Counter-Currents
3,920 words
Editor’s Note:
Another very important essay. Please read, comment, and share. — Greg Johnson
Late in 2016, the “Hailgate” incident ignited a furious war of words on the Alt Right, centering on the use of Nazi rhetoric and imagery by people in our movement.
In my view, most people in the Alt Right took the correct line: viewing the incident as a failure, chastising those responsible, but not overreacting and cutting ties with the movement as a whole. Those who did try to distance themselves were wrong: four drunkards doing Nazi salutes in an audience of more than three hundred is pretty damn respectable, especially at a time when “mainstream” heads of state were puffing on Fidel Castro’s dead mass-murdering Commie cigar.
Needless to say, those Hailgate defenders who accused people of “cucking” and “punching to the Right” were also wrong. The reason why the Left dominates cuckservatives is that Leftists see themselves as engaged in a metapolitical war (which, after all, they started), while cuckservatives see their political calling as a polite debate and business opportunity. People engaged in metapolitical war do not sell out their own side to the enemy, but nor do they coddle foolish and self-indulgent people who endanger their own side (this is why, in the first chapter of Rules for Radicals, Jewish subversive Saul Alinsky castigated 1960s Leftist agitators for burning the American flag). No-one who is serious about metapolitical war against the Left could object to the criticism of Hailgate voiced by most of the Alt Right.
My own view on the use of Nazi rhetoric and imagery is strongly negative. Whichever way you look at it, Hitler and the National Socialists are tainted: by the atrocities and massacres that morally besmirched their cause, by their catastrophic defeat, by the fact that most of Europe remembers them as invaders or enemies, and only lastly by the propaganda of the Left that has turned them into an archetypal bogeyman. I suspect that the defenders of Hailgate would rather have a “safe space” for weird and perverted tastes than a metapolitical fighting force, and would rather have the easy catharsis of “Roman salutes” than the harder Roman discipline needed to reconquer the West.
However, I am not interested in rehashing the post-Hailgate disputes, which focused intensely on the motives and personal records of pro-Nazi individuals in the Alt Right. To make a clean break with this, I will make no direct references to such individuals here—still less to allegations against individuals, or to details of individuals’ personal lives.
What I want to do is to take a critical look at the “strategic” arguments for the use of Nazi rhetoric and imagery, of which I first became aware in the aftermath of Hailgate I will say in advance that I consider these arguments to be mere verbal self-justifications. However, for the purposes of criticism, I will treat them as if they were serious and sincere. Having collated them from innumerable comments, articles and memes, I reproduce them as follows:
Nazism is the essence of the Right, as far to the Right as one can go: when you call yourself a Nazi, nothing remains for the Left to call you. While weak-sauce intellectuals think they can get away from this term, the real Alt Right is full-Nazi: the popularity of sites with overt Nazi leanings is much higher than the popularity of sites that oppose Nazism.
The media relies on the smear term “Nazi” to condition the public to reject Alt Right views. By deliberately using over-the-top Nazi imagery, and conflating it with the majority of the Alt Right’s reasonable positions, we can trigger the mainstream media into overusing their smear term and hurling it at people who are obviously nothing of the sort. This makes them look stupid and dishonest and renders their precious smear term meaningless.
The more we use Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and the more the media hysterically reports on it, the more ordinary people become desensitized to this imagery and no longer react violently against it. The deliberately shocking and extreme rhetoric of self-proclaimed Nazis makes everything else on the Right look reasonable by comparison, shifting the “Overton Window” towards the Right. Previously taboo and stigmatized ideas thus find a path to public acceptance.
We might christen this proposal the Kursk Strategy, after the 1943 battle in which Hitler’s armies made the same strategic error that is being advocated here: using inferior forces to attack the strongest-defended and best-prepared part of the enemy front. Let us break it down into its three underlying myths and explain why it can only lead us to defeat.
Myth #1: Nazism is the essence of the Right & the functional core of the Alt Right.
In the Cosmopolitan and Jewish historical narrative, “Nazism” is an essence and an archetype: it is the eternal dark side of Western civilization. The militant Left is seen as the protector against this disease, whose own violent crimes (whether that of the Soviet NKVD or the modern antifa) are invariably “contextualized” as necessary evils that serve to keep the “Nazi” beast down.
This is an almost perfect inversion of the truth, which is that the Left is the disease at the heart of the West—and that its Rightist opponents are invariably defensive reactions, created by modifying the original order so as to meet the new threat. Rightist reactions (Burkean conservatism, the Fascist Uprising, the Alt Right) always postdate the Leftist assaults that gave rise to them (the French Revolution, Communism, modern Cosmopolitanism); and Leftist violence always dwarfs Rightist violence in quantity and intensity, a rule to which Communism and Fascism are no exception.
The Right and the Left are both underpinned by timeless principles (e.g., order as opposed to chaos). But the forms taken by Rightist reactions are always more closely bound to time and place, because they seek to defend a particular order, while their Leftist opponents seek only to reduce it to rubble. This is why the Right suffers so much more than the Left from political necrophilia—the error of confusing empty, defeated, and anachronistic forms for timeless principles—which, in the modern day, generally leads to what we describe as “LARPing.”
So the first error that we see in the sentence “Nazism is the essence of the Right” is necrophilia, the confusion of a dead form with a living essence. The second, more pernicious error, which lies in the word “Nazism” itself, is the application of necrophilia to a distorted bogeyman created by Leftism, Jewish influence, and the Cosmopolitan establishment.
