Counter-Currents
Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 253
Is White Nationalism Inherently Toxic?
Counter-Currents Radio
114 words / 107:34
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Greg Johnson, John Morgan, and Frodi Midjord reconvene to answer your questions.
- 0:00: Introduction
- 0:08: Donations
- 5:00: Is White Nationalism Inherently Toxic?
- 22:32: The Trad Catholic/Conservative Escape
- Nicholas Jeelvy, “Tradition isn’t Socialism“
- 31:42: The Groupie Question in White Nationalism
- Margot Metroland, “Antisocial: A Review“
- Samantha’s story
- Greg Johnson, “The Groupie Question in White Nationalism“
- Is Whiteness Only Relevant in the Colonial Context?
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Greg Johnson
20 comments
I’m not really understanding your attachment to the White Nationalist label, Greg.
Sure the media will smear and blacklist any term or label we come up with, that’s a given. But it’s really not the media that makes the term toxic, but rather the actions of some people who identify with the label.
With White Nationalism you had skinheads, prison gangs, mass murderers and all sorts of other highly toxic and destructive people. You can say that was 1.0 but still, they called themselves White Nationalists. That wasn’t what the media labeled them at the time. Same thing with the Alt-Right.
So far as of yet, Identitarianism has had a much more professional tone to it, that WN or Alt-Right do not have. In spite of all the media attacks against the term.
Actually no, the White Nationalist label as I understand it was created in the late 1990s and was not used by the 1980s and 1990 skinheads, the National Alliance, the Creativity people, etc. They were subbed WN 1.0 only by Alt Right people.
I hate the word “professional.” I have no idea what you think it means when you use it to apply to the Identitarians. The French and German media smear identitarians all the time, and pretty much in the same terms as the Anglophone media smears White Nationalism and the Alt Right.
As far as I can remember, Stormfront was where the term White Nationalist was popularized. While there were probably, a lot of decent people on there, there were still members of various Klan groups, the NSM, skinheads and other 1.0 type people who dominated the culture and the comments of that website. This was years before the Alt-Right had ever existed and most of those aforementioned people called themselves White Nationalists.
I use the term professional because it’s what we need to be in order to effect any sort of real change. Frankly a large portion of the behind the scenes work in any Nationalist or Identitarian network or movement is boring, stressful and unpleasant.That’s just the reality of it, so there needs to be a fairly decent number of people who treat this like a profession.
Frankly you are right about the media smearing any term that we come up with, and they do a lot of damage. However, if we use a term that is tainted beyond repair, by the people who called themselves WN, we are just giving the media and our enemies more ammo to use against us and to hurt us even more.
Go be an identitarian then.
If, however, you give a signal boost to the left who want to brand WN as an inherently evil ideology, then I will regard you as my enemy and treat you as such.
I have no problem with people using other brands.
I have a problem with people who attack my brand in the same terms as the enemy.
Ask yourself how you would feel if I were to use identitarian in the exact same way as the people in the French and German media who are smearing the concept.
Stay in your lane and we won’t have any problems.
What Identitarian is giving a signal boost the to the left? I don’t understand what you mean by that.
I think there has been a misunderstanding, it is not my intention to make your brand or people who identify as White Nationalist look evil. I have no desire to do that, my point is, from a marketing perspective, WN is a term that invokes a lot of negative reactions from the people we want to reach.It makes things more difficult than it has to be.
And that is not entirely, the fault of the media nor is it at all, the fault of anybody associated with Countercurrents.
YOU are giving the signal boost.
How am I giving a signal boost to the left? What does that even mean?
I means you are repeating establishment slurs advancing the establishment agenda.
Not sure if its best practice to interrupt a conversation in a comment section but here is my 2 cents.
Firstly I believe that WN, as described in Greg’s book WNM, is the most true and correct ‘term’.
However, in some cases for some people it is wise and convenient to use other ‘terms’/’labels’.
Someone can share similar information to Greg and call themselves something else because that will enable them to reach a slightly different audience or it may simply be for their own safety.
They are just ‘labels’ and we don’t need to all have the same ‘labels’.
In fact our diversity of labels is sometimes a strength.
One example that comes to mind is how I remember James Allsup was described by some leftist outlet as a ‘right wing libertarian’. This is advantageous for reaching people and I’m sure for some people out there that label made him ‘acceptable’ more acceptable than if he self identified as a WN.
A few other examples of cousin terms are; identitarian, paleo conservative, national conservative, traditionalist, white advocate (e.g. Jared Taylor), european advocate, white conservative, new conservative etc. I’m sure there are more out there.
These terms do not describe the long goals of the ‘broader Grass roots Right’ (btw I think this is the best over arching term to describe us all) as well as WN but they are useful in many situations.
In conclusion, it doesn’t really matter what labels people use (within reason), what matters is what they say, what they promote and what they achieve.
I agree that many labels can be helpful in different contexts.
But it becomes a problem when, in our conversations about different labels, people who are ostensibly on our side promote the very same “WN is intrinsically bad” slurs that our enemies promote.
