Counter-Currents
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Paul Revere, 1768
1,500 words / 10:54
French version here
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Many patriotic Americans object to White Nationalism because they are told it is “un-American.” America, they say, was always a multiracial society, dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Therefore, the White Nationalist idea of a society that bases citizenship on race is alien to the American tradition.
This viewpoint is false, based on a systematic misrepresentation of American history.
First of all, the claim that the United States is dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” is simply untrue. The phrase “all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Whatever the intended meaning of this rhetorical flourish, its author, Thomas Jefferson, and many of the signatories, evidently did not think it was inconsistent with owning Negro slaves. In fact, “all men are created equal” was simply the republican denial of the principle of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. The intended meaning, however, is moot because the Declaration may well be an important historical document, but it is not a legal document of the United States.
The Constitution of the United States was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and went into effect in 1789. It contains not a word about universal human equality, but it does prohibit a hereditary aristocracy. The Preamble makes it clear that the Constitution was created and ratified by white men to provide good government for themselves and their posterity, not all of mankind. The Constitution treats Indians as foreign nations, allows Negro slavery, and defines free and enslaved blacks as non-citizens, each one counting as only three-fifths of a person for the purposes of Congressional representation.
The claim that America is “dedicated to the proposition” of human equality comes from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which, like the Declaration, is a fine piece of rhetoric, but it is not a legal document of the United States either. Lincoln’s claim that America is dedicated to the “proposition” of equality is the epitome of the Left-wing revisionist tradition in America, which has taken a line from the Declaration, inflated it with a great deal of rhetorical hot air, and set it up as the first and final commandment of an egalitarian civil religion. This civil religion has no constitutional basis. But that has proved to be no impediment. A piece of paper still remains enshrined in Washington, D.C. But the Constitution’s inegalitarian, particularist, and libertarian order has simply been replaced with a Jacobin-style state committed to realizing the idea of universal human equality.
Second, the claim that America was always a multiracial society — with whites, American Indians, and blacks present from the start of English colonization — is fundamentally false. From the beginning of the colonial period well into the history of the United States, there was a consensus that blacks and American Indians — and later mestizos and Orientals — might be “in” white society, but they were not “of” it. They were foreigners, not fellow citizens. They had no say about the character and destiny of white society.
The colonial consensus that blacks and Indians were not part of white society was reflected in the Constitution. It was further elaborated in the Naturalization Act of 1790, which defined who could become a citizen of the United States. Naturalization was limited to free white persons of good character. This excluded American Indians, indentured servants, free and enslaved blacks, Muslims, and later, Orientals.
From the start, American Indians were considered distinct, sovereign nations. American Indians who did not live on reservations could become citizens only with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Citizenship was granted to all American Indians only by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. To this day, however, most Indians in effect enjoy dual citizenship, since they belong to tribes which still have special rights granted to them by treaties with the US government.
John Singleton Copley, Head of a Negro Slave
Blacks, whether slaves or free, were not considered to be part of white society in the colonial period or under the constitution until the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868. The Naturalization Act of 1870 allowed foreign-born blacks, primarily from other parts of the Americas, to become US citizens.
Chinese immigrants began arriving in the 1840s, and their presence almost immediately created a backlash. White Americans objected to Chinese economic competition, drug use, criminality, and all-round alienness.
Soon an Asian exclusion movement arose to cut off Chinese immigration and freeze the Chinese out of American society. The vanguard of Chinese exclusion came from the labor movement, which saw that big business interests were importing coolies to depress white wages and living standards. California was the front line of the Chinese invasion and the white reaction, which was often violent. The Chinese exclusion movement was led by the California Workingmen’s Party, founded by Irish immigrant Denis Kearney, who obviously didn’t fall for the idea that all immigrants are equal. (See Theodore J. O’Keefe’s “Denis Kearney and Struggle for a White America” and Raymond T. Wolters, “Race War on the Pacific Coast.”)
Because of exclusionist agitation, Chinese immigration was reduced, then completely barred for ten years by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was renewed in 1892 and again in 1902 and extended to people from Hawaii and the Philippines. Chinese exclusion was again reaffirmed by the Immigration Act of 1924. Chinese born in America were not considered citizens until 1898, and it was only in 1940 that naturalization was opened to people of Chinese, Philippine, and East Indian descent, as well as descendants of the aboriginal peoples from other parts of the Western Hemisphere, meaning Indians and Mestizos from outside the United States. Chinese exclusion was only overturned by Congress in 1943, as a wartime gesture toward China.