While hyper-sensitive to “lies” about their favorite ideology (many of which are quite true), pro-Nazis are happy to emphasize precisely those elements of Hitler’s movement that are emphasized by the enemy, and to believe that they form a Rightist archetype because the enemy says that they do. In the Kursk Strategy, this dependence on the enemy’s worldview is rationalized through the argument that “when you call yourself a Nazi, nothing remains for the Left to call you.”
The elements of National Socialism (NS) selected for emphasis by the enemy—military expansionism, Nordicist racial supremacism, sub-Nietzschean megalomania, genocide—were mostly conditional to 1930s Germany, the idiosyncrasies of Hitler, and the fighting of the Second World War. These negative phenomena may have been strongly represented in NS, but they are not the “essence” of the Right—nor even of the Fascist Uprising, which was an early attempt to create a Rightist alternative to the “social justice” version of the managerial revolution. Those foolish enough to rattle on about them in the present day are flailing in a trap set by the enemy.
This is not some personal theory of mine. Those who took part in the Fascist Uprising were perfectly capable of distinguishing the conditional from the essential, which is why the various national movements outside Germany formed their own symbols and manifestos without reference to Hitler’s movement (and why Mussolini, for example, castigated NS as “savage barbarism”). After the war, too, European Rightists were not so bowled over by Hitler’s legacy that they could not assess the crimes and failures of NS in a critical way.[1]
So whence comes the “Nazism” we know today—in which the figure of Hitler is idol-worshipped, the symbols and forms of NS are uprooted from their German context and treated as universal, and every German war atrocity must be rationalized away before we can even get around to saving Europe?
For the genesis of this neo-Nazism—or, to sacrifice politeness for accuracy of expression, McNazism—we must look to postwar America rather than 1930s Germany, and to George Lincoln Rockwell rather than Adolf Hitler. The break in filiation is hinted at in the name of Rockwell’s party, the “American Nazi Party”: a comparable name for a Leftist organisation might be “The Commie Party” or “The Reds-under-the-bed.” It was under Rockwell that McNazism acquired its defining qualities: the embrace of the hated Nazi bogeyman as a test of balls, the use of shock imagery to get media attention, the crude and gratuitous use of racial slurs.
Rockwell’s trollish strategy—which he may have begun to abandon by the time he was murdered in 1967—did not work the way he intended, and only had the result of “selling” the Leftist caricature of the last Rightist uprising to credulous people on the Right. By the time I first encountered the nationalist element of the radical Right in the early 2000s, true-believing McNazis had mired it in an ineffectual purity spiral, and the smarter elements within it were doing their best to abandon half a century of swastika-addled failure. This project culminated in Richard Spencer’s founding of the original Alternative Right in 2010—which is why it is such a pernicious lie to say that “Nazism is the core of the Alt Right.”
Yet it is true to say that, around the same time, a more accessible movement in the younger generation turned the old stock of Nazi imagery to the new purpose of internet trolling. This Nazitrolling can be distinguished from McNazism by several factors: its cyberspace format, its insincerity and irony, its younger membership, and—of course—the fact that it succeeds in its aims, be these ever so modest as “triggering shitlibs and cuckservatives on social media.” I find the rhetoric of Nazitrolling distasteful in the extreme, but do not condemn it, because 1) it is not serious and 2) the Left deserves everything it gets.
We must always remember, however, that Nazitrolling is a fairly narrow Rightist reaction (more or less a direct response to SJW hypersensitivity) that depends heavily on several factors: anonymity, Millennial irony, and the structures of the modern internet. Once it crosses the line into serious belief or any amount of real-life LARPing, Nazitrolling reverts back into McNazism, as surely as Cinderella’s ballgown turned back into scullery rags after the stroke of midnight.
Keep this in mind when you see a McNazi pointing to the vast numbers of people attracted to this type of trolling and trying to convince you that he is in command of some massive future human wave. Just as hits on Pornhub do not translate into political support for “Pussyhat Protests,” clicks on Nazitroll websites say nothing about sincerity of pro-Nazi beliefs, or the willingness of large numbers of people to perform the NSLARP Ghost Dance in real life. All that we can say of real-life politics and culture is that, within them, Nazi rhetoric and imagery are still as toxic as ever.
Myth #2: The use of Nazi imagery & rhetoric triggers the media into overstating their position & rendering their own smear terms useless.
This appears superficially plausible, because the FakeNews™ media is indeed descending into visibly ludicrous hysteria, and much of it does concern “Nazis.” But the first thing to understand is that this self-discrediting of the media, and its resulting alienation from the public, is a natural process that can be left to run its course. The more the strictures of political correctness tighten their grip, the more “little Hitlers” are created and smeared by journalistic bigots, and this causes more and more people to tune the media out and resent their constant lies.
While triggering the media is certainly possible, in this favorable situation, we would be very foolish to abandon the principle of “never interrupting your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
One Alt Right figure who appears to enjoy triggering the media is Richard Spencer. His public speeches (e.g., the second minute of this one[2]) have long included vague, ambiguous Nazi-themed references that are liable to be seized upon by a paranoid media but are sure to be greeted with indifference by the general public. If this is indeed a tactic used by Spencer, it is one to be used with caution—witness Hailgate—but we can at least credit it with being reasonably well thought-out.
