Counter-Currents
2,168 words
Originally, I had planned for this essay to be a response to Jack Donovan’s still relatively recent essay, “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist.” However, I’ve decided that this essay would work better if thought of as an extended discussion of a couple of the topics raised by Donovan’s essay, rather than as another open letter response aimed at Donovan himself. In part, this means it will only address a fraction of the things Donovan actually said.
Beyond the Buddy System
For the most part, the subtext of these arguments was not really “why I disagree with the premises of ethnonationalism” so much as it was “why I don’t personally want to buddy up with everyone who identifies as a White Nationalist.” Since Donovan’s entire political philosophy now appears to be “cracking open a cold one with the boys in the woods,” it makes sense why he would implicitly muddle the distinction in this way between what one’s political philosophy is and who one would like to buddy up with.
I don’t have to be ‘buddied up’ with everyone I want to form political alliances with. Indeed, the inability to form and negotiate political alliances with people who aren’t pals and bros is a kind of weakness. And it is a kind of weakness that will be bred out of the world by evolution, because groups that are capable of this will inevitably dominate groups that can’t. If the United States government were to turn against the Wolves of Vinland and try to wipe it out of existence, how long do you think the Wolves would survive? I think it would be reasonable to bet they wouldn’t last a week. And why is that?
It’s because the United States government is a larger entity than the Wolves. And the United States government is a larger entity than the Wolves because membership in it is based on shared dedication to common principles and goals as well as consent to the hierarchy of an overarching command structure—not whether or not everyone who joins the U.S. government wants to buddy up with each other. The U.S. government’s capacity for domination of fringe groups like the Wolves is, in and of itself, proof that political alliances built out of principle and extended hierarchy rather than “buddying up” will trump isolated, small–tribe “groups of buddies” every time.
In light of this, Donovan should ask himself why he’s in favor of forming groups of “buddy-based” tribes in the first place. Whatever answers he gives for why individuals should network together to form tribal groups will probably end up being the same exact reasons why those very tribal groups should network together to form larger political blocs.
I say this truly—I really do respect the inner core of the anarcho-primitivist instinct. If I had the choice to live in a thoroughly anarcho-primitivist world, I would be tempted to take it.
But in reality, the inevitable course of events is that tribes will either network into political blocs that grow to the scale of governments, or else they will be dominated by whatever other network of tribes manages to do so first. For a historical analysis of this aspect of the relationship between tribal warfare and the formation of ordered civilizations throughout history, Ian Morris’ War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots gets my highest possible recommendation. In short, this is the scenario that repeats on an endless cycle all over the world: individuals form into tribes, and these tribes either grow to the scale of governments that eventually rule over the other tribes—or else they end up dominated themselves because some other tribe built itself up to that level first. Like it or not, one’s tribe either “dominates” or grows to become “dominated.”
But as far as Jack Donovan personally goes, there isn’t much left for argument on this point to prove. Either a time will come within Donovan’s lifetime when his tribe needs a more extended network in order to protect itself against outside assaults from activist enemies ethnonationalists share in common—or there won’t. Either ethnonationalists will be organized enough to be able to usefully offer this kind of protection at that time—or they won’t. Either Donovan’s disavowal of the most crude “skinhead” types in the movement will help shift the Leftist bullseye off of his back, even if it doesn’t remove it completely—or it won’t.
Either way you go, these are all inconclusive predictions of the future; this is not a case where we can pontificate and produce “proof.” In the meantime, all any of us are doing is building our own personal projects while discussing them with our often separate, sometimes overlapping followings . . . and all of us, in our own ways, are ultimately trying to prepare for civilization to collapse. Should the collapse set in within our lifetimes, we’ll just have to see who makes it out given however the general situation will have changed by that time.
And on that point, there really isn’t anything left to be said. So this concludes the first point raised by Donovan’s essay that I thought there might be some value in discussing.
What if We Really are “Losers”?
The second point I thought there might be some value in discussing is Donovan’s suggestion that White Nationalism will fail because of White Nationalists. Throughout the essay, Donovan continually refers back to the most tired Left-liberal characterizations of what kinds of people “White Nationalists” supposedly are: men with “‘white pride’ tattooed on [their] chest[s]” who “theatrically claim to be proud of being white because it is usually the only thing they have going for them.” To be fair, this may very well describe Donovan’s personal encounters with self-professed “White Nationalists.” But to speak for myself, I’ve been involved with Counter-Currents for long enough to have accumulated a rather large pool of people I would call “White Nationalists,” and I’m quite certain I have literally never met a single one who had “white pride” tattooed either on their chests or otherwise.
