Counter-Currents
James Henry Beard, North Carolina Emigrants: Poor White Folks (1845)
1,000 words
As of late, a great deal of debate has occurred on the Right concerning whether certain aspects of white-European history possess any relevance to the contemporary white racialist movement or not. For example, many have questioned the merits of the perpetuation of National Socialist ideology in the postmodern “West.” Most recently, the ire of the establishment and its multitude of shabbos goyim has been embroiled in the fabrication of a controversy surrounding the immorality, if not the outright “evilness,” of Confederate monuments. Iconoclastic controversies have a tendency to devolve into the demagoguery that characterizes plebeian politics, and in this regard the current debate is on par with past historical trends.
The politics of the establishment, of the Left, and of all previous plebeian political movements must, by their very nature, appeal to the lowest common denominator, the Nietzschean “Last Man,” and most glaringly his vanity and stupidity. The postmodern white world is fractured, atomized beyond recognition, and as such political pandering is often framed in moralistic terms, because postmodernism has destroyed all truth. Morality concerns the principles of what is right and what is wrong, and as such it is based on the abstract notions of belief, emotion, and sentimentality.
In Aristotle’s Politics, the philosopher argued that those who are held in thrall by the “bestial” desires of their senses are natural slaves. Natural slaves are individuals who have deprived themselves of a sense of agency, of the ability to exert will and manifest power. In short, Aristotle opined that he who is “by nature not his own but of someone else” is a slave.[1] The current controversy regarding Confederate monuments is therefore exemplary of the natural capriciousness and servitude that characterizes the “slavish mentality” of the mass man.
Ironically, the Leftist demagogues who spew moralisms about the inherent evil of the Confederacy, ostensibly because of chattel slavery, are themselves perpetuating a more insidious form of the institution. Irrespective of one’s opinion on why the American Civil War occurred (was it fought over slavery, states’ rights, out of animosity between Celts and Anglo-Normans, etc.?), one point remains consistent: the Confederate States of America, and the antebellum South in general, represented a continuation of the Classical worldview that was based upon tradition, hierarchy, and ordered inequality. The removal of the Confederate monuments is symptomatic of a greater disease, one which seeks to not only erase our past, but to destroy our present as well.
The South has always been on “the wrong side of history,” fighting losing battles against egalitarianism, modernity, universal suffrage, and a whole host of other notions that we white racialists hold to be true. Moreover, Southern history is our history, and it is a people’s unique ethnocultural history which determines not only how we got to where we are collectively, but most importantly how we become who we are. The South was a North American manifestation of ancient Greece and Rome. The South’s role as a manifestation of this tradition is evinced by its worldview, which revolved around respect for the authority of established forms over speculative ideas, a worldview which hearkens back to the time of the ancient Greeks.
Plato put forth the notion that the soul was “form” as made evident by intelligence and the higher, transcendent ideas of the cosmos, while matter, which was represented by the “material” world, was the mere “receptacle” of form, and thus fleeting and subject to change. The Weltanschauung of the South, of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, of Medieval Europe, and of our past was premised upon the centrality of this distinction, namely that there is a reality beyond our own and that we should emulate it here on the physical plane. Our forbears understood, respected, and paid reverence to this cosmic truth through the propagation of civilizational structures that were both hierarchical in orientation and inegalitarian in nature. Like the poleis of ancient Greece or the Roman Republic, and by extension the Confederate South, they served both as living embodiments and integral components of the natural cosmic order that their peoples so revered.
We white racialists are quite literally the last vestige of, the last hope for, and the conservators of a worldview which the enemies of our people, deliberately or not, have all but destroyed. We believe in a reality not solely fixated upon the material world because we are adherents of the natural order – of an ordered, unequal, and harmonious cosmos. Our reverence for it is illustrated by our adherence to the timeless principles of inegalitarianism and hierarchy, and it is from this that we as a people contribute towards the creation of a gloriously unequal and yet harmonious cosmos.
The philosophy of inegalitarianism is an intellectualization of the notion of difference and of the timeless concept of inequality, and as adherents of this philosophy, our people, like our Confederate monuments, are both Platonic “form” and “receptacle” made incarnate, and thus the living embodiment of our past, present, and future. As such, an attack on our monuments is not only an attack on us, but an existential threat to our very racial existence, and cannot be tolerated.
The Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius mused that “wisdom and right action are the same thing,” and it is doubtless that the destruction of our past is a sin that we must not tolerate, and that a proportional response, whether in the form of political activism or any other, is vital for the sake of our people.[2] Historically speaking, iconoclastic controversies are always precursors to physical removal, and this is something that should concern even the most “conservative” of White Nationalists among us.
We as a people, we conquerors of the heavens and Earth, alone possess the unique historical agency to master our own destiny and change the course of our existence. This begins first by acknowledging that the Confederacy matters.
Notes
[1] Aristotle, Politics (Knutsford, Warrington: A & D Publishing, 2009).
[2] Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor’s Handbook (New York: Scribner, 2002), translated by C. Scot Hicks & David Hicks.
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8 comments
Good article, but…
…all the good parts of the Confederacy and The South – the ideas of Greece and Rome, etc. were really in spite of the fact that it was a Big Corporation, Plantation Economy, that dumped a massive race problem on the rest of America.
Some valid points, but I don’t think they apply to the above article. From my perspective Mr. Crowley’s article was defending Southern heritage as White heritage. Slavery was a terrible mistake, but I don’t see perceive this article as defending it. I would say that characterizing the entirety of American Southern culture as being based upon entirely upon slavery and nothing else is short sighted and more in line with the perspective of those who oppose us. The anti-White establishment promotes sweeping generalizations along those lines and as the article states this is how we are erased.
Southern slave owners were primarily responsible for inflicting the Negro problem on what would have otherwise been an all-white Republic. They did so not as some expression of the eternal cosmic order, but simply as a way to make money. Slavery was a business after all. Had southern slave owners gotten their way, the country would likely be well over 50% black today, resembling such classical expressions of White civilization as Haiti and Jamaica. Even if racial hierarchy could have been maintained in the face of the prevailing egalitarian headwinds, such a society would hardly be ideal from a white nationalist perspective. Slavery also kept the South economically backward and prevented it from fully industrializing–the end result of which can be seen in the South’s ultimate military defeat in the Civil War.
Confederate monuments should be defended as symbols of White history and culture, but the Confederacy itself should hardly be idolized. In many ways, the social structure of the confederacy–a small high IQ “master” class with acess to compliant, cheap labor from a class of predominantly nonwhite helots–is the one desired by our current elites.
Yes you have commented almost exactly what I was thinking.
“Confederate monuments should be defended as symbols of White history and culture, but the Confederacy itself should hardly be idolized. In many ways, the social structure of the confederacy–a small high IQ “master” class with acess to compliant, cheap labor from a class of predominantly nonwhite helots–is the one desired by our current elites.”
I wonder however if this is not to confound form with substance? The “elites” of the present day have not the least sense of the worldview which governed the old Confederate aristocrats—the sense of honor, of chivalry, of duty, of class. Indeed, the “elites” of the present day are nothing but capitalists, which already suggests their inferiority to the aristocrats of yesteryear.
I agree entirely that we should be wary of promoting any given political scheme simply because it establishes certain ostensible forms; everything depends on the substance and quality of the men involved. But for that very reason, we should also be wary of drawing swift parallels between past forms and present ones.
“Confederate monuments should be defended as symbols of White history and culture, but the Confederacy itself should hardly be idolized. In many ways, the social structure of the confederacy–a small high IQ “master” class with acess to compliant, cheap labor from a class of predominantly nonwhite helots–is the one desired by our current elites.”
Good one!
Perhaps not directly related to the question at hand, but I also find the “Confederate flag” interesting in how it relates to our cause.
Apparently, for some people it stands for slavery, racism, white supremacy… For others, it’s this “heritage not hate” thing we hear about. For me, I see it as a symbol of white rebellion against the state more generally. With obvious historical roots, of course.
But I bring it up because there is the obvious tension between it being a flag which implies white identity and rebellion but also the actual historical regime (and war) it relates to. Can we doubt that if there were any attempt at secession from the United States that the “Confederate flag” would be appearing time and again? The people flying it wouldn’t be saying “Let’s re-institute plantation slavery.” In fact, we still see the Confederate flag popping up wherever there are white people rebelling against a government or attempting secession. The Flag of Novorossiya bears an unmistakable resemblance, though they claim other, somewhat doubtful origins.
So, yeah, symbol and meaning…
If I had to side I suppose I’d go Confederate..but Tom Metzger always brought up a point that bothered me, in that the north had a factionally ideologically racial cause in stopping the spread of Africans across the nation. And then you have the philo-semitism. Def America’s Peloponnesian war.
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