Counter-Currents
Lothrop Stoddard
3,364 words
Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) was, in many respects, decidedly a man of his times. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he devoted the bulk of his writing to the nascent field of social science, hoping to harness the discipline not only to explain the past and present, but also to affect positive changes in the future. He can accurately be surmised as a disciple of Madison Grant, who was himself the intellectual progeny of Arthur de Gobineau by way of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The Rising Tide of Color, the 1920 geopolitical and anthropological work for which Stoddard was and is best known, shows Grant’s influence not only in its division of the Aryan race into three subcategories (Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean), but also in its overriding pessimism and anxiety about the future of white civilization, a trait characteristic of the post-First World War generation of Right-wing intellectuals.
However, Stoddard departed from Grant in meaningful ways and, while some of Grant’s work is commendable, Stoddard’s deviations from it are almost uniformly for the better. In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant suggested that the Nordic race was characterized by a set of sublime, masterful traits which were absent from lesser races, including the other Caucasoid races. Stoddard, by contrast, is less interested with these subdivisions than with the fate of the larger racial community. Grant wrote the preface to The Rising Tide of Color, and the word “Nordic” appears far more often in those thirty-two pages than in the remaining three-hundred some pages of the book. As one would expect, Stoddard is guilty of some of the purity-spiraling which characterized his generation of racial theorists and remains a problem for white activism today, but these forays into excess are easy to overlook in favor of the more relevant argument and his obvious admiration for a greater racial community.
Stoddard has some positive things to say about non-white races, even as he views geopolitical circumstances naturally drawing them into conflict with whites. For instance, Stoddard praises the Chinese for their laboriousness. The Japanese are praised for their rapid industrialization, and the West is chastised for having underestimated their abilities. Stoddard even praises the Islamic Revival as regenerative within its particular cultural context, restoring to the Arab world a vitality which had been lost within the bureaucratic Ottoman Empire, and he portrays Arabs as some of the world’s fiercest warriors. Stoddard’s advocacy of racial hygiene thus has the goal of preserving the distinctive traits of all races, not just a particular subset of the Caucasoid race. In this sense, he has more in common with many on the New Right than does Madison Grant.
In The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard made a number of predictions which have proven startlingly accurate, if not wholly original. Stoddard’s thesis, in essence, is that the apparent hegemony of Europe in his day would be short lived – white civilization would soon be overrun by the “colored” races. Unsurprisingly, he does not predict that this circumstance will be brought about by non-whites overtaking whites in terms of ability. Rather, this usurpation of the West would be a simple metric of quantity over quality, the result of higher birth rates among non-whites. These higher birth rates, he notes ironically, would not be possible without the medicinal, technological, and political changes brought to Africa and Asia by European colonists. At stake here was not just the displacement of whites from their traditional homelands. Stoddard, who had previously written The French Revolution in San Domingo, was well aware of the probable fate of white minorities. The dysgenic tragedy of the First World War, which Stoddard aptly portrayed as meaningless but unfairly blames almost exclusively on the Germans, is portrayed as accelerating the onset of this catastrophe.
Stoddard foresaw that capitalism would encourage the importation of non-white labor that would outcompete whites not in its quality, but in its quantity and its willingness to work for practically nothing. This willingness is owed to the fact that, given the Malthusian pressures triggered by the overpopulation of their nations, even the most meager subsistence would be preferable from their perspective. Needless to say, this prediction has been made manifest in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere. Stoddard predicted that the Islamic Revival would bring the Muslim world into war against the West and that black Africans would align with Muslims in this effort. Stoddard predicted that internecine rivalries between non-whites would be put aside in favor of a sort-of rainbow coalition that would persist up until the moment that the white world had been defeated. He also predicted that the moral grandstanding about national self-determination during and after the First World War would make continued maintenance of the massive European colonial empires an impossibility. This seems obvious in retrospect – the values codified at Versailles both incentivized the creation of nationalist movements across the European colonies and made the ruling position blatantly and indefensibly hypocritical – but it must not have been to the contemporary British and French ruling class, who made efforts (with varying degrees of intensity) to cling to their empires into the 1960s. He predicted that the Bolsheviks would persuade discontented colored nationalists to the cause of Communism. He predicted that Japan would challenge the West for hegemony over Asia – another accurate prediction, although its impressiveness is mitigated by the fact that this was already a widespread belief following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. He also presaged Samuel Huntington by prophesying that the struggle between various races and cultures, rather than Marxist materialist concerns, would be the primary cause of conflict and consciousness in the twentieth century and beyond.