What we want to do here is to highlight the dissonance between media portrayal and directly observed reality. In the case of Spencer, we want the media to publish ranting denunciations of the “Naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews”; for curious normies to do Google searches on the target’s name; and for said normies to find a soft-spoken and rather anodyne speaker saying perfectly reasonable things about white identity. Opening up little windows of doubt in the dominant narrative and bringing people to small realizations that they have been deceived, is the first step towards getting them to swallow the whacking great red pills in the Alt Right’s arsenal of ideas.
But the Kursk Strategy does not just negate the tactic of triggering the media. In its folly, it also reverses the collapse of public trust in the media, helping out the enemy and making it less likely that normie awakenings will take place as a result of media lies.
Let’s run our little hypothetical scenario again, removing Mr. Spencer, and substituting any old Rockwellian McNazi ranter. The media breathlessly denounces the “Naziwhowantstokillsix-millionjews”; normies do a Google search on the name; and what do they find but someone claiming to be a Nazi and talking about killing Jews. No dissonance between portrayal and reality; ergo, no awakening. Some might want to make an exception for the more blatant sort of Nazitroll irony here; but even in this case, normies attuned to irony will still tend to conclude that the media has good cause to portray things in this way.
This last point, the use of “irony” as a catch-all excuse for Nazi rhetoric and imagery, highlights a fundamental weakness of the Kursk Strategy: its assumption that Rightists can win the metapolitical power of the Left through a blind, indiscriminate, cargo-cult imitation of Leftist ways. This clearly fails to distinguish the vices of power from the means of attaining power. It is like the behavior of a village idiot who spends all his savings on banquets, neglects his work to go hunting in the royal forest, and struts around ordering people about in the belief that he can thereby become a King.
Since the rise of the Millennial generation, and the total self-castration of the cuckservative non-opposition, the Left has comfortably indulged a fashion for “embracing negative stereotypes ironically.” Notable results so far include “I Bathe In Male Tears,” “Die Cis Scum,” and sketches gloating over the prospect of oppressing future white minorities in the West.[3] Although these are, most likely, real expressions of hatred dressed up in a limp justification, the FakeNews™ media churns out excuses for them with the regularity of bowel movements.
So why can’t the Right do the same thing? Because we are not in power, of course! We cannot afford to reopen doors, which we have strived for years to close, to warped and depraved elements on our own side; and we can still less afford to give a pass to sane and reasonable people who feign genocidal hatred as part of a ludicrous “strategy.” It seems that even the Left, with the brainwashing apparatus of the media on its side, can ill afford the “irony” of its spoiled SJW members, as it is rapidly losing its moral hegemony and facing a popular backlash in the West.
Myth #3: The use of Nazi imagery & rhetoric desensitizes the public & pushes the Overton Window to the Right.
According to the theory of the “Overton Window,” the extremist fringe of a political movement is a good thing to have around, because it makes the more reasonable body of opinions in that movement look anodyne by comparison. The pro-Nazis on the Alt Right, then, are supposed to act as a “bad cop” to the rest of the Alt Right’s “good cop.”
The serious mistake made here is, once again, cargo-cult imitation of the Left. The fact is that the Overton window does not move equally for all men, for its movement largely depends on whether or not the media deigns to make a distinction between extremists and moderates.
One group who can usually shift the window are the Leftist “Black Bloc” anarchists. These violent thugs turn up at Leftist protests, smash everything, and next day the media is full of carefully-worded apologias differentiating them from the saintly peaceful liberals at the protests. The Left has long accepted these tactics in the knowledge that they stretch the boundaries of accepted opinion in their favor (while intimidating political opponents, of course).
One group who may or may not be able to shift the window are the Libertarians (who apparently came up with the concept in the first place). Having anarcho-capitalists around may make it easier for cuckservative big-business advocates to push selective “anti-statist” measures, because they can be sure that at least part of the media will support them in this. But the pro-statist wing of the media can, and does, try to scupper this by blurring the extremist-moderate distinction.
One group who cannot move the window are people who sexually molest the underaged. In popular parlance, the term “pedophile” encompasses pedophilia (attraction to children) and ephebophilia (attraction to adolescents below the legal age of consent), a distinction that can be identified with “extremism” versus “moderation.” If the movement of the Overton window was some sort of natural law, we might expect constant media exposure of the horrors of pedophilia to make ephebophiles look respectable in comparison. But because the media, bowing to public disgust, does not deign to make a distinction between the two, what actually happens is that people use pedophilia as a reference point to condemn similar sexual misdeeds in the same way.
Now, muse long and hard on the fact that the FakeNews™ media in the West seems to be considerably friendlier to pedophiles than to us.[4] In light of this, what result does the Alt Right get when it tries to play games with the Overton window? Yes, you’ve guessed it: no distinction is made between the core of our movement and its lunatic fringe, just as no distinction is made between irony and sincerity with us, and every last one of us is parleyed into a de facto “Nazi.”
This is not to say that the Overton window cannot shift in our favor outside the remit of the media, i.e., when normies come to our spaces and find reasonable people living cheek-by-jowl with ranting McNazis. But the media will never let “Nazis” live on their online reservations: once they are confident of being able to link them convincingly to the wider movement, they will always trot them out and use their rhetoric as a reference point to condemn the rest of us. Even if advocates of the Kursk Strategy are convinced by none of the arguments in this piece, they should at least think very carefully about why the enemy really, really, REALLY wants us to be identified as “Nazis.”
Could it have something to do with the “desensitisation of the public” referred to in the Kursk Strategy? Extreme NSLARP rhetoric might desensitize the public to the supposedly “extreme” positions of the Alt Right, but it is also likely to desensitize them to state crackdowns on free speech and resistance, which can now be justified by harking back to the heroic myth of the last war.
