the nonwhite world.
Ethno-nationalists are partisans of big European nations exercising hegemony over smaller Euro nations. Instead of practicing collegiality among Europeans so as to exercise sovereignty or hegemony globally. As such they are the tools of Anglo, Russian and Jewish geopolitical interests. No use arguing with them. What is required is a sort of modified pan-European approach. With larger, peripheral nations, as well as any recalcitrant hard-line resistance within the core of Europe cut out of any solidarity or reciprocity. Europe moves forward , and it’s lost tribes simply get lost.
There are some people who are essentially doing that. I can think of two offhand, Richard Spencer has been doing it in a subtle way, and Constantin von Hoffmeister has also been doing it in a completely explicit way.
Here’s an example of Spencer doing it in a podcast on 19 Dec 2015: http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2015/12/19/trump-putin-and-the-future-of-the-white-world
Again, Spencer doesn’t explicitly do it, he just establishes the kind of framework which could lead a person to arrive at those conclusions. He does acknowledge in the podcast that the ‘unity’ he is talking about is a long shot.
Here’s an example of Hoffmeister doing it in an interview on Stark Truth Radio on 28 Feb 2017: http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=3913
In that interview Hoffmeister actually calls for ‘an alliance of Berlin, Moscow and Tel Aviv’. He repeats it three times and seems to have no self-awareness about how a large percentage of listeners will regard him and that savagely obscene idea with the utmost horror and revulsion.
And Hoffmeister had also appeared at Identitarian Ideas IX, on 25 Feb 2017: https://altright.com/2017/02/27/identitarian-ideas-ix-rising-from-the-ruins-2/
Hoffmeister’s appearance at that venue seems to show that he is no longer totally the half-joke and half-eccentric figure that he was apparently seen as in the 2006 – 2009 period. It wouldn’t be impossible that his ideas might have some currency with some people in the Alt-Right.
A scan of comments sections often will also show random commenters affirming those kinds of views, and they seem to have received a renewed – albeit still limited – push since the emergence of Russian Active Measures which strove to amplify certain aspects of the Alt-Right message that the Russian state assessed to be useful to cultivating a social support for their energy interests in Europe. By amplifying the parts of Alt-Right ideology they agree with, or inserting themselves into identitarian movements, or by simply funding organisations, Russia has been able to shape some of the contours of these social movements in ways that could be conducive to their interests.
John Morgan’s article was really good, I think, he is on to the truth. Morgan may or may not have had quotes or specific podcast links immediately to hand when he was writing his article – after all, not everyone has browser bookmarks as beautifully organised as myself – but his sense of the situation wasn’t wrong. This is a thing.
The people who believe in the ‘Big Europe’, often tend to also assert that anyone who disagrees with them is ‘in favour of intra-European conflict’ or something like that. But actually on a basic level the ideas propagated by those who believe in a so-called ‘Big Europe’ – by which it is understood as a ‘Lisbon to Vladivostok’ concept – are the ideas that really are promoting an intra-European conflict because the persons promoting them must know on some level that Britain specifically will be dramatically opposed to any such thing.
What do I mean by that? Well, no one ever tries to utter the phrase ‘London to Vladivostok’, and I think we all know why they do not say that. It’s because they know that they cannot. At the end of the day, people do quietly understand that Britain’s geostrategic and geoeconomic interests are to strive against allowing any single power to control access to the transit lanes and the mineral and energy resources of Central Asia, navigation across and around the Baltic area, the strategic depth of the Visegrad countries, or the natural resources of Siberia. The legacy of the Great Game, the Crimean War, and the First World War’s covert and semi-covert theatre in Central Asia trace the contours of that fascinating phenomenon.
Another factor which has not been considered by many people, is that the advent of ‘Brexit’ which will be implemented sometime in the next thirty days, will further unshackle Britain from the continent, and thus unshackle Britain from the (relatively speaking) moderating effect that European institutions suffused with Franco-German stakeholders have previously exerted on British policy toward Russia. In other words, Brexit will not herald a softening of British policy toward Russia, but rather it will herald a sharpening of British policy against Russia.