The Rising Tide of Color was well-received, despite being panned by the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas, who (in keeping with his Jewishness) was endeavoring to remove all racial considerations from a field historically composed almost exclusively of racial studies. Stoddard took the implications of his research seriously, and worked to prevent the catastrophe he foresaw from becoming a reality. To this end, he helped lobby for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, much admired by contemporary and modern Rightists, which created an immigration system based upon quotas designed to preserve the traditional ethnic makeup of the United States. This seems to have alleviated much of his pessimism, as his 1927 book Re-forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood celebrates the (sadly, illusory) palingenesis of the US and its founding stock. Reflecting the non-racial dysgenic concerns described within The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman (1922), Stoddard helped promote eugenicist policies, working alongside Margaret Sanger to create the birth control movement. He also spent time as a correspondent in the Third Reich, of which he held an ambivalent view. Nonetheless, German government officials naturally preferred giving interviews to Stoddard rather than to the more hostile William Shirer. During and after the Second World War, Stoddard, like many of his generation, was shut out from even supposedly conservative publications. The man and his work were suddenly heretical to the intellectual and political establishment, and he was silenced to such an extent that his death in 1950 went practically unreported in the press.
Today, the unfortunate veracity of Stoddard’s predictions has reignited interest in his scholarship, sympathetically in dissident circles and, of course, negatively in the establishment. The similarity of his predictions to the “Great Replacement” which we observe today will not be lost on any conscious reader. It is safe to say that this is the reason that Stoddard has recently begun reappearing in Leftist publications. The Left uses Stoddard to demonstrate that anything but an open border is racist and evil, and those articles are exactly the kind of insipid, smooth-brained commentary you would expect – in essence, Stoddard proves that “orange man bad.” Another article positions Stoddard as evidence for the dangers of academic and speech freedoms. A slightly (but only slightly) more interesting article suggests that Douglas Murray is the heir apparent to Stoddard’s legacy, a somewhat accurate assessment nonetheless muddled by the asinine, copy-and-paste commentary suggesting that the displacement of whites is at once a ridiculous conspiracy theory and an inevitable force of nature that we should celebrate and embrace. The establishment Right has also recently begun smacking around Stoddard, using him to tar Planned Parenthood as part of its ridiculously misguided and self-destructive campaign against abortion rights.
It will doubtless be a shock to all Counter-Currents readers to learn that none of this mainstream pabulum is worth the time invested in reading it. However, there has been one recent article regarding Stoddard which caught my attention and which, through its enshrinement in Stoddard’s Wikipedia entry, has now become part of his popular legacy. The article, published in The New Yorker and penned by Ian Frazier, regrettably grabbed my attention with the clickbait headline “When W. E. B. Du Bois Made a Laughingstock of a White Supremacist.” I immediately knew, based on the fact that he had once engaged in a public debate with Du Bois, that the eponymous “supremacist” was Stoddard. Moreover, I immediately knew that the article must be laughably disingenuous, given that Du Bois was not remotely close to Stoddard in terms of ability (and given that it was published in The New Yorker). Du Bois is a beloved icon of the modern American Left, a fact attributable to his blackness, his constant demands that whites change their societies to include and advance blacks, and his Marxism.
Du Bois is uniformly portrayed as an inimitable genius, rivaled only by Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas as a founder of social science. However, when one actually examines his ideas, it becomes obvious that not only was he wrong about practically everything but, worse, he also had nothing novel to say. Every single one of Du Bois’ supposed contributions to social science can more meaningfully be attributed to someone else. The term “color line” to describe racial segregation was coined by Frederick Douglass (and, at any rate, is hardly an insight), and the argument that the concept of race only exists to justify capitalist exploitation was clearly lifted from Karl Marx’s theories of superstructure and false consciousness. Du Bois’ most celebrated achievement, elucidated in The Souls of Black Folk, is the theory of “Double Consciousness,” wherein blacks are forced to consider themselves through white racial conceptions. Even this is lifted from elsewhere, little more than a modified version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the same name. Moreover, double consciousness’ claim that black Americans are forced to inexorably struggle to reconcile a black ethnocultural identity with their existence in a European cultural context has always struck me as a direct contradiction of Du Bois’ race negationism. Race, when it is conceived by whites, is a social construct created to justify exploitation. When conceived by blacks, race is an innate reality of existence, and Pan-African cultural traits persist within the black soul regardless of their physical location.