We are, after all, not the only ones trying to shift the Overton window. In the face of the populist reaction that is breathing a last flush of defiant life into hollowed-out democratic institutions, certain moves are being made from above to shift the Overton window towards a Committee of Public Safety, which would protect the Cosmopolitan project against the dangers posed by free speech and white majority resistance.[5] Public resistance to this would, of course, be ferocious; but one of the few things capable of splitting and overriding it would be a highly visible uprising of people claiming to be Nazis and appearing to advocate genocide.
If Alt Righters who LARP as Nazis want the rest of us to silence our criticism on the grounds of “not punching to the Right,” then I suggest that they first stop punching for the Left.
And no, this is not an accusation of bad faith directed at individuals (for what it is worth, I find most of such allegations made in the aftermath of Hailgate to be insufficiently convincing). It is true that agents provocateurs would, presumably, adopt the “Nazi” label that our enemies so fervently desire to pin on us. But I do not think that there is much more to the psychology underlying the Kursk Strategy than a form of harsh and angry verbal catharsis, made irresistible by the strong repression of white European speech in almost all aspects of public life.
The problem is that this sort of catharsis, like the shocking statements of well-paid degeneracy-advocates on the Left, comes under the category of the “Liberty of the Slaves.”[6] It is speech that discredits the speaker, marking him as a person without civilized standards, and justifying his unfreedom of action under the managerial regime. Understandably, many of us are fed up with being civilized nowadays; but we must also understand that “racialist Tourette’s Syndrome” is all part of our enemy’s plan. Just as race-replacement policies give rise to the racial hatreds that are then used to justify suppression of white opinion, to give repressed and silenced whites a free hand for violent verbal catharsis on the internet is to give them just enough rope to hang themselves.
Our best defense against this is a good offense: we must forcefully push the Alt Right off the internet reservation and into public life, creating spaces where frank discussion of suppressed truths and opinions are possible, even if these must at first be small, low-key and even secret.
The pro-Nazi brigade will, of course, try to follow us; and the enemy will, of course, give maximum publicity to their antics. And this is why—for all that I have said here—I want to make it clear to those of like mind that we should never, ever, apologize to Leftist scum on account of pro-Nazi rhetoric within the Alt Right, however unhinged it may be. Simply attack, attack, and attack—pointing out the hate and violence of the Left and the Cosmopolitan establishment, as well as the fact that they have created the racial divisions that they are now using to increase their power—and keep your honest opinions on NSLARP stupidity for those who do not question you with hostile intent.
Hopefully, over time, the psychological need for verbal catharsis will itself become obsolete—which means that self-justifications like the Kursk Strategy will also vanish like the mirages they are.
Notes
[1] https://counter-currents.com/2013/05/julius-evolas-notes-on-the-third-reich/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXGOWJbt2BU
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TMrJDHu_TU
[4] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/self-confessed-paedophile-todd-nickerson-tells-critics-youre-the-real-monsters-a6675946.html
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/29/why-elections-are-bad-for-democracy
[6] http://thermidormag.com/the-liberty-of-the-slaves/
Source: https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-kursk-strategy.html
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27 comments
What ‘Nazi salute’? Being American nationalists surely they were performing the traditional American pledge of loyalty ‘Bellamy salute’:
https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/the-official-american-flag-salute-used-to-be-a-hitler-salute/
Kerry: not sure if sarcasm because its the Internet.
However, anyone who un-ironically tries to use the Bellamy Salute to justify literal Nazi-aesthetics is monumentally autistic and should be kept out of the public face of the alt-right and prevented from doing harm to the movement.
We live in a country where a startlingly sizable % of the populace doesn’t know that the Moon revolves around the Earth and think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows… to throw up a Bellamy Salute and try to convince people that “well no its not really neo-Nazi because the US used it back in our great-grandparents day…” shows a total seperation from reality and popular perception.
When I first became involved in British Right-Wing politics it was standard practise for our Lefty opponents to berate us with mock Roman salutes. I don’t recall any Lefty “beating himself up” about it. Neither should we on the other side of the fence, “beat ourselves up” about it now. To each his own.
The Nazi regime and its central figures were a one-time event in history. This doesn’t deny that it’s an important piece of history that we can learn both good and bad lesson from, but only that we as Whites must not try to relive or somehow resurrect it (e.g., ‘the good old days’).
Whites here in the U.S. must use the sort of rhetoric and images that are relevant to us, or at least ones that don’t ‘trigger’ the very people we want to reach (namely, other Whites). Using Nazi imagery will only serve to turn most people against us, especially when one considers that a whole lot of our older American relatives died fighting the Nazis. Americans won’t so easily it forget it either, and so we must tread lightly.
We can still fight for and defend our race and its preservation without having to resort to Nazi imagery and the like. And while I am aware that Hitler’s not quite the genocidal mad man that Jews and others portray him as, and while it’s true that many of the events surrounding WW2 have been manipulated by a ‘Tribe’ of liars, this is knowledge that should be shared with those who first get a grasp of what’s happening to our people and not something before.
For example, I have ‘revisionist’ books on the Holocaust, including historical books on Hitler , yet I don’t ever engage in discussions about them among White ‘normies’ because it’s not relevant to the greater purpose of White identity. Once they understand our central message, I could perhaps share such books, but not before because I understand the importance of staying on message.