In fact, most “White Nationalists” I know would look down on anyone who has any tattoos at all—Richard Spencer thinks tattoos are degenerate, for example. For this new generation, “white pride” isn’t something “white supremacists” boast about, it’s just what regular old milquetoast conservatives who read outlets like Breitbart or The Blaze try to ironically (and ineffectually) throw back in the face of liberals when the topic of black or Mexican pride comes up. The average “White Nationalists” of the younger generations today are likely educated enough to be familiar with findings from the field of biosocial criminology showing that genes do indeed have an influence on the propensity to criminal behavior, probably turned in the direction that led them towards ethnonationalism after liberal researcher Robert Putnam finally published his results showing the negative impacts of diversity brought by immigration on community trust, hate drugs and porn and promiscuity, desperately want to build wholesome families, and are genuinely afraid to reveal their views to their peers.
The nature of the “movement” (such as it is) is changing rapidly, and part of the issue here may simply be that Jack Donovan has relatively more contact with the older breed of “White Nationalists” that most people in the new generation only know from cheesy stereotypes.
Either way, this finally brings me to the second point I want to discuss.
If White Nationalists were losers, just what would that prove?
Let’s grant it just for the sake of the argument: let’s assume 100% of people who identify as “White Nationalists” are “losers” in a broad sense.
Well, one could make a similar argument about welfare. According to your definition, you could say that most or all people who rely on welfare to survive are “losers,” in the sense that they would literally “lose” without welfare because they can’t stand on their own feet (or else they wouldn’t be on it in the first place). But what would liberals think about an argument that said that welfarism is dumb because people on welfare are “losers”? Certainly they would recognize it as a non sequitur: so maybe they are “losers”—does that mean we should let them starve in the streets? “Not so fast,” they’d respond.
Let’s step back for a moment.
Within any given race, all traits are distributed along bell curves.
On the one hand, this means it will always be true that keeping groups with different bell curves separate will lead to more social cohesion than mixing them willy nilly—as is validated by the literature on diversity and social cohesion that began with the previously mentioned research from liberal Robert Putnam.
On the other hand, it also entails that there will always be a minority of outliers in any given group who actually are more similar to the average member of a different group than they are to the average member of their own.
These minorities will always exist. But because of—you know—the very meaning of the word “average,” it follows that they will also always be in the minority. So even if not all admixture leads directly to reduced social cohesion, a totally segregated society would still always be more cohesive than a totally integrated society.
Now, suppose you live in an area like Palo Alto, California. The average rent in Palo Alto is almost $2,800 for a single bedroom apartment, and these expenses keep out anyone who can’t afford to pay. As it turns out, one’s IQ predicts one’s future wealth better than one’s wealth predicts one’s future IQ scores. This means if there are some groups with low average IQs and low wealth, then someone who lives in Palo Alto will have experiences almost exclusively with the outliers from that group—the few that are unlike most of the rest of them. A similar point would go for a black man whose only experiences with white men are in underground rap battle scenes: such an environment would inherently select for white men who are more extroverted, aggressive, and impulsive than the white male average; and this particular black man could end up as a result with an inaccurate idea of what most white men are really like as a result.
In other words, smart and successful whites who dismiss the “racism” of lower IQ whites who decry the negative effects of diversity because those whites aren’t as smart or successful as others might be rather like the tallest man in the room mocking everyone around him for drowning while the room they’re in begins to flood, dismissing them because he thinks they’re too short to have a valid opinion. It turns out that actually experiencing diversity also predicts one’s holding a negative view of it. Evidence like this suggests that it is much more often those who haven’t experienced as much diversity who imagine that its effects on a community are better than they really are, than it is those who haven’t lived around large members of other races who expect they would find the experience to be less enjoyable than they really would.
And IQ helps predict one’s experiences with diversity. When more successful whites enter diverse areas, they inevitably end up “gentrifying” them. And guess what happens when middle and upper class regions full of successful whites grow increasingly diverse? “White flight”. This deserves repetition for emphasis: do more successful, higher IQ whites stay or go when regions grow more diverse? As a matter of fact, they go. As regions grow more diverse, very large numbers of those whites who can leave in fact do. Thus, more successful whites never have to think about the idea of ethnonationalism, for exactly the same reason they never have to think about food stamps and other forms of welfare.