It is ironic that many of the same people who supported ‘Big Europe’ also gave moral support to ‘Brexit’ (and thus they accidentally supported #GlobalBritain!), because these things are totally opposed tendencies. Britain was asked to choose between the continent and the sea, and it chose the sea again, as it absolutely had to. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that is an integral part of the identity of the British people as a seafaring trading nation with ‘historical connections’ to Central, South and East Asia.
In summary: For people to call for ‘an imperium from Lisbon to Vladivostok’ or ‘a Euro-Siberian imperium’ as Hoffmeister does, is effectively the same as those persons announcing an intent to have conflict with a whole laundry list of countries who will of course disagree with it, namely, all the countries which would have to be unwillingly dragged into such an arrangement, as well as offshore balancers like the British who would rightly see their interests being threatened by any such suggestion.
‘Big Europe’ is also a maximum autistic LARP which is open for exploitation by Gazprom, because the concept doesn’t intersect with realities on the ground and ends up functioning as a mere cheerleading squad for the Kremlin. It additionally seems to want to include large swathes of land in the so-called ‘RFE’ that are not even inhabited by Europeans to begin with.
No, your insane Asian imperialism of Silk Road White Nationalism is the LARP that we should all beware of, for autistic Asiaphiles selling out to the inscrutables of Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul. We do not need Russian-hating Japanese dictating to Europeans what our relationships to each other should be.
Britain’s “geostrategic” interests helped lead to two World Wars that lost them their empire, wrecked the White world, and led to the colonization of Britain and the rest of Europe by the Third World. It’s high time that the British stop applying 19th and early 20th century strategies to a 21st century world.
And, yes, by the way, I’m a Big Europe person who was enthusiastically in favor of Brexit, since the EU is the perfectly inverse mirror image of what a sane Big Europe would be like. The EU is monstrous, not because European cooperation and collegial feeling is bad, but because it is a vehicle for globalist aspiration (which the government of Britain and all other Western European nations also is).
“the British people as a seafaring trading nation with ‘historical connections’ to Central, South and East Asia.”
Right…Britain should make common cause with Asians against Europe so as to please Asian imperalists who covet the Russian Far East. Sorry, I do hope the British people don’t fall for that Asiatic swindle.
Thank you. This is an excellent comment.
I do not completely agree with Ms. Kumiko Oumae (大前久美子 the pro-Jewish neocon establishmentarian intellectual in Japan, are you?) in overemphasizing the historically consistent British geopolitical and geostrategic tendencies i.e. seafaring colonialism and anti-European Continental power conglomeration (which were often made by the Jewish and for the Jewish interest that had had an increasingly firm grip on the British foreign policy ever since the 17th century) as if they were all sane and just and wise, which they weren’t certainly and had led to the calamitous WWII serving the interest of their Jewish master and destroying the best White hope Germany in tandem with US and USSR. In the meantime, I do not completely agree with Mr. Ted either who seemed to have overreacted to Kumiko’s comment with a little too much misguided and errant vehemency and conflated different political notions together. I believe I am totally balanced and objective from my viewpoint as a Japanese nationalist and a White nationalism advocate.
To correct two cardinal misunderstandings of Mr. Ted briefly,
First, never put Japan and China together as if they are of the same camp politically, economically, culturally, diplomatically, racially, ideologically or philosophically in discussing any pressing geopolitical or other related issues. Japan and China do NOT stack together, much less stack together against Whites. China hates Japan more immediately and acutely than it hates the West and Whites. It is my belief and mission to ally Japan with the Whites to commonly combat and counter the Chinese menace. So your remark in response to Oumae in which you put Japan and China in a seemingly allied relationship is really wildly off mark and wrongheaded.