In other words, our message must focus on the soft White genocide that’s been against us for the past 60 years or so, rather than focusing on defending a man and his political regime during the years prior to WW2 and after.
“our message must focus on the soft White genocide that’s been against us for the past 60 years or so, rather than focusing on defending a man and his political regime during the years prior to WW2 and after.”
That’s a well known argument of Greg Johnson.
However, the point is, nobody is defending Hitler just to get the historical record straight. There is an undeniable link between NS, WW2 and our not so “soft genocide”. Like it or not, this link is the JQ.
And since our primary goal is a White Ethonstate, no better argument for your ‘first graspers’ is asking them why (((those who have their own ethnostate))), in all Western countries violently oppose ours.
“However, the point is, nobody is defending Hitler just to get the historical record straight. There is an undeniable link between NS, WW2 and our not so “soft genocide”. Like it or not, this link is the JQ” – I don’t for a minute deny the link that you refer to, and the JQ is not something we should avoid addressing. But all of these come in good time.
For most Whites who finally come to embrace their racial identity, it’s a progression, often a slow one. We can retard and maybe even prevent a fuller understanding of such matters when we conflate Nazi imagery and a political group of a bygone era with our current racial and cultural struggle. So we need to be sensitive in this area and tread lightly.
Often, if you dump too much information on people – regardless of how valid and noteworthy it might be – they will choke on it or even perhaps even rebel against it. In my own case, I embraced a true White racial identity in 2002, but it was only around 2013 that I began to understand the ‘Jewish Question.’ In fact, I intellectually fought against it, but the evidence was too overwhelming especially after ready Kevin MacDonald’s ‘Culture of Critique’ and some other works.
I am listening to the YouTube audio book of Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich.
Speer writes:
He [Hitler] considered the Dutch Nazi leader Mussert and Sir Oswald Mosley, chief of the British
Nazi party, mere copyists who had had no original or new ideas. They
only imitated us and our methods slavishly, he commented, and would
never amount to anything. In every country you had to start from different
premises and change your methods accordingly, he argued. He had a
better opinion of Degrelle, but did not expect much of him either.
Politics, for Hitler, was purely pragmatic. He did not except his own
book of confessions and professions, Mein Kampf, from this general rule.”
Mussolini thought little of Hitler until he actually made it, there’s no reason to not expect Hitler to have had a change of heart about early British fascism had it won…and Mein Kampf was a collaborative effort, Hitler was marketed as sole author for obvious reasons.
To continue my comment, even if Hitler were alive today with his 1920s-30s mindset, he would not be a Nazi.
Shawn: bingo!
Hitler used the term “national socialist” to describe his movement because “socialism” was a popular meme that he could use to draw votes away from working-class and recently-unemployed Germans who would otherwise vote for the communist party.
NS is no longer a popular meme and hasn’t been for some time. So, by using “national socialist” to describe your movement, you’re literally doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Hitler himself did.
Social Justice is in this case a similar but far more contemporary monicker for a revolutionary right to adopt.
In 2018 America, just using an American flag and pictures of the more “libertarian” US Founding Fathers is sufficiently edgy to trigger leftists.
Like, seriously: Co-opting Thomas Jefferson is WAAAY easier than Co-opting Adolf Hitler.
Leftists don’t use the US flag, Gadsen Flag, etc, they also are increasingly not seeing much distinction between libertarians and the alt-right.
Just go “tactical libertarian” A.K.A., crypto-alt-right. That’s the beauty of the movement: we can all identify as alt-right amongst ourselves but deny the label when it’s used to describe us,
We need a futuristic conservatism – a conservative progressivism.
A long article to make a short argument: the Alt-Right should avoid imagery of the NAZIs, because our times are not their times and it is outside the Overtone windows our enemies have set.
Accepted. But that’s not an interesting discussion.
The author basically assumes that those ugly McNazis only want to resurrect Hitler and other “necrophilia” and gives us his somewhat biased version of WWII incl. opinions of Mussolini (whose “savage barbarism” draw Hitler into the Balkans, BTW), Kursk and other arguments which have nothing to do with the subject.
Mr. Lawrence carefully avoids the crucial questions:
Why are so many NS sympathisers on our side? Just idiots having fun with the swastika?
Could it be that our worldview, our “conception de vie” is very close to the National Socialists’s? Starting with the taboo of the taboos:
When the NS warned that the Jews would destroy the European race and culture, could they have been right?
Is there any of the NS concepts in contradiction with ours? If so, which? And if not, how can we deal with such an embarassing situation?
“…Is there any of the NS concepts in contradiction with ours? If so, which? And if not, how can we deal with such an embarrassing situation..?”
There is indeed much overlap between NS and WN, but the major differences are :
1) WN seeks the survival and flourishing of all European and European-derived peoples, NS sought the survival, flourishing and expansion of the German people (eventually with the cooperation of other Germanic peoples) at the cost of Slavic peoples, which was the so-called Lebensraum project, i.e. the project to colonize Slavic countries up to the Urals, a project in which the local Slaves would be partly exterminated, partly expelled and partly enslaved. Hitler planned to completely destroy the Russian cities of St.Petersburg, Moscow and Stalingrad. Such a monstrous plan is anathema to WN.
2) WN do not seek to rule over other races, i.e. they are no “white supremacists”.
NS lived in a time that white rule over most of the planet was taken for granted and believed to endure for ever. Thus Hitler greatly admired the British Empire and sought to cooperate with it. WN accept self-rule for all peoples of what-ever race or ethnicity, in this sense they are “egalitarians”.