Nonetheless, and despite the much more numerous successes of his arch-rival Booker T. Washington, Du Bois was regarded as the leading black intellectual of his day. In The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard had explicitly cited Du Bois as an example of the growing non-white resentment that would undermine and eventually destroy white civilization. This, coupled with Stoddard’s constant willingness to express his ideas in front of even uniformly hostile audiences (he even gave a speech to all-black Tuskegee University in 1926), led to a 1929 debate between Stoddard and Du Bois in Chicago. The debate was Du Bois’ brainchild, and was thus held in front of a largely black audience and reported on primarily by the black press. One is thus forced to wonder what Stoddard thought this debate would accomplish. At the time, there remained some slight degree of optimism that blacks and whites would both remain in their proverbial lanes, with blacks following the example of Booker T. Washington and his Atlanta Compromise. Indeed, Stoddard referenced Washington’s metaphor of the American races as a hand (in which each race is kept distinct, like the fingers, but works together for the betterment of all) during the debate. But Washington’s path, which focused on black self-improvement, cultural assimilation, and interracial cooperation until black-white parity was achieved, was always a longshot; it required blacks to possess low time preference. Du Bois’ way – simply demanding that white society change to fit black expectations by appealing to the white sense of fair play and benevolence – was always going to be an easier sell.
To borrow a beloved Leftist expression, everything about the debate was “rigged.” The New Yorker article, like the magazine’s Jewish readership and the debate’s contemporary audience, has of course already made up its mind on who won the debate before a single word is relayed. Author Ian Frazier mocks Stoddard as a “nut,” citing his belief in “germ-plasm” as the conveyor of genetic information. Stoddard’s understanding of this process retrospectively comes across as nonsense, and The New Yorker clearly feels that it is no excuse that he was writing at a time when no one on Earth understood it much better. Likewise, the black correspondents who recorded the details of the event from which we are to draw our conclusions represented The Chicago Defender, which had called Stoddard “the high priest of racial baloney,” and The Baltimore Afro-American, which had at once rejected the premise of The Rising Tide of Color while simultaneously celebrating its statistics showing that non-white people outnumbered whites worldwide.
The central question of the debate was “Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?,” a concept which had never been relevant to Stoddard’s research but was the entire raison d’etre for Du Bois’ career. Moreover, the framing of the question was such that, even at the time, it would have been impossible to make a cogent argument against it. The contrary position, that whites should actively discourage blacks from bettering themselves, would not have been how segregationists presented their position. And, of course, Du Bois was not asking for whites to “encourage” blacks to “seek” their own achievements – that was the position of Booker T. Washington, his hated nemesis. Du Bois’ goal was to dissolve white institutions, or at least inject blacks into them, and to accomplish a Marxist redistribution of wealth along racial lines.
The debate began with the moderator presenting Du Bois as “one of the ablest speakers for his race not only in America but in the whole wide world,” while Stoddard was “a man whose books and writings and speaking have made his views known to many hundreds of thousands of people both in this country and abroad.” In other words, Du Bois is among the most brilliant people in the world, and Stoddard is someone who is literate enough to convey his ideas through the written word. Du Bois’ speech at the debate was typical for him and the precedent of black activism he established: He argues that everyone should be given cultural equality freely rather than having to seek or earn it, that since Abolition blacks have a list of accomplishments with “few parallels in human history” (though what these are is not stated), and that the white race has actually done far more ill for the world than good. Nordic whites, he says, have inflicted war, suffering, and tyranny on more people than any other group, a position that could be found restated verbatim in any modern Leftist publication. The same could be said of his next argument, which is that science (in the abstract) has proven that the races are equal in their aptitudes.
Du Bois also says that Stoddard is hypocritical for opposing miscegenation, for it is whites that have brought about the majority of interracial interaction in the world via exploration and colonization. Moreover, it is only arrogance which leads whites to believe that blacks would want to copulate with them in the first place. In the very next breath, Du Bois asserts that racial categorization itself is ridiculous because, as a mixed-race person himself, he is both Nordic and negro. This obvious contradiction – wherein he chastises whites for miscegenation before immediately saying resisting miscegenation is foolish – gets no commentary from The New Yorker, which presents Du Bois’ argument as brilliant at every turn, carefully luring Stoddard into a rhetorical trap. Du Bois finishes by saying that the US is founded upon Christian values, which it betrays by denying equality to blacks; in essence, that “this is not who we are.” What is most striking about Du Bois’ speech is that it reveals that the Left simply never changes. Their rhetoric today is the very same as it was ninety years ago. While it has never ceased being emotionally manipulative and intellectually bankrupt, you can hardly blame Leftists for sticking to a script which has won them a practically uninterrupted string of major victories.
Stoddard, for his part, does not even address Du Bois’ points. His proposal is the maintenance of the “separate but equal” dictum established by Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the races are kept apart not based on claims of superiority, but simply on the basis of racial difference. The New Yorker predictably presents this as a distortion of his beliefs, but I have little doubt that Ian Frazier never read The Rising Tide of Color, which makes the same essential argument. This brings us to the climactic moment of the debate when, as The New Yorker tells it, Du Bois makes a laughingstock of Stoddard, exposing his “unintentionally funny” ideas for just how ridiculous they are. Let us see how Du Bois’ brilliant dialectical style unfurled in full flower, ensnaring this hapless, “Nazi-loving” fool in its wake.
Stoddard says that “the more enlightened men of southern white America” are trying to ensure that, while the races are kept separate, that the facilities to which they have access are nonetheless equal in quality. This elicited laughter from the black audience, who found the claim to be ridiculous. Stoddard then informed them that he did not see the joke, apparently eliciting more whooping. Angered, Stoddard rebutted that bi-racial cooperation of the Atlanta Compromise mold was making more progress than anything Du Bois was attempting – another apt prediction, for Du Bois died having accomplished none of his goals. Du Bois gave up on “progress” in the US and eventually moved to observe and admire Mao Zedong’s brutality in China before settling in Ghana. His NAACP was and remains little more than a debating and protesting society. From its inception in 1909, the NAACP incessantly complained for over fifty years until other acronymous black organizations, aided by the bayonets of the National Guard and the Cold War exigencies of “winning hearts and minds,” ended the white near-monopoly on American political power.
The duplicity of The New Yorker’s portrayal here is so obvious that I have to imagine even those few goyim foolish enough to regularly sift through its wretched pages were able to at least sense a slight tingling in their temporal lobe. Clearly, Du Bois did nothing to “make a laughingstock” of Stoddard. Stoddard simply stated his beliefs in front of an audience so hostile to them that they met his arguments with incredulous laughter. The same result would befall anyone today who attempted to suggest before a black audience that Affirmative Action is racially biased or that Michael Brown was not a gentle giant. One wonders what the response would have been if Du Bois had returned Stoddard’s courtesy by conducting a debate in front of an educated, pro-white audience. How might they have reacted if Du Bois had made his claim that science disproves human genetic variation?
Ironically, the 2019 retrospective on this debate in The New Yorker is evidence of the veracity of Stoddard’s ideas. The entire informational apparatus of the US has been seized by vengeful non-whites and their self-destructive white allies, and is now used as a vanguard for affecting anti-white sociopolitical change. The rest of society is already taking and will continue to take the same course as whites become an increasingly scarce minority. Barring a miracle reversal, the “rising tide” which he feared and helped delay will subsume whites, subjecting them to the conditions which have befallen white minorities everywhere around the world.
25 comments
Your description of the Du Bois-Stoddard debate shows that the anti-white invective was pretty much the same then as now, except that it is today the established conventional view.
You write, “The entire informational apparatus of the US has been seized by vengeful non-whites and their self-destructive white allies, and is now used as a vanguard for affecting anti-white sociopolitical change. … Barring a miracle reversal, the ‘rising tide’ which he feared and helped delay will subsume whites, subjecting them to the conditions which have befallen white minorities everywhere around the world.”
Quite the black pill, what? If you believe that, why bother to write your article? Why should we spend our time reading it? Purely out of intellectual interest as we shuffle off the stage? Or do you have any encouragement to offer us?
@Pretzel Yardstick
I’ll offer you some encouragement by way of discouragement:
The White Race is not doomed, but if we are going to win, it’s NOT going to be done in a way that most of the White Nationalist Movement would approve of. There are essentially two equally hopeless factions in this Movement with absolutely no inbetween whatsoever:
-Fed Posters/Seige tards
-National Populists/Reactionaries
The way the White Nationalist Movement wins is by embracing the popular culture, embracing the religion of Liberalism, and successfully subverting both. As long as the Movement continues to position itself as being at war with popular culture and with Liberalism in all its varieties, it will lose, and it will deserve to lose. What does such integration and subversion look like in practice? Start with Culture Jamming and work your way outward from there.
I remember seeing seeds of this on Youtube and Twitter in the summer and fall of 2015, which was the same time that the Trolling Wars started and the cuckservative meme went viral. As a prominent example, does anyone remember the Disney parodies created by Uncuck The Right/Walt Bismarck? Sure, his videos were pretty much just preaching to the choir, but even as a choir member/WN by then, I remember thinking to myself, “oh my gosh, there’s actually someone other than me in this Movement who actually likes Disney movies.” In the previous year at the time – 2014 – I remember how every one of my WN friends on Facebook hated Frozen, which was arguably the biggest pop cultural phenomena of the decade, and its been clear to me ever since that White Nationalists are incapable of relating to the sensibilities and tastes of the very people they profess to be trying to save. Uncuck The Rights videos were, to me, a prime example of a WN who actually gets it.
Unfortunately, that flash in the pan from 2015 was short lived, and now we’re in a bigger mess than we ever were in the pre-Trump days. We need to embrace the popular culture, we need to accept that “Liberalism” as a general worldview has won,* and we need an overhaul of our false assumptions about the world, such as this tired canard that history is cyclical when in fact the ver way we measure time is now and always has been linear.
There’s hope, but not if the Movement doesn’t make major structural changed to the way its followers see the world and how they govern their own lives.
*When I say Liberalism has won, that’s not the same thing as saying the Woke Left has won. The Woke Left falls firmly within the ideological faction of Radicalism (think Thomas Paine and the Jacobins, William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolitionists, the aforementioned W.E.B. Debois, and of course, the Cultural Revolutionaries of the 1960s). Radicalism has indeed achieved a lot of victories in the last 250 years, but its also suffered some major setbacks, most notably the 1877 Compromise that ended Reconstruction and ushered in 90 years of continued White Dominance. Radicalism is currently in a state of crisis, and suffice to say, it can be defeated. However, what I see from the WN Movement is basically an attempt at either salvaging Classical Conservatism or rolling back the Enlightenment altogether, both of which are doomed causes that no normal White person wants or believes in. Classical Liberalism in all its offshoots and manifestations – some admirable, some pitiable – has won and is here to stay. There’s no version of events where White people randomly stop believing in both Radicalism and Classical Liberalism. As such, the general worldview of Liberalism is here to stay. Forever. The sooner White Nationalists adjust to that reality, the better
I might agree with you, depending on what falls under the heading of Classical Conservatism and Classical Liberalism. (What are Fed Posters and Siege Tards?) Any valid philosophy should be able to be expressed through the culture it resides in, regardless of whether it shares the values current in that culture. There seems no inherent reason why white nationalism shouldn’t make its peace with existing forms, including ones I can’t relate to like computer games.
We can’t, as we are forever being told, turn back the clock. But we can set it forward to echo an earlier period that had something worth reviving.
@Pretzel:
Fed Posters is the derisive name given to WN’s and Alt Righters who implicitly or explicitly promote acts of violence, usually of the lone wolf variety. When challenged on their absurd belief that shooters like Dylan Roof and the New Zealand guy are changing anything, they often respond by telling their critics to the read the 1983 book “Seige” by James Mason, who promotes lone wolf resistance in the book. Hence the “Read SEIGE” meme.
The proper name for Fed Posters is called Vanguard Nationalism, and back in January 2017, there was a long essay on a site called “Rope Culture” that laid out the philosophy of this type of Nationalism. Suffice to say, I found myself strongly disagreeing with almost every single one of its tenets and assumptions of the world, even as it quoted Hitler at length (I believe disingenuously and out of context). The unfortunate thing about Vanguard Nationalism is that now, pretty much no one can explain the flaws of National Populism or supporting candidates like Trump without being dismissed as a Fed Poster. Hence why I said there’s no inbetween. I attribute this to the atavistic urge of the Movement to close ranks around particular subjects when in fact this Movement, with all its brilliant thinkers, should be modeled off an ancient Greek philosophy school where everyone can debate freely and sharpen each others minds.
You are going to need to define liberalism. I don’t think there are liberal solutions to the problems generated by liberalism.
@Greg Johnson:
I would define Liberalism as a new, all-encompassing way of seeing the world, a vision of reality, that replaced the old way of seeing the world that was hegemonic in Europe during the Medieval era between 500-1500 AD. I would say that anyone who likes and supports how life has been lived in Europe and North America over the last 500 years since the Renaissance happened sees the world through the lenses of Liberalism whether they know it or not. If the Classical Civilization of Rome and Greece defined the epoch between 1000 BC and 500 AD, and if the Medieval Civilization of the Catholic Church and Constantinople defined the epoch between 500 AD and 1500, then Liberalism and the Enlightenment define the epoch we’ve lived in ever since.
The narrative of the WN Movement has always been an edgy extension of the narrative of doom first put forth by the Moral Majority and the Religious Right: Whereas the Moral Majority unanimously believed that Western culture has degenerated since the 1960s, White Nationalisrs and Dissident Righters assert that Western culture started degenerating way earlier, whether thats 1865, 1824, 1789, 1776, 1689, 1492, or, in the case of one Julius Evola, 800 BC.
Generally speaking, I don’t deny that our culture is worse now than it was in previous periods of time, but then again, as a Millenial, I’m old enough to be nostalgic for the simpler times of the 1990s that I grew up in, when a Democrat President railed against illegal immigration at the State of the Union address. Its all well and good to say that previous times were better – as they objectively were – but its another thing entirely to preach a slippery slope narrative in which everything bad about Western culture today was somehow the inevitable result of major events and movements that came before, like first wave feminism, the Civil War, the American Revolution. or even the entire Enlightenment. Such a slippery slope narrative, in addition to being intellectually lazy due to its refusal to draw distinctions, can only result in the logical conclusion that things are hopeless and that the White Race is doomed. The narrative that “Everything Went To Crap After X” is a narrative of despair, and it must be cast aside if the WN Movement wants to win.
To that end, I challenge anyone reading this to look at the basic wikipedia definition of Liberalism and ask themselves which tenets and principles they objectively disagree with, because I find myself agreeing with most of them, as I believe they can be congruent with Pro White interests:
Liberty: Agreed, as long as its balanced by duty
Consent of the Governed: Agreed. Nothing gets done without it anyway
Equality before the law: Disagree. Character should determine how people are treated before the law
Limited Government: Agree in some policy areas, disagree in other
Individual Rights: Disagree
Capitalism/Free Markets: Agree
Democracy: Agree
Secularism: Agree
Gender Equality: Agree with first and second wave feminism, disagree with third wave
Racial Equality: This is the one that trips up White Nationalists. Guys, how about we not throw the baby out with the mud, err, bathwater
Internationalism: Honestly, agreed. There’s nothing wrong with cooperation between sovereign nations of the same race working in their own best interests
Freedom of speech: Agreed X 6 Million
Freedom of the Press: Agreed.
Freedom of religion: Agreed with the exception that Islam would be banned outright and that my ideal education system would teach that Christianity and is an anti-white religion.
In summary, our problems are created by the ideology of Radicalism, not Liberalism per say. Robert Lewis Dabney may have been right about the weak character of a lot of conservatives, but he was wrong to assert that Classical Liberalism inevitably follows Radicalism on the road to perdition. If that was true, then Segregation and Jim Crow laws never would have been established after the Civil War, the 1924 Immigration Act never would have been passed, and the Eugenics Movement would have been rejected out of hand instead of being embraced by the entire culture until WW2. We don’t need to roll back 500 years of mostly objective progress to save our race
First, I will concede that I am by nature a pessimist. That’s probably what attracts me to studying the intellectual history of the Interwar Period Right.
You’re also right to imply that I wouldn’t have written this if I thought everything was lost. I still hold out hope for the “miracle reversal” I mentioned – I have to. I’m actually confident that the current order will collapse under the weight of its contradictions and that the truth will have the final victory. Any system built on such falsehoods is doomed to failure. My concern is that there will just be enormous suffering before we get there.
Unfortunately Lothrop Stoddard’s fears about the future are coming true. What is not usually mentioned is that without White skills, initiative, creativity, ingenuity and discipline the technological societies coloreds inherit will simply collapse; they can neither build nor maintain a sophisticated civilization. South Africa is a prime example of a country with first world technology sinking into the abyss under colored misrule.
The electrical grid is constantly failing and wealthy people rely on generators. The water system also is in disrepair in a country with a dry climate similar to southern California’s which makes living especially difficult. These trends will only get worse and this is while sympathetic Western countries support the Black run government. If Western countries go bankrupt from another 2008 type financial crisis aid will cease and the Third world will implode like a dystopian science fiction movie.
Here are South African Blacks attacking other Blacks from other parts of Africa. This is going on while the country is still functioning:
https://twitter.com/AdaaMazii/status/1168605993992904706
Imagine what it will be like when the lights go out and the taps go dry for good .
Stoddard’s clear style and a tone devoid of emotions can strike a cord with those high-minded Anglos with reservations to realize the utter foolishness and uselessness of modern Conservatism. We’ve just been furnished with a fresh example – The Conservatism Inc’s recent cynical, demagogic outburst against Bernie Sander’s well-meaning idea to ship contraception to the third world.
I think I first heard the name Lothrop Stoddard in the 90’s but I didn’t REALLY learn his significance until maybe 2016 when I stumbled on the audio version of Suicide of a Superpower by Pat Buchanan (who did his own narration.) that someone had posted on YouTube. Holy Cow! Did that have a huge influence on my final abandonment of liberal racial ideals! Thank you Uncle Pat and T. Lothrop Stoddard! By the way if anyone is interested here is a book dealer that’s offering a few of his books:
https://ostarapublications.com/product-category/writers/t-lothrop-stoddard/
Ostara Publications is a great publishing operation. They publish all kinds of works full of ‘forbidden thoughts’. Many of Stoddard’s works can be found available for download on Archive.org.
” Many of Stoddard’s works can be found available for download on Archive.org.”
True. But being a boomer tech-retard I prefer to have the book in my hand. At least it can’t be deleted. Unless my home is burned down by the FBI swat team of course! Besides I like to toss some money at /our guys/ like Kemp. I can’t tell you how often I’ve made up lists of White nationalist book dealers (including Counter-Currents of curse!) and posted them on sites like TRS and Daily Stormer. As one commenter said recently on TRS in reaction to my list: book posting is best posting!
(including Counter-Currents of curse!)
Sorry again! I meant to say of COURSE! No curses on Counter-Currents ever. Even if I don’t agree with you all the time!
I was simply pointing out that those who wish to avail themselves of ‘free’ information can do so.
Like you, I prefer ‘hard copy’. Our enemies have to find ‘hard copy’ and destroy it in order to make it go away.
All paths lead to the same destination, it’s just that some paths are harder than others.
Take care.
“palingenesis”
Expanding my word-power again.
” smooth-brained commentary”
You know, I’ve also noticed how intellectually aero-dynamic many Leftists are.
Highly unlikely indeed that Ian Frazier never read The Rising Tide of Color. The book is not about a black-white faceoff, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere. Stoddard devotes a chapter to Africa, and blacks (about 16 of its 310 pages) but the book as a whole is much more concerned with East Asians, Amerindians and “Pan-Islamic fanatics.”
The author brings up Dubois and Booker T. Washington, so I would like to comment on this matter of which I have some interest.
Dubois was — as indicated by the author — a mixed race person. Booker was quite black.
Colorism among blacks is quite pronounced and — despite their often professed contempt for the White Man — those of lighter skin tone often dominate Black politics and culture.
Dubois lived in the North and appears never to have lived anywhere in the US other than Northern cities.
Booker lived in the South and all of his work was done with Southern Blacks, mostly rural farmers, seeking to improve their self-sufficiency.
Both were, in the terminology of their day, considered ‘race men’ (a phrase which I think White Nationalists should appropriate), though Dubois was always making his pitch to Whites, while Booker was focused on Blacks.
In many ways, the debate between Dubois and Washington is still going on in the Black community, but mostly the Dubois-ites get all the press. Listen to some Black millionaires (or billionaires) speak, and you’ll hear the voice of Booker T. Washington.
“Colorism among blacks is quite pronounced”
Man, you ain’t kidding!
I remember about 30 years ago there was, briefly, a TV show starring the comedian Tim Reid and his wife Daphne called Frank’s Place. It was about a Northern Black man (who graduated from Brown University! wink, wink) inheriting a Creole restaurant in New Orleans, LA. Well in one episode Frank is invited to join The Big C Club. The big c standing for Creole rather than colored. They would subject potential members to the brown bag test. If you were darker than a brown paper bag you were denied membership. Of course Frank made the “heroic” decision to reject membership in order to stand against evil colorism. But that was when I first learned what “colorism” was.
Now fast forward a few years to the early 90’s and the book The Color Complex and some Black co-workers were surprised that a White middle-class man like me would know what colorism was. What I’ve discovered over the last few years though is that colorism exist in every society. Even amongst White people. And it ALWAYS favors people with lighter skin tone. I’ve also discovered that IQ tracks very heavily with skin tone as well. The advantage going to the lighter skinned again. But I have to say I didn’t realize how obsessed with colorism Black people are until I went looking for the title of the book I mentioned above. I discovered this website:
https://colorismhealing.org/colorism-books/
#37 on the list mentions the brown bag test.
#52 mentions colorism in the Asian community!
#52 is The Color Complex
The conclusion I come to after all of this is that lighter is better and White is the best! And everyone in the world realizes this whether they admit it or not. Fragility isn’t just for Whites
of course!
Sorry I meant to say #53 is The Color Complex.
The truth is that ‘colorism’ is a factor across the entire spectrum of melanin-content, it’s just that White people are not as conscious of it as those who are ‘melonically enhanced’. There is a tendency across the entire melanin spectrum for darker males to be preferred by lighter females. For example, Irish male marrying Italian females.
Wait: wouldn’t the Irish male in this case probably be lighter than the typical Italian female? Did you mistype something there?
Corrected text of previous post:
The truth is that ‘colorism’ is a factor across the entire spectrum of melanin-content, it’s just that White people are not as conscious of it as those who are ‘melonically enhanced’. There is a tendency across the entire melanin spectrum for darker males to be preferred by lighter females. For example, Italian males marrying Irish females.
Thanks to Digital Samizdat for pointing out my error.
I first read Rising Tide in 2017, largely out of curiosity, and it was a real revelation. Contrary to what I anticipated, it was not some obsessive Nordicist screed; rather it was a serious geopolitical analysis of the world as it stood in 1920, offered from a racialist (i.e., realistic) worldview. It’s refreshing to read something that was written from a completely different set of assumptions and without the influence of later intellectual fashions.
The modern conventional wisdom on race is that we today are highly enlightened and that prior to, say, the 1960s, people were mysteriously afflicted with totally irrational racial prejudice. But if you actually read older writings, what you will find is that in many cases, the discussions they were having about race echo many of the same discussions we have today. These past generations don’t seem like gratuitously cruel racists. They seem like people attempting to manage the race problem, and their understanding of it was far more realistic than the view imposed on us today. For all our supposed enlightenment and moral superiority, our quest for racial equality has failed utterly. Even among the establishment this is tacitly acknowledged, although they of course must prevaricate about the reasons (“white flight” “subconscious racism” and so on). If Americans from a hundred years ago could see us today, they would laugh at us for patting ourselves on the back for our racial tolerance amidst our destroyed cities. Even now, some sixty years into the “civil rights” era, the establishment is still arrogantly certain that we must make racial liberalism work. For liberals, the solution is 1) to dilute whites with as many immigrants as possible, 2) gibs for minorities, funded by white people. For supposed conservatives, they are too “colorblind” to notice any race problem at all and at any rate we just need low taxes and all races will thrive together.
Looking back, I can see why utopian racial liberalism would have appealed to the intellectual classes (especially white liberals and white-aspiring mulattoes like Du Bois). By the 1960s, this had become the standard view, and Stoddard’s suggestion of “biracialism” was decidedly out of favor. But racial liberalism has proved to be so unrealistic that we ended up with a sort of soft form of segregation anyway.
I have seen a foul, vile program advertised on television called “Mixed-ish.” Does anyone really believe that there would be a demand for such a show; I believe that shows like that will make some white people wake up. The jews are so foul, and vile!
On that question, perhaps Du Bois was just a bit prophetic. After all, don’t modern liberals often selectively negate their own race-negationism whenever they feel like it? On affirmative action, for example? For them, race is like some god-outside-the-plot that they can call on whenever they like and dismiss as soon as they’re done with it.
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