Second, Some small sized lands in the Far East e.g. the four tiny islands off the northeastern tip of Hokkaido of Japan are historically, inherently and rightly Japanese territories. Russia took it from Japan by naked force and aggression at the end of WWII, a sheer act of heist which is a universally and objectively known fact. Japan has every legitimate reason to want them returned to Japan, and the four-island issue is the only problem currently lying between Japan and Russia preventing mutual trust, further cooperation and a comprehensive development of the bilateral relationship. It is willfully unjust and arrogant on the part of Russia, backed by its massive military power against a pacifist and militarily minuscule Japan, to refuse to see the truth and give the islands back to Japan to which they rightfully belonged. And it is also patently stupid for Russia to do so because Japan only wanted the four islands back and nothing more and the bilateral relationship would be markedly improved and strengthened if Russia simply oblige and acts justly by seeing the light.
Meanwhile, look at the following facts: China has long claimed openly and vehemently that Russia had stolen more than 1.5 million square kilometers of its own land in the Far East and asserted it would never forget that and would take them back someday. China’s military power has been increasingly exponentially under Russia’s assistance. China has exporting its extra labor hands to explore and harvest Russia’s vast Far East lands, many of whom had settled down, married Russian women and never gone back. Now tell me with honesty and common sense, which is a larger threat to the White men’s Russia, Japan or China? But look at Russia’s senseless and ignoble bullying of Japan and insouciant allying and ingratiating with China, people’ll surely get an idea of Russia’s degree of national integrity and its sense of judgment.
I would suggest Mr. Riki-Eiki go to Majority Rights and respond there:
https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/britain_as_a_pacific_trading_power_in_the_21st_century_04032017
I’ll have a very interesting post to put on my blog.
By the way, Kumiko, if you value Counter-Currents so much, I’m curious why MR allows Captain Choas to post offensive vulgar attacks against Greg? Just asking?
You should have asked me that question right there at Majorityrights, really. I assume you are referring to the time when Captainchaos directed homophobic abuse toward Greg Johnson in our comments section.
I’m relatively sure that this happened about two weeks ago, and that I saw it, and I came into the thread in which it occurred and argued against Captainchaos and against another person who had taken the same position as he did.
I obviously do not endorse homophobia. I am strongly against homophobia and against misogyny in all its forms, and I’ve been telling people repeatedly to stop making homophobic comments. This is obvious.
Did you want me to actually go as far as to literally censor all the reactionaries? I sense that you are trying to put me in a catch-22 here. If I were to really do what you presumably want me to do, which is to censor anyone who brings homophobia or misogyny to Majorityrights’ comments section, you would probably immediately then change your argument and declare that I’m ‘dictating’ how Europeans should think about social issues and that I’m ‘abusing the power’ which GW conferred on me (I’m sure sure you know that GW is a strong and overt believer in ‘free speech’, apparently that’s how Western Europeans operate).
How can I ‘win’ with you here, Ted? If I don’t censor them, you’ll accuse me of implicitly endorsing their retrogressive views, even though I obviously do not endorse them. But if I do censor them, you’ll probably accuse me of waging an ‘Asiatic’ censorship war against anyone who is less ‘permissive’ than me on sexual issues.
What would you want me to do?
It is interesting that Daniel censored CC for calling you a “Jap” – or so he claimed (and also banned Silver) – and yet “free speech” is the excuse for abusing Greg in a despicable and libelous fashion.
What should you do? Not allow personal abuse on your blog. If you folks disagree with Greg’s defense of Enoch, explain why. Abuse has no place in reasoned arguments. CC’s comments were completely unacceptable and any decent person would have deleted them.
I have to be more light-handed in my moderation, primarily because people like you persistently create an environment where you try to absurdly racialise every action that I make. The very thing that you are asking me to do now, is the same kind of action which if I were to do it, you would write several blog posts telling people not to post at Majorityrights because ‘Kumiko the evil Asiatic might censor you’ or whatever.
In fact, it was you who wrote in your recent blog post that you in fact saved Captainchaos’ comment so that even if I did decide to delete it you could simply reproduce it and put it back! In other words, you were already prepared to publicly work against the very same moderation policy that you are disingenuously exhorting me to adopt here. Isn’t that amazing?
Now, regarding my own treatment of Greg Johnson in that thread. I’m sure you read the thread on 28 Jan 2017, and that you are therefore aware that I used up about a quarter of the thread repeatedly defending Greg Johnson. I said that while I don’t understand the choice that Johnson made to not sound the alarm about Enoch’s shameless lying ways earlier, and that he should be asked about why he made those decisions in that moment (for the sake of forming a more complete picture of the events), that there is a correct way to ask about that and a wrong way to ask. I said that Captainchaos and Ned Flanders were wrong to say what they were saying and that it was not acceptable. I am completely open to the idea that there were reasons which we who are looking at it in the aftermath would not be able to see. That’s why I said while we are going to be rough on Enoch, we should approach the issue of everyone else who may have known or suspected something about him in a fundamentally different way. I explicitly said that in the same thread.
It’s pretty disingenuous for you to now be trying to lecture me on what a decent person ‘should do’, seeing as you yourself are in fact a key component of the indecent and essentially deplorable problem which I had find a way to deal with there.
My response – which was the ‘nephew and niece group selection argument’ – seems to have also been agreed with by Richard Spencer because within days Spencer in fact approvingly echoed the substance of my argument on one of his podcasts (without attributing the comments to me – which is fine by me).
Do you know which outlet actually found my handling of it to be inappropriate? The Daily Shoah with TRS, of course. The Shoah subsequently had a show in which they addressed that same specific argument that I made (without attributing the comments to me – funny how so many people suddenly decided it was really time to talk about group selection in an extended family context, it’s really an astonishing ‘coincidence’), and they addressed it by ranting about ‘degeneracy’ and how apparently ‘un-European’ such an argument is.
So rather than acting as though I am the problem here, maybe you should go and ask your supposedly persecuted friend Mike Enoch at TRS why it is that he allows homophobia and misogyny on his show and on his website in the form of actually hundreds upon hundreds of Disqus comments literally every single day, and why it is that he reinforces and echoes those views at every opportunity. Ask him.
It is almost surreal that you are having this conversation with me of all people, and that you are having it across the comments section of Counter-Currents.
To accuse me of supporting homophobia is basically the most absurd – but comical – accusation I have ever faced from you. Seriously, it is absurd. It’s almost like you asked yourself: “Let me see if I can find the single most liberal person on sexual politics in the ethnonationalist sphere and accuse her of homophobia because that would be the single most hilarious thing that I could do. Oh, there’s Kumiko, let me try this on her!”
It’s almost like the kind of thing that if I didn’t know better, I’d say Mike Enoch and Seventh Son actually put you up to it. The reason I know better is because I know you guys aren’t nearly that organised.
I am no longer going to play host to this conversation. Take it to your own websites.
Ted , please explain why a migration of 1 million Russians to the Republic of Ireland would not be a risky strategy concerning the preservation of Irish indentity, and why it would not threaten the social cohesion of Irish society ?
Surely , if ancestral, historical, linguistiic , religious, ethnic and racial diversity are the equivalent of the effects of a poison on the human body , then the less of it consumed , the better.
In other words, there is no such thing as a beneficial or acceptable amount of poison.
Dan, please explain where I, or anyone else, EVER advocated such a migration. Did I say it in my comment? Did I EVER, once. in all my years of writing articles on racial issues, ever, one single time, advocated that even one single Russian, or a person of ANY non-Irish ethnic group, should migrate to Ireland?
These discussions do nothing but reinforce my belief that ethnonationalists are either dishonest or delusional. I absolutely challenge anyone to point to any piece of writing of mine that supports intra-European migration.
Sorry for the misunderstanding Ted. My fault. Itchy trigger finger.
Excellent piece by one of the few people qualified to discuss these differences intelligently.
That said, I am somewhat surprised that John does not mention Vox Day’s 16 Points of the Alt Right at all. Those points very much get at the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-globalist stance of the Alt Right. Vox’s writings more generally are also highly cognizant of the ethnic, rather than racial, basis for identity in Europe, and he has pointed this out to the American Alt Right repeatedly. Finally, I would also note that Vox Day is at the forefront of the questioning of pure capitalist economics. An interview he did with Greg Johnson, included as an appendix in “Cuckservative”, shows that the Alt Right is rejecting libertarian / free trade principles in favor of national-interest-based policies.