3) There is no consensus among WN how to deal with the Jewish Question, but the NS “solution” of demonization, disempowerment, and incarceration into concentration camps seems not to be one of them. At most disempowerment and repatriation to Israel seems to be acceptable to WN.
The Nazis achieved remarkable success in restoring Germany to economical, social and cultural health, and that in a very short period of time. But anything beyond that was ill-conceived, immoral and led to colossal failure, a failure WN better try to avoid.
Ryckaert:
The things you ascribe as being particularly vile “nazi” stuff – razing of cities, concentration camps, are not a distinct feature of NS. I am just thinking of Hiroshima, or Dresden, or Gulags and concentration camps in Poland or the US (what would have happened to the Japanese camps if the US had been under a real emergency with a direct, constant and savage attack taking place on its soil?), or in South Africa in the Boer Wars, or that someone wishes that Germany had been completely pulverized and the like. The difference is that there is a profitable endeavor to magnify and extra-demonize whatever the German side in the war has, or is said to have, done, while the Allied’s side is either shrugged or laughed off, even spun into a heroic tale.
However, to assume the imagery and esthetics of NS in any other nationalist movement is unsuitable because:
National Socialism has passed into history and cannot be revived or relived; it was a movement arising at a specific time from specific circumstances with specific conditions.
Mussolini couldn’t revive the Roman Empire as little as the Egyptians could their Dynasties or the Greeks their creative conglomerate of small city states.
This imagery is a main weapon in the hands of the enemies of nations, nationalism and ethnic self-assertion. They use it all the time, to make money, demonize, smear, to jerk tears from the people they have made emotionally immature and ignorant and run their successful campaign of ideologized politics against the background of NS in all its aspects. This is perhaps comparable to the former Catholic Church which ran its religion against the stage setting of the Devil in his realm. The whole thing has been systematically built-up, hence we are dealing with the result of a PR campaign, not rational thought.
Nationalism and NS are two different aspects of self-assertive politics, and there are others – all the various Fascisms- and even the Left represented until not long ago a movement that took its departure from the existence and rights of Nations. The new Left, however, has thrown away its commitment to people, peoples and Nations and is now dedicated to the execution of a bookish, childish hyper-moralistic program that appeals mostly to people whose development is arrested in their late teens.
National Socialism has shown that a Nation in unity can overcome the greatest odds and rise to the most frightening occasions in a combative spirit. Hence its appeal.
#1 fails to account for historical realities at the time, i.e. Lebensraum as a reaction to the starvation inflicted by the western allies during WWI, caused by an excess of population that was not self-sufficient with its present boundaries and given its likely enemies in future wars of the total war style. Moreover, if one believes that whatever is done to survive is necessary and good, then in this regard National Socialism did nothing wrong (in a moral sense given their own beliefs and context, clearly they lost and therefore acted wrong practically and materially to some degree).
#2 offers a large point of disagreement on the nature of WN, larger than the main article for sure: “WN accept self-rule for all peoples of what-ever race or ethnicity, in this sense they are “egalitarians””. Do we? Or do we not care about self-determination outside our homelands, and will we deal with out- groups according only to our needs? I’m not convinced this proposed point is WN doctrine.
Point 2 also undermines point 1 in identifying how very different our context is now vs. then. With foreign and domestic existential threats to white survival today, not just threats to white empires 80 years ago in fratricidal wars, it’s hard to imagine a young Hitler today not engaging in pan-European politics out of at least necessity if not sincerity. It is therefore also understandable, yet enormously regrettable, he did not embrace a broader view of white interests in his own time, especially in the east where it may have made the difference.
#3 seems to presume the solution NS pursued wasn’t one (or else I don’t know why it was in quotation marks). If they’d won, wouldn’t it have worked? More to the point though, a lack of consensus on the JQ says more about our total lack of real power than indecision or disagreement about what to do about it. When options actually become available beyond online metapolitics, let’s reasses.
ad 1) Lebensraum
Apart from the fact that Anglo-Saxons in general and Americans/Australians in particular, should think twice before accusing other white tribes of “taking Lebensraum”, Hitler did not attack Slavic countries for taking Lebensraum.
Poland was attacked for taking German Lebensraum, committing atrocities to German minorities and refusing to come to a reasonable arrangement to such unstable situations as Danzig.
Stalin was attacked because he was clearly preparing an attack himself, moving some 120 of his 150 divisions to the borders with Germany or her allies.
The Germans have the longest experience living with Slavic people and although there were conflicts, it was not such a bad neigborship. It turned sour in Versailles.
2) White Supremacism
This is a complete misinterpretation, really putting things upside down.
NS is the only of the great ideologies that explicitly stated it is not for export, it is a political system for the German people, others could adopt or not. Contrary to the messianic ideologies we are suffering: Socialism/Democracy/Globalism/Human Rigths.
And yes, Hitler considered the British Empire a “stabilizing geopolitical factor”. You need not be a fan of the British Empire to admit, at least wrt. Africa, he was a prophet.
3) JQ
You should distinguish between wartime treatment of Jews and NS politics before 1939: six years of peace and six years of a cruel war for survival attributed to Jews in the east and Jews in the west.
As far as I know (convince me to the contrary!), before 1939 no Jew was incarcerated for being a ‘Jew’ (but for being a communist, for example). Official politics was to ‘disempower’ them, get them off the control levers of art, media, banking, lawyers and not allow them to be government officials. And yes, to encourage them to emigrate, such that the Jews live separately and
do not seek to rule over other races
What can be more in according with WN?