No one is claiming that the term White Nationalism is in “inherently” flawed. Inherent means “existing as a natural or basic part of something”, and this is the exact opposite of the claim being made, to wit: that the term is not fit for purpose due to a number of *contingent* circumstances and reasons, all of them spurious, specious and malicious. The Overton window shifts little by little.
Don’t fixate on one definition of inherent.
The point is that our enemies wish to claim that WN is necessarily connected to toxic people and horrible outcomes.
I get why they do that. They are our enemies. I am less understanding when people who are supposedly on our side claim the same thing.
If you take the term at its literal meaning at face value, there is nothing wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with being a Nationalist who wants to preserve a White super majority in the UK, United States or Sweden for example.
However you have to take into account the connotations it has because of the actions and the culture of the people who used the term in the past. Which is why it has such a negative stigma to it, regardless of what the media says.
But the fact that you are construing that legitimate point as an attack on you by people using establishment talking points, is a dangerous and alienating mentality to have. Not to mention stifling criticism is a sure fire way to destroy any intellectual movement.
Call it White Nationalism. To call it anything less would be dishonest. The righteousness of our cause is an invaluable asset that can not be sacrificed. Our enemy lies and we tell the truth. That is what sets us apart.
Re “being honest”: if someone is fat, you can call him “chubby” or “fat pig”. In both cases, you are telling the truth. But depending on the context, one may be more convenient than the other.
Don’t get mad at each other over words and labels, please. Being few and powerless, we cannot afford internecine quarrels. Unity is not a choice, but an imperative. Having said this… While I believe Sergio is obviously wrong to associate skinheads and the like with the term “white nationalism” (they would actually be “supremacists”, not “nationalists”), I would humbly suggest using the label “national populism”. The “white” part must be brought up and defended whenever necessary-no apologies, no concessions-, but it is strategically wiser to leave it implicit (in the label), at least for now. Otherwise we scare the hell out of the kind of people we want to win over to our cause (the kind of people I work with and, believe me, I work in the very belly of the beast). The white part is neatly covered by the “national”, since we all now that that word etymologically refers to descent and birth. But it also has come to include cultural aspects, which allows many potential recruits to join on account of “cultural” considerations without feeling racist. And “populist” is perfect, for it highlights our love of the people, our… ahem… “hostility” towards “our” genocidal soi-disant “elites” (LOL) and, above all, it allows us to recruit people from left and right (Which is a reason I reject attempts to insert right-wing economics into our doctrines by people like Eordred. First, we take back control. Then, we discuss economic matters, but we do it *among ourselves only*).
“White nationalist” and “identitarian” aren’t just two different labels for the same thing, because they refer to separate political concepts; so it wouldn’t make sense to pick the “identitarian” label out of convenience, if you aren’t actually an identitarian.
Wouldn’t calling ourselves “ethno-nationalists” instead of WN force the left to attack all forms of ethno-nationalism instead of just white nationalism? Then they’d have to admit that all we want is the same thing enjoyed by Israelis. We want basically the same thing for all people, which is a right to self-determination. We don’t ask for anything we would not grant to others.
Wouldn’t calling ourselves “ethno-nationalists” instead of WN force the left to attack all forms of ethno-nationalism instead of just white nationalism? Then they’d have to admit that all we want is the same thing enjoyed by Israelis.
No, because the left makes a clear distinction between oppressors and their victims. And almost all white peoples, except small minorities like the Sami in northern Europe, are regarded as oppressors. Since the implementation of ethno-nationalism in our countries generally would require repatriation of a large number of non-white “oppressed” immigrants, the left opposes it.
That said, the term “White Nationalism” has its limitations. It may work in America where there has been a racial divide between whites and blacks for centuries. But in Europe we don’t have any similar “white identity,” but rather ethnic identities together with a shared European or Western identity. An explicit White Nationalist organization would be associated with National Socialism here, and would find it very difficult to attract the nationalist mainstream.
The man makes the label. The lable doesn’t make the man. Greg made it okay for me to be a white nationalist because his ideas were reasonable, articulate, moral, creative, and forward looking.
I wouldn’t worry too much about silencing people who make us look bad. Once you get a group over 20, there’s bound to be one or two crazy people, and how many more are there when thousands if not millions identify with us? Rightist YouTibers interview crazy cat ladies and spastic antifa. Meanwhile, leftist YouTubers interview uncouth Trump supporters. Every ideology has its loonies and morons, and they’ll always be caught on camera. However, because we are less numerous and less known, people don’t have counter examples in their daily lives with which to contrast the media’s anti-white propaganda. The Internet helped us provide them. Now Jewish organizations want to take that away. It seems the only prohobitions they want are of our ideas.
We need not focus too much on how we appear to our enemies or indifferent people, who make up the majority of Americans but how we appear to potential converts. We must separate ourselves from the few nuts who inevitably belong to every movement and get ourselves out there. The Jewish organizations’ crackdown on YouTube and search engines is reducing our ability to get out there, but we must not give up. You never know what’s around the corner.
In short, it doesn’t matter how low the bottom of our movement is if people can see the top.
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