As for the Alt Right bookshelf, aside from Greg Johnson’s contribution which John mentions, I would add the following:
“Cuckservative”, mentioned above. This is the first true book-length Alt Right critique of American conservatism, and it very much gets at the points you mention in your talk about the limitations of the enlightenment, muh Constitution and “liberty”.
John Derbyshire’s “We Are Doomed” can be seen as something of an Alt Right work avant la lettre, albeit it is far more “black pilled” than the Alt Right is now.
Samuel, thank you very much for your kind words. I have indeed read Vox Day’s 16 Points of the Alt Right, and I might have used them as well, but to be honest they slipped my mind when I was considering what to draw on. Although given that I was asked to write something that could be delivered in 20 minutes, it would have been impossible to go into any more depth, anyway, but I’ll certainly take that into account if I expand this into a longer essay, as I’m considering.
I must confess to not having read “Cuckservatism” yet, or Derbyshire’s book, but again, maybe something for the expanded version.
I also forgot to mention that Vox Day and John Red Eagle, authors of “Cuckservative”, are working on a book about the Alt Right. It should be the definitive statement on the movement when it appears.
Here is the link to Vox’s 16 Points of the Alt Right, which I forgot to include. Note that those 16 points have been translated into _nineteen_ languages at last count. There are differences between the European New Right and the American Alt Right, but many points of congruity (as John admits in his talk).
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/08/what-alt-right-is.html
I particularly like your short discourse on chattel slavery and colonialism, particularly as they existed in the last 500 years and practiced against lesser people. Slavery, especially, has had a deleterious effect upon those who practice it. It encourages a materialist view of humanity. Everything about this institution reduces humans to producers. We do not have to feel sympathy for the enslaved; the slave-owner has reduced himself to a dependent. Chattel slavery practiced against one’s own is even more repugnant. To see one’s brethren reduced to this state has to be aesthetically, the most sickening thing a lover of one’s own can see.
Colonialism is similar. It reduces conquest only to a materialist undertaking. Those who engage in it, whether on their own or by Jewish instigation, are committing a slow death by one means or another. It never fails.
We do not have to be shamed for our past mistakes; we have learned from them but these practices must be eschewed for now and all future times as injurious to our own souls. They encourage sloth, greed and all other degeneracy. This I feel should be our attitude.
Absolutly brilliant text!
I wish the author would write in more depth about the nature of political philosophy of the Alt-Right (although, that is a demanding task, as the author noticed himself, due to anti-intellectual tradition of WASP thought – and I, as a Euro, am finding anti-intellectualism to be more and more commendable).
Specifically, I would like to hear more about the current position of libertarian anti-statism withing the Alt-Right which is still present despite the fact that AltRight is aware of certain downfalls of libertarianism.
I believe that one reason that was not mentioned by the author, who made Trump come to be named, was the massive support of the evangelicals. The same ones who felt and feel increasingly threatened with the moral relativism that prevails in society. They had to leave their comfortable life and vote. Many look at the current European situation, seeing the spread of Islamism, as the secularization of European countries themselves, as a warning sign. I am Brazilian, evangelical, and here, conservatives are gaining more and more strength precisely to contain this politically correct relativism that grows in schools and universities.
Thank you, but this is about the Alt Right, not Trump. There is no significant influence of evangelicalism on the Alt Right, which is mostly atheist, pagan, or Catholic/Orthodox. And there is even less of a connection between the European New Right and evangelicism.
So I disagree with this movement and I do not see how it will work in the United States. A movement that in its root denies the main values that built the United States, will not be seen by many. In my view, what should be worked out in this new right is simply the rescue of the values that governed this society, precisely to face moral relativism, politically correct, multiculturalism and other things. Wanting to face the Islamization of the West without rescuing these solid values, deep down is trying to cover the sun with a sieve. It will never work. I totally disagree with this movement and I do not think it will work. To deny the Protestant values of American society, it would be the same thing for me as a Brazilian to want to renounce Catholic values in Brazil, or I as a Russian, to deny the importance of the Orthodox Church today. That does not make the slightest sense.
I don’t know anyone on the Alt Right who denies that Protestant values are a fundamental part of American culture. I think rather that most people’s attitudes towards religion on the Alt Right are similar to my own, namely that religion is a private matter that should be kept out of politics, at least for the present. Trump made virtually no appeal to religious values and yet was very successful, which demonstrates that one doesn’t need to be a Bible-thumper to win support from conservative Whites in the US.
Based on all of this, I’ve started reanalyzing my “Pan-European Preservationism” piece to see how my current thoughts jibe with my original essay. I’ll post that at my blog whenever it is done.
The most insightful article I’ve yet read on the political wave which is breaking across the Western world at this time. The call to arms you make to Europeans, however well placed it may be, will fall on deaf ears. The conditions for an equivalent movement to the alt-right in Europe simply don’t exist – such energy historically only surfaces in nations which have a place secure at the centre of the world, as the United States unequivocally has today. Much of the ‘kek’, Pepe, and general absurdist humour which has driven this assemblage of ideas to the fore comes from a willingness among younger Americans to expend this kind of superfluous energy to an as-yet undefined greater cause. The similarities to Dada, and the action of the Left following the bloodbath of the Great War, are surely unmissable. Europe as a political entity, explicitly the EU, has retained an exostructure of wealth, power and forward motion. But it is obvious to all but the minority of direct beneficiaries of the quirks of the system that it is a sad and pathetic thing – not a fraction of the meaning and verve of one or another of its member states prior to its inception. Thus in France (my home), a major player in a system where the parts are far greater than the sum, there is no sense of the value of such playfulness. Conversely, while the 3rd position in politics remains a minority (albeit powerful) in the US, the Front National find their core support among under-25s. But the mood is sober, and partially because in the West at least, the language of the internet is American (and I mean American, rather than more broadly English). Europeans, unless well-versed in the nuances of 21st C. net English, will inevitably fail to generate such a ferocious cauldron of radicalism and humour as 4Chan is able to do pertaining matters American. The very idea here is to avoid an American cross-culture. We’re looking for security, and scaling cautiously in that direction. Young Europeans, unlike Americans, furthermore do not fear socialism in all its forms. We see that, under the right conditions, it’s a highly functional system as in any homogenous society – as Europe ought to be – everyone will more or less be driven towards mutually beneficial ends. The United States will never be homogenous, and thus mistrust grows between groups, meaning that a more libertarian, individualistic system seems more appropriate. Avoiding civil war as free groups compete with one another over time for the great prizes of power is America’s challenge. Avoiding the wipeout of our ancient cultures and ways of life through greed, blindness and revisionism is the European challenge right now. A degree of humbleness would do us well, combined with continuing our now-antiquated models of raising our levels of civilisation and technological advancement above all others without necessarily resorting to underhand means of achieving it. France and Britain, and no less Spain, Greece, Italy and most European nations should look today at Japan and bow their heads with shame to think of what they might have achieved – with most of those nations not even having been hobbled by participating on the losing side in WWII, let alone suffering nuclear attacks and firebombings of a kind never seen before or since. And yet, the candidate for the centre-left party in France would essentially ban robotics and make the nation a junior partner in an alliance with Algeria. The equivalent in the UK would have people going back into the mines, while bringing the world’s most potent monotheistic religion to the forefront of the political schema, all these centuries after the ghosts of Virgil, Livy, and Homer were borne back into our lands by Petrarch and all those who bravely followed him on the road to the reinvigoration of our minds with European ideas in place of the spiritually crippling ideologies of the Middle East. We are already greatly diverse – put a Finn alongside a Neapolitan, a Scot next to a Greek. Purity spiralling and the vulgarity brought by the NSDAP in the 1930s is redundant. We must take a slightly humbler path than our American allies, and grow smaller to be free. Every nation to speak for itself, and to delve into the knowledge that comes with being Swedish, French, Andorran, Swiss etc. There’s little danger of Europeans emulating the alt-right in all it’s crass thunder, we simply don’t have the energy anymore. Fortunately, the enemy is a Union built on a foundation of feathers – keep leaning, it will fall.
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