But during WW2, a war was going on, Jews were considered enemies and treated as such, and no, this is not in line with WN.
Because we are not at war, aren’t we?
“And no, this is not an accusation of bad faith directed at individuals (for what it is worth, I find most of such allegations made in the aftermath of Hailgate to be insufficiently convincing). It is true that agents provocateurs would, presumably, adopt the “Nazi” label that our enemies so fervently desire to pin on us.”
I think that these suspicions, given the day and age, can be tracked down to the fact that Leftist parodists, acting as strawman right-wingers, are not uncommon online and can even be effective at destroying any quality discourse. Of course, such an approach wouldn’t work on “high level” environments like CC – such specimens would be instantly recognized by other commented, if their comment is even approved to appear . but on reddit and the like, and on sites with more populist approach and higher comment intensity, they can do some damage.
It is thus easy for someone who spends a lot of time in online discourse to project that outside of it.
Sylvie’s comment below is spot on. I also agree with Mr. Lawrence’s key point, that NS ideas and symbols are counterproductive metapolitically with normies and the opposition, for whatever they matter (I’ve never heard a plan for what we’re going to do with all these normies when we get them). And while I don’t want to nitpick details about his harsh characterization of NS sympathizers or revisionist history, I do want to pose a number of questions that expose problems with Mr. Lawrence’s tack.
Is Jef Costello correct in writing the myth of the good war is the root of our enemy’s moral judgments and incitements against us (https://counter-currents.com/2017/09/the-myths-we-live-by/)?
Is invalidating this myth and destroying its power a metapolitical prerequisite to whites reclaiming their sovereignty and a strong, positive group identity?
Does the ultimate success of white interests in Europe and America globally require a confrontation with and overcoming of Jewish power (one of those “suppressed truths and opinions” Mr. Lawrence mentions)?
If so, will this require views or actions, explicit or implicit, that will essentially align with elements of the NS worldview? What of restoring homogeneity to a country invaded and occupied by alien populations? Would such actions in either case require invalidation of the moral judgments of today’s establishment powers concerning NS to succeed?
By asking these questions I hope I make my position clear: successful white identity politics requires an invalidation of the prevailing myth of the good war, and its greatest enforcer, the guilt of the Shoah. To say nothing of NS sympathizers individually, Mr. Lawrence’s rough treatment of this group errs in poking them with the enemy’s own weapon. Perhaps this is only characteristic of this one essay, or perhaps I’m seeing a broad critique where there is really a narrow one; but there I see it all the same.
Invalidation of the prevailing ideology requires, at a minimum, absolute aloofness to their moral judgments. Conceding an inch on the morality of NS’s history is an error. Whatever they did is only one of three things: entirely irrelevant, a material and not moral mistake to learn from, or a positive and successful idea or action worth appropriating.
Men such as the late Jonathan Bowden have already laid out clearly how to avoid these traps laid by the left, encouraging a soft, civil, and reasonable reaction to accusations of atrocity and implied guilt. We must not back up from it or try to go around it; there will only be more traps laid. We must step over it. There’s nothing wrong with National Socialism.
We are not German National Socialists and don’t advocate their politics, since they are a dead party in history and we are alive in our own context. However, our existence and successful advocacy for our group requires our refusal to acquiesce to the liberal demands for moral judgments on their invented demons. In this, I think Mr. Lawrence’s apparent personal tastes, with his implicit agreement on the accusations of moral crimes (or at least poking eyes on the issue) and pejoratives, distract from the core and sound pragmatic message he delivered.
Finally, as a general aside: we must always consider what is emotionally persuasive if we are to succeed at persuasion. The Culture of Critique may be a civil and intelligent discussion of the JQ and may be rationally persuasive, but is not emotionally persuasive. The history of the NS era may be more trouble than it’s worth, but where else can young men of the movement (or potential newcomers) see a greater example of struggle and heroism against the same enemies we face today? When else in the history of Europe since the Crusader Orders has a supranational European political army, the Waffen SS, fought for the West? It’s fair to debate the utility of these ideas and images, but we must at least understand the emotional appeal of that period to young men of the right, and the persuasive power of emotion over reason, to know why this alleged fringe exists in the first place.
This article was written in early 2017, soon after Heilgate, at a time when Nazi edgelords were demanding deference from everyone else (“no punching to the Right!”) while freely accusing other people of being cucks. If the insults and general pugnacity come across as a little obnoxious, well, it’s difficult to exaggerate the obnoxiousness of the movement at that time. Perhaps the enemy did us an inadvertent favour by knocking that whole ridiculous signalling-spiral on the head.
As for the main argument of your comment, I agree that the ‘Good War’ myth is a major plank of the enemy’s propaganda matrix and must be destroyed, but I don’t think this can be done by simply inverting the myth into a hagiography of the Nazis. I would suggest 1) pointing out the cynical milking of the war myth in the present day by neo-imperialist interests, repressive government, and Jewish power; 2) knocking down the thin conceptual barriers that separate German atrocities from Allied ones, the “pointless” 1914-18 War from the “justified” 1939-45 one, and so on; and 3) emphasising the pivotal role of the Soviet Union in the war, the moral depravity of that state, and the fact of its aggressive intentions (helping to make Mikhail Meltyukhov’s historical research available in the West would be a good start on this front).