But even with all of these concessions to non-whites, US immigration and naturalization law was explicitly committed to maintaining an overwhelming white majority until the 1965 immigration act threw open America’s borders to race-replacement immigration from the Third World.
The 1965 Immigration Act, like the long history of extending citizenship to non-whites that came before it, was imposed by political elites against the will of the white majority. Such measures would never have been approved if the public had been allowed to vote on them in referendums.
Furthermore, extending legal citizenship to non-whites did not in any way alter the deep conviction that real Americans are white, and the naturalization of non-whites came with the expectation that they would live according to white norms. Non-white citizens faced numerous forms of legal and social discrimination, subordination, and segregation well into the twentieth century.
Thus, although it is true to say that non-whites have always existed within the borders of what we now call America, throughout most of American history, they have been excluded from citizenship or consigned to second-class citizenship and forced to conform to white cultural norms.
The American tradition of excluding and subordinating non-whites is, of course, portrayed as violent, evil, irrational, petty, and mean-spirited by our education system and culture industry, which are firmly in the hands of the Left. But Americans had their reasons. They recognized that race is real, that the races are different, and that different races are more comfortable in different forms of society. They recognized that any attempt to incorporate non-whites into American society will result in conflict as non-whites demand that white society accommodate them, and whites push back to protect their own way of life. In short, they knew all along precisely what White Nationalists — and white Americans in general — are now learning from bitter experience from the failure of egalitarianism, racial integration, and non-white immigration.
If, dear reader, you truly are an American patriot, if you take your bearings from the American Founding (the real Founding — the Constitution — not the egalitarian afflatus that has replaced it), then it behooves you to learn something about what the founders and subsequent generations of statesmen and sages actually thought about race. I suggest you begin with Jared Taylor’s classic article, “What the Founders Really Thought About Race.” I also suggest that you pick up S. T. Joshi’s Documents of American Prejudice: An Anthology of Writings on Race from Thomas Jefferson to David Duke (New York: Basic Books, 1999), which documents a long and illustrious tradition of American race realism, as well as its editor’s Left-wing prejudices.
Even many White Nationalists are surprised to learn how sensible earlier generations of Americans were. This makes America’s reversal and decline all the more shocking, but ultimately it is cause for hope, for it reveals deep foundations upon which we can build. Far from being “un-American,” White Nationalism is actually the legitimate heir of the healthiest strands of the American tradition.
But unlike previous generations of race realists, who were confused by commitments to classical liberalism, corrupted by the allure of the cheap-labor plantation economy, and too easily contented with half-measures that ultimately failed to preserve America for their posterity, White Nationalists aim at a permanent solution: the repatriation of post-1965 immigrant populations and the partition of the United States into racially homogeneous homelands.
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16 comments
The proposition that “all men are created equal” defies common sense, so unless we’re to believe that the ‘Founding Father’s’ were moronic there must be some some other interpretation of their words?
It always seemed clear to me what they meant – that all men are created with natural rights. It does irritate me when speakers at WN conferences (or writers) deride the statement as being naively ignorant of all human differences, because I’m pretty sure that Jefferson, Sherman, Adams, etc. were aware that some people are smarter than others, others stronger, and so on. They couldn’t have been expected to foresee the cucking and racial suicide of their descendants, using a misinterpretation of the Declaration as moral impetus.
The D of I is a political document intended to justify secession from Great Britain; not a lecture on racial equality.
I agree. Once I got over the naive interpretation of those words and looked at them as I would look at any historical document (a skill they taught me in seminary Scripture studies), I concluded that the purpose of his statement was the denial of the right of White hereditary aristocrats and kings to rule other White men. That’s it.
But as the redoubtable Vox Day repeats, after Aristotle, dialectics and reason are small potatoes when battling rhetoric and slogans. So the “original meaning,” though important in any forum where actual reason and evidence are admitted, is important, out in the debased real world, I assume that it is a lost cause, making Mr Jefferson’s phrase a weapon of the enemy.
The irony, of course, is that they claim the phrase while condemning its writer as the epitome of everything they hate.
You are right, of course, and I have added a line on the real meaning of “all men are created equal.” Properly understood, this principle is in the Constitution, namely in its prohibition of a hereditary aristocracy.
Nowhere in any of the documents or declarations considered central to American tradition – whether the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, etc. – is there uttered the notion that racial and religious diversity are American values.