While it is absurd that this simultaneous condemnation of “gentrification” and “white flight” leaves successful whites damned if they do and damned if they don’t, whether they stay or they go (in other words, if they do just about anything other than give all their money away to blacks as one Baltimore professor insists or else just plain drop dead), there is truth to the fact that both these phenomena imply forms of “privilege”: successful whites rarely, if ever, have to experience any form of “diversity” that doesn’t entail skimming the cream of the crop off of outside groups while staying safely sequestered away from the rest. Less successful whites aren’t so lucky—as successful whites move away, they get left behind. Thus, it is actually less successful whites who end up acquainted with what multiculturalism actually is like, in the real world, for most people, most of the time. Should they be forced to live in increasingly stratified communities because someone thinks they aren’t intelligent enough to be worth caring about?
Are they really just too dumb to deserve cohesive communities to live in?
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
8 comments
Hey, I recognize that graph 😉
You make a lot of interesting points. In the short term, as whites are about 2/3s of the population in a democracy, whites will likely remain divided. The upper class sees the middle class as its direct, immediate competition, and generally tries to “ally” against it. But of course, getting the lower-class vote requires promising them things they want, like welfare and jobs.
This leaves the middle class in the lurch, de-facto voting for pro-white policies whether they consciously intend to or not. Take Trump’s supporters, for example: many of them don’t see themselves as WNs or racists at all, but Hillary’s supporters are pretty darn convinced that they are. As the non-white percent continues to grow, they won’t need as many whites on their side to balance against middle, and the degeneration of politics into a “white” and “non white” party will continue. Can the white party effectively attract and split off some group of non-whites? The Republicans were certainly hoping to attract Hispanics to the party of social conservatism, Christianity, reduced Welfare, and no minimum wage before Trump stormed the stage, but I don’t think this strategy would have worked anyway. The data out of California since Reagan’s amnesty implies that Hispanics will continue voting with Blacks, at least until they have the numbers to dominate elections on their own.
Maybe Asians will feel inclined to vote with whites against the creeping underclass, but they’re a small group.
As for “losers,” the sort of folks with the large white power tattoos tend, afaik, to be prisoners/former prisoners who had to join nationalist gangs just to survive. When the chips are down, everyone is a nationalist, traitors get shanked, and you wear allegiance in the most visible way possible. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and man cannot afford niceties like “Do I actually like this guy?” in prison.
That said, I’ve no interest in allying with rich and powerful whites who sit in their gated communities and whine about how those stinky proles who don’t want more crime in their neighborhoods are preventing them from importing cheap maids and curry chefs.
Evidence like this suggests that it is much more often those who haven’t experienced as much diversity who imagine that its effects on a community are better than they really are ….
Joseph Sobran once wrote something like “education gives you the income to live apart from racial diversity, and the language with which to praise it.” That’s not the actual quote, but it’s what he meant.
This is an actual Sobran quote: ““in their mating and migratory habits, liberals are no different from members of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The Wolves of Vinland…nothing new or original. The Outlaw Motorcycle Club started in 1935, and there are monasteries, abbeys, communes, and the Hells Angels.
I’m guessing that Donovan (and others) don’t want to be around “defectives” that attack his identity, while at the same time claiming this is an identitarian movement. One major advantage the leftist world has is that it mandates civility as much as possible. This movement? Not so much.
It is apparent that Jack Donovan has been scraping off the tops of other races’ bell curves in his social dealings, like most white people do. He says he’d rather base his ideals on who shows up to his gatherings and reject race as a basis for organizing.
However, if the population were 100% white in a given area then most whites would have more friends or stronger friends. Donovan would probably have more buddies with whom to LARP in the woods.
This is because what is seen is the one nonwhite, sitting around the campfire, but what is not seen are the two whites who would be in his place if the town were all-white.
Granted, if one is engaged in an activity which a greater proportion of blacks do, like rapping, then this would not hold. Racial outliers, both white and non-white, benefit from diversity at the expense of non-outliers and, more importantly, the race as a whole, as Aedon Casseil’s graph implies. I suppose the concept of having a different “race-soul” applies to racial outliers.
Aedon Casseil is right that Jack Donovan’s proverbial tribe would be dominated by a nation. He also claims dominating other nations is adaptive in an evolutionary sense, but in so doing he conflates conquest with increased reproduction. Such a correlation may have held true with respect to Early European Farmers conquering tribal European Hunter Gatherers in Neolithic Europe and maybe Yamnaya conquering their mixed descendants in the early bronze age. However, it doesn’t hold true in recent times. European nations conquered Africa’s tribes in the 19th century, but the African population has exploded since then, while Europe’s has increased moderately on the net since then but is now declining. Then again, this was a case of empire vs tribe, and he’s examining the nation vs tribe scenario.