@Benjamin
Lawrence’s article is great, with one major failure, his belief that we are not dealing with people acting in bad faith. At least in the American context, we have two groups that are, effectively, anti-White:
1. World War II NSDAP fetishists. These people hate America and White Americans. Typically not even German, they are simply cranks who care more about rhetorically “avenging” the losing side in World War II than doing anything to advance White people – Americans, Europeans, or diaspora Whites. They are worthless and counter-productive.
2. The “LARPERS” – typically these people are no different than the “incels” that simply hate women due to their own failures, homophobes who are obsessed with homosexuals not due to any concern about sexual morality but simply due to some sort of loathing, and immature types that simply enjoy negative attention. All of these types are, in fact, acting in bad faith.
Benjamin is of course absolutely correct, meta-politically – in America – we really have to do nothing more complicated than actually engage the explicitly pro-White legacy of the United States and our Founding Fathers. We can “trigger” the anti-whites plenty with the added benefit of actually getting normal White Americans on our side.
Which is why it’s a waste of time to cater, in any way, to groups 1 and 2.
The only way to keep the LEFT from vilifying us as Nazis is to keep developing new media to circumvent the older/established media that the LEFT has always dominated. As long as the LEFT has this media they can keep squawking “Nazi” and make it stick (in most people’s minds).
Talk radio is definitely in our hands. No LEFTISTs ever really succeed in radio.
The internet is good but in danger of being lost to us if we keep allowing ourselves to be at the mercy of LEFTIST owned/controlled sites such as paypal, google, youtube, twitter, facebook et alia. We need to develop our own alternatives. Kind of analogous to living off grid and not being dependent for food, shelter, electricity from (LEFTIST dominated) society in general. Easier said than done.
TV networks are largely off limits. Even the one (FOX) we think on our side is now in the hands of the LEFTIST children of the founder (Murdoch). That doesn’t bode well for the news part of FOX. Shows such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity may be not long for the world. But starting another network in place of FOX is very expensive. Most of the billionaires are jews. The few who aren’t jews probably don’t want to lose their social/cultural life (beholden to jews) for establishing such a new network that would be anti-thetical to jew interests/agenda.
A President, before the end of White male Presidents comes along, should do something about all these LEFTIST networks that are simply surviving due to generous jew billionaire donors and not from advertising due to viewership. With only one network on the Right and many, many many on the LEFT, our voice can easily be lost in the clutter. A President could, if he wished, launch anti-trust lawsuits against these media conglomerates.
As I recall (I was very young at the time) the Germans lost the Kursk battle because they carefully prepared to crush the Soviets with massive force, but then drew off a large proportion of tanks and troops in response to the invasion of Sicily and Italy; yet didn’t alter their original battle-plan for Kursk.
I’m not sure how this fits in with the above essay, except that Kursk was not a foreordained fiasco; its loss was the result of distraction and trying to do two things at once.
The above writer makes some sound observations about NaziLARPers (he’s particularly amusing on Rockwell) but we shouldn’t distract ourselves too much with these concerns. Good taste, opsec and PR control can take care of most of these problems.
For example, in that matter of Hailgate: we still hear in the media how Richard Spencer led that “Nazi” or “Roman” salute. Some of us now even repeat this nonsense. Actually he did no such thing; he raised a double-old-fashioned glass in toast. It was rather a previous speaker who opened a brief talk with a full Bellamy (in jest, to much laughter). Regardless, the media fallout wasn’t caused by either speech, or even by the three or four LARPers who saluted Spencer’s whisky glass and got caught on video. No, this damage was entirely due to lack of opsec and poor PR. Enemy journalists were still on the premises, although they could and should have been barred from what was supposed to be a private dinner.
Instead of depleting our energies by blaming the LARP-afflicted amongst us, the Right must stay focused on central goals and avoid distractions, by simply using good sense and security. Forget these things and you get a Kursk.
Margot Metroland:
Thank you for this comment. I did not know that the Hailgate dustdevil was not even related to Richard Spencer but engineered by making a “scandal” effective by attaching it to a recognizable name.
I agree that spending energy on moving forward rather than worrying too much about internal differences is more profitable for progress.
The analogy with Kursk is meant to illustrate the folly of attacking one’s enemy at a point where he is strong and well-prepared. Please bear in mind that I wrote this piece right after Heilgate, during the Alt-Right’s ‘pride before a fall’ phase, in which the movement was full of aggressive edgy boys buoyed up with vicarious momentum and claiming that their Nazi-signalling was part of a clever strategy. Although the piece aims a few insults like “NSLARP” and “McNazi “at these people, because they were profligate with “cuck” and “faggot” themselves, on the whole it is an attempt to engage with their arguments under a presumption of good faith.
You are right to say that Spencer did not lead the Nazi salutes at the Heilgate conference. But he invited the enemy journalists, then made a speech laden with unsubtle Nazi references and finished off with “Hail Victory” (Sieg Heil), which got just enough people saluting for the fake news to spin it into an outrage story. The point of this becomes clear if you look at two intimately related episodes in Spencer’s career: 1) his shutdown of the original Alternative Right site in 2013 and repudiation of the Alt-Right brand, just before it vastly increased in popularity; and 2) his unveiling, soon after Heilgate, of the Alt-Right corporation, whose declared purpose was to centralise the movement under his leadership and which launched constant attacks on ‘competitors’ including the editor of this website. My conclusion is that Spencer cynically staged the Heilgate uproar so that he could take a crown from the hand of the enemy media – one that, unsurprisingly, blew up on his head and incinerated many good people surrounding him.
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