Indeed, I discuss all this in more in my essay “The Legacy of the Second World War and the Question of America,” the second part of which begins:
Proponents of European Identity often trace the collapse of the West back to the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment expressed most famously by America’s Founders, who declared that “all men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” [5]. Perhaps the best evidence for this thesis is the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to appeal to these “self-evident truths” in the campaign to end the racial freedom of White Americans [6].
It is for this reason that I would like to briefly expound upon the degree to which Thomas Jefferson and Company can be rightly blamed for the demise of the Western world. On this subject it must first be noted, of course, that Jefferson and his peers did not believe in racial equality or support racial integration. In fact, in speculating about America’s growing race problem, Jefferson dismissed any notion of trying to “retain and incorporate” Blacks into the state, predicting that such measures would “divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” Jefferson supposed Blacks were a “distinct” and “inferior” race, and he opposed miscegenation on naturalistic grounds, going so far as to compare the sexual “preference” of Blacks for Whites with the alleged “preference” of the Orangutan for Black women “over those of his own species.” Thus Jefferson wanted Blacks removed from White society “beyond the reach of mixture” to prevent Blacks from “staining” the blood of their former masters [7]…
Here is the link to that essay
http://nationalvanguard.org/2016/01/legacy-of-the-second-world-war-and-the-question-of-america/
Could there be a warning here against our historical tendency to wrap up noble sentiments in grandiose rhetoric?
To play devils advocate white nationalism on face value may not be anti-American however, the implications of white nationalism are in fact anti-American. Less we forget the founding fathers were engaging in statecraft by trial and error. Had they known the ramifications of the Declaration of Independence’s word choice undoubtedly they would have amended it. Same is true of the first Naturalization Act. They did not anticipate future immigration on any large scale. This is bore out by the name of the act. It was assumed that the continent of North America was a birthright to the colonial population & their descendants alone. The term “white” was used to be inclusive towards the residual Dutch population in the Hudson River Valley and the Germans of Western Pennsylvania. Had they known “white” would come to justify Italian & Turkish immigration 100 years on they perhaps would have used the phrase “Teutonic persons of good character” instead. The founders never felt a need to define what an American was in any great detail because it was implicit. An American was and always has been an Angloized Northwest European. White nationalists in America particularly incorrectly use “white” as an ethnic identity. “Anglo” has always been the ethno-linguistic identity of which “American” was/is proxy for NOT white. ei white Nationalism doesn’t make sense as an ideology because from Platonism & Taoism I can extrapolate everything that “white nationalists” espouse & I take views of ethno/racial preservation/promotion as implicitly understood. I.e. White-Nationalism = Anti-American; Anglo-Nationalism = Patriotic
Moving ahead a bit toward the early-mid 19th century, Calhoun and Douglas used “white” to mean of European descent:
https://eginotes.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/john-and-stephen-vs-sir-desmond/
and there is no evidence one way or another to prove or disprove that the 1790 Act was intended to mean or not mean anything different.
That a Jew was a high-ranking member of the Confederacy suggests that the color line was, at least by the mid 19th century, not drawn as sharply as some today may have wished, regardless of rambling about “Platonism and Taoism.”
To paraphrase H. Rap Brown: White Nationalism is as American as apple pie!
The actual Brown quote is “Violence is as American as cherry pie!”.
I guess the reason he chose CHERRY pie is because cherries are RED. Other than that he’s right. Violence is a good old American tradition.
I think we also need to address the problematic issue of the often-used, “American Dream”.
This term has comparatively recent origins:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2882688/
“just as waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe did a century ago”
Well, at least these authors clarify that it was “Southern and Eastern Europe[ans]”, rather than EVERYONE who were the most significant past generational immigrants. Of course there were also Chinese, Mexicans, Greeks, Japanese, and others, but it was predominately Europeans. The article provides some specificity & nuance to the “America is an immigrant country” slogan / leverage promulgated to justify present claims to the “American Dream”; which itself is a notion originating from that generational wave of immigration (~1930s). It may have been a term used then by immigrants as whatever leverage to claim U.S. resources, and it certainly continues to be.
Yet, it was predominately Europeans that comprised past immigration, and thus history becomes skewed by present immigrants (and anti-White-Whites) to justify continued immigration.
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“declining significance of race and ethnicity in American society”
As Greg mentions, supra., White preservation has been largely illegal since 1965. This has been a setup for becoming a “flux” people, & country to whomever influxes most.
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“Most media accounts of these forecasts neglect to report that whites (as opposed to non-Hispanic whites) are actually projected to remain the large majority (upwards of 70 percent in 2050) of the US population”
Hispanics are not “White”. When it benefits Aztecs esp., they have almost always pushed for the label “Hispanic” to be an ethnic term; e.g. on the U.S. Census to make their impact less noticeable. However the ethnic term “Hispanic”, then, is in contrast to “Whites” which is racial/biological foremost, and as well as still connoting Europeans, esp. Anglo-Americans, & not Mexicans (etc.); unless they plan to co-opt that term, as predicted & above, along with everything else valuable.
Further, apparently authors Perez & Hirschman downplay demographic replacement indicated by the U.S. Census data. How these authors can claim to be more informed that the U.S. Census is dubious, however it serves to assuage both “Whites”, and “Whites”, to maintain the status quo replacement of the “Whites”.
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Let us just get to the heart of the matter.
At some point, it does not matter what the history was.
Immigrant country or not, this is just a power struggle.
Life, more broadly, is Struggle.
Regardless of whatever history is deployed, revised, selectively promulgated, or any other arguments conceived.
The Life that competes best, is the Life that best survives.
Individual, “racial”-group, economic/corporate-group, and species.
…(However, only the corporate entity, do we allow to play by the Law of Nature, and even enforce it, & glorify it. For competition breeds better results, thus justifying Trust-busting, in theory.
… Yet, somehow, modern Western society thinks that what is known as “economics” is a realm to itself, apart or unique from Existence proper. It’s laws & ideology, partitioned & compartmentalized to its own sphere/department, where, ruthless competition is desired to cultivate the best-abled {corporate} entities.
…But, if economics was seen more holistically, and the corporate entity was not an Other apart from the biological human, proper, and in whole, then the Harvard Business Review, would be a journal fixated on the intricacies of birth, slaughter, & survival.; proper.
…For, what is the realm of the “economy” if not the creation, distribution, & control of the sustenance & desires of biological Life?)
How we can disparately understand & treat the corporate-entity, & not the biological too, is an oddity to me.
The best defense of white nationalism as American would probably be by synthesizing the Harry Jaffa approach to Lincoln with the actual facts of Lincoln’s opinions about the suitability of Africans for American democracy & his vision of their future. Jaffa is correct that Lincoln (A) saw that there were no valid arguments for enslaving blacks that could not be used to enslave some whites as well, and (B) that Lincoln thought the institution of slavery called out for justice and was a blight on the principles of the Declaration. Lincoln clearly believed that “all men are created equal” was truly inclusive of all men, but also thought this perfectly compatible with a regime that would by encouragement or gentle force, repatriate at least the vast majority of black slaves to West Africa.
Abolitionist propaganda focused far more than is remembered now on the corrupting effect the institution of black slavery had on whites— Southern whites were seen as being reduced to cruel, decadent tyrants by the nature of having to uphold their peculiar institution. (And it certainly is offensive to allow chattel slavery in a regime based on natural right.)
I must say that I found the picture of “Rough on Rats” amusing. I sometimes refer to flies, cockroaches, and other pests that find their way into my residence as “illegal immigrants.”
From the founding until the mid 1960s America existed with the concept of white rule. Having a white majority was taken for granted, because that is actually what happened, with widespread European immigration. Blacks and Native Americans were here in very large numbers since the very beginning, and if not for the European immigration, they would have formed a much larger part of the American nation.
After 1965, with civil rights and immigration reform, things began to slowly fall apart and we are witnessing this now. All humans are short sighted, they simply couldn’t see that far out in the future, anymore than we can see the year 2050.
Not only has America abandoned the concept of white rule, but it has also abandoned the notion of a white majority. What this means if present trends continue: not only will white Americans decline in relative numbers, but their ability to influence the course of events, by ruling, will also decline. The result is multi-ethnic chaos.
With Trump now groveling to China, this is interesting –
“Chinese exclusion was only overturned by Congress in 1943, as a wartime gesture toward China.”
That is quite remarkable. It was in part due to the American war effort that China was freed from Japanese domination – a domination that infuriates the Chinese people to this day. And yet, it was not the Chinese who made gestures and concessions to America – it was America that had to make concessions to the Chinese for the USA to have the “honor” of helping them.
Is it a coincidence that in 1943 Madame Chiang was touring America and “charming” Washington politicians?
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,526463,00.html
Even back then, Asians were using their women to lead White men by the nose (or another bodypart) – the more things change the more they stay the same.
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