Generally, the cycle of human organization moves from tribe to nation to empire. Then the empire breaks apart and tribes fill the void, starting the process all over again. That’s the stage at which Jack Donovan wants to be. He’s an inspiration in that he opposes the prevailing globalist empire and gives us the model of the tribe as the prelude to the nation state we want to create. We’d need a white tribe though, and he wants his multiethnic one. In the short run, where multi-ethnic conditions are a reality, his model will be more efficient because it allows for scraping off the few nonwhites of great ability and white race-souls (personalities), but on the national level a single-race group is more efficient. By rejecting multi-ethnic present conditions we sow seeds for a white future nation that will be more powerful than the nation that arises from multi-ethnic tribes like Donovan’s.
This belief that a multi-ethnic empire invariably disintegrates into disaggregated tribes presupposes that technological progress will not provide the means to keep an increasingly diverse empire together. It may very well do so, but on the other hand it may provide the means to overthrow it or at least create a space within it for whites to be preserved. Alternatively, the sheer force of a global marketplace may prevail in spite of technological change.
These thoughts aside, it seems that for the time being Donovan is far more our friend than the globalizing force he calls “the nothing,” which homogenizes humanity in a cultural sense. (I would point out that this happens in a racial sense as well.) Overall, it’s important to see Donovan in perspective, i.e. as being a fellow opponent of the prevailing empire.
By the way, the (((tribe))) really isn’t a tribe but a nation, a semi-regional nation, with a region-specific ethnostate and supply chains wherever good goys live. As Greg Johnson has articulated, they rule by soft power, i.e., hegemony, but if and when the empire collapses, so will their hegemony. When they scuttle off from this broken empire, as at least 50% of their ancestors did when Rome collapsed, then maybe in another two millennia their descendants will bring to life a new, intergalactic hegemony . . . or maybe they’ll be out-Jewed by the equivalent of the Ferengi.
It’s worse than that. Even conservative whites who otherwise might be race realists are largely sheltered from other races, which makes them choose wealth as the arbiter of everything. Naturally this invites wealthy non whites in, and keeps poor whites out. As well as supporting immigration as the reserve labor pool.
Economic elites in America are protected on all sides. They are protected from the world, and are protected from their own citizens. White nationalism is a populist movement, which is why it is rejected by both parties in the mainstream.
The game really is up! And it’s been over for at least 20 years if not longer. We are all playing out the endgame in various ways. But that’s alright, these things come and go in cycles.
As for tattoos, some of the first people to get them in America were all-America, WHITE men who fought on the battlefields of some of the most brutal wars and had white children with white wives. A lot of the frat boy looking white nationalists of today can’t even knock out a queer looking antifa with a single punch.
Though I will say, I do regret mine. Not only for the subject matter, but the fact it’s no longer a real symbol of the outcast, but beyond trendy at this point.
If one thinks about the biggest example of a white loser and degenerate, who comes to mind in the jew-controlled media and dried up Republicans and white hating liberals alike? Charles Manson. Yet Charlie did what others only talk about, at a time few people saw the problem. His commune was a WHITE ethnocentric one that looked to nature for what the truth on gender roles were and even though a lot of the girls prior to meeting him were UCLA created leftists, they all developed a disdain for race mixing. See Sandra Good’s comments:
“Hitler tried to straighten the mess out and millions were moved
by him because he struck a chord in the truth. No one can book his
act again … They all died knowing their cause was right … The
mass of people … subconsciously want to die. To me, the differ-
ences (skin color) are enough reason for not mixing. In fact, the
main reason. If all the emphasis is on intelligence differences, then I
can see why so many in the movement are blind to the fading of
color, vibrancy, and life from the earth. If I was a moron and met a
brilliant black I would rather produce a white moron than a mulatto
offspring with average intelligence”
…and:
“Mixing with whites would only
destroy their race…. I would leave the Africans to be themselves to
run free and wild like the wildlife. If I was a man and needed their
land or parts of it for my survival and my kid’s survival, I’d conquer
and kill what got in my way, but I would not breed with anything
that did not look like me…. To rob the conquered people of their
own blood is wrong. Whitey is so advanced he breeds himself right
out of existence…. If dumb white assholes go around telling blacks
that they are shit (which is tempting to say to an American nigger
type, the type I have to deal with day in and day out) that just makes
them run after whites all the more…. Prove they are equal for
revenge. Now they are messed up in a phony Jews’ culture…. Deep
down I’ve got faith. Hess is a lucky man — better off than Speer …
there are two people who know my mind ”
Now look at how far ahead of the curve these “degenerate”, “hippy”, “leftists” were compared to the only recently “red pilled” conservatives who are only now scared shitless after realizing what is happening.
It should also be said that Hitler, Rockwell and everyone who opposes the Jew is dismissed as a common criminal, loser, underachiever, etc….but that is to discredit THE TRUTH they revealed.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment