Introduction to a Banned Book

2,002 words

Author’s Note:

This is the introduction to my best-selling book The White Nationalist Manifesto, which has been banned from 80% of the global book market controlled by Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. But it is available from better booksellers, including Counter-Currents.

What would you do if tomorrow morning you learned that you had one week to live—seven more days, then no future? The world would go on, but you would not be in it. At first, most people would feel shock and sadness. Some would sink into despair. Some might even kill themselves straightaway, rather than wait around. But for most of us, the initial shock would wear off, and we would say our goodbyes, put our affairs in order, and then figure out what to do with the time that remained.

Obviously, there would be little point in thinking too far ahead. Some would become intensely religious, hoping somehow to prolong their existence, but most would probably turn to short-term self-gratification. Most people don’t like their jobs, so they would choose not to spend five of their last seven days on Earth working, no matter who depended on them. But they could smoke, drink, eat junk food, take hard drugs, gamble, tell people off, and even commit crimes without any fear of long-term consequences. Many people might, of course, resist these temptations because they would want to be remembered well by the people they leave behind. But very few people are willing to behave in a dignified, self-restrained, or moral manner simply as an end in itself, without external incentives.

Now imagine that not just you but the whole human race receives a death sentence tomorrow. Telescopes reveal a massive asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, an asteroid many times the size of the object that scientists believe caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. If the whole human race is going to die, with nobody to carry on our values or remember us when we are gone, there is no question that there would be an immense increase in hedonistic, nihilistic, and anti-social behavior. Social order is always threatened by a criminal rabble that must be constantly policed and suppressed. So just imagine what would happen in only a few days if this population were swelled by millions of despondent nihilists—and the policemen and prison guards who keep them contained just decide not to show up to work.

Things start breaking down in the immediate present, as soon as people lose hope for the future.

What does this have to do with White Nationalism? White demographic decline is extremely advanced in the United States. Whites have gone from being about 90% of the US population in 1965 to about 60% today, and in many locations and age groups we are already a minority. Whites are projected to slip below 50% of the population around 2042. In a democracy, that inevitably means political disempowerment.

Authoritative voices declare that white demographic decline is inevitable and hail it as a triumph of racial justice. Multiculturalists try to paint a rosy picture of a rainbow-tinted future in which whites are a minority. But whites are increasingly skeptical. Leftists and non-whites are already partying like it is 2042, openly gloating about white decline and even extinction, eager to dance on the grave of white America. It is increasingly obvious that these people really hate us. If white Americans want to see what life is like as a despised minority in a majority non-white society, they need only look at South Africa today, which was also touted as a rainbow nation.

And white people are getting the message. In the present system, we have no future, and we are acting accordingly. Loss of hope for the future is what ties together a whole array of social pathologies afflicting white Americans. After rising steadily for centuries, white life expectancies are declining, something that we would only expect in times of war, famine, plague, or social collapse.

In our case, however, the collapse has been spiritual. When people lose hope for the future, it makes no sense to go to college, marry, start families, invest in one’s children, create businesses, pursue careers, or think about giving something back to society. Instead, it makes sense to turn to short-term hedonism: pornography, video games, drinking, drugs, casual sex, etc. People are increasingly failing to mature, failing to launch, failing to build relationships, failing to have lives. But short-term self-indulgence can’t make us happy. Thus we see soaring rates of alienation, loneliness, anti-depressant usage, drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide.

There is no reason to think that the results of white demographic decline will be different in any other white countries.

The entire political establishment in virtually every white country is committed to the policies that are driving white demographic decline: the destruction of the family and the denigration of motherhood; the promotion of hedonism and selfishness; encouraging multiculturalism, race-mixing, and race-replacement immigration; and the cult of “diversity,” which is just a euphemism for replacing whites with non-whites.

If whites have no future in the current system, then we will simply have to set up a new one. That is the goal of White Nationalism. To give our people a future again, we need a new political vision and new political leadership.

Who are White Nationalists? We are white people who have decided to have a future again, and who wish to give a future to the rest of our people. We recognize that white decline has political causes and political solutions. We are mature enough to understand that we cannot solve these problems as individuals, but if enough of us work together, we can turn the world around.

White Nationalism is a form of white identity politics. White identity politics, at minimum, means that whites think of ourselves as members of an ethnic group, with collective interests, and defend those interests against conflicting groups in the political realm. Currently, the most powerful political taboo in the entire white world is against white identity politics. Just as establishment parties of the Left and Right are united in their commitment to multiculturalism and identity politics for non-whites, they are equally united in their opposition to identity politics for white people.

White identity politics can, of course, exist within a multicultural, multiracial society. For instance, “white supremacism” is a political order in which whites impose their rule and standards on people of other races.

White Nationalism, however, is not white supremacism, because we seek to replace multiracial, multicultural societies with racially and culturally homogeneous[1] homelands, which we call “ethnostates.” Ethnonationalism is a universal right possessed by all races and peoples. White Nationalism is ethnonationalism for whites. White Nationalism simply means the right of all white peoples to sovereign homelands. We recognize that some peoples might not wish to exercise this right. For others, such as small, primitive tribes, exercising it might not be possible. But if a people chooses national self-determination, nobody has the right to oppose them.

White Nationalism is often misunderstood or misrepresented as nationalism for generic white people as opposed to specific white ethnic groups. But there is no such thing as a generic white person. In this world, all white people belong to specific ethnic groups. Even colonial melting-pot societies like the United States do not create generic white people, but new ethnic identities: Americans, Canadians, etc. White Nationalism means self-determination for all white peoples, not merely generic whites, just as saving the rhino means saving all the specific subspecies of rhinos, not some sort of generic rhino.

My case for White Nationalism is based upon the white demographic crisis. Whites in every country have below-replacement birth rates, often combined with widespread miscegenation and immigration by more fertile non-white populations. If these trends are not halted, whites will lose control of our historic homelands and eventually simply cease to exist as a distinct race.

All the principal causes of biological extinction apply to whites today, and since these causes of extinction result from political policies, it is meaningful to speak not just of white extinction but white genocide. These are the topics of Chapters 2 and 3 on “White Extinction” and “White Genocide.”

To stop white genocide, we need to change the policies promoting it. We must replace our leaders before they replace us. Then we must create white homelands with pro-natal policies, so that our race in all its genetic and cultural diversity can survive and flourish again. In short, we need White Nationalism. This is the topic of Chapter 4, “Ending White Genocide.”

White extinction is, of course, a long-term danger. But many horrors await us in the near future if white demographic decline is not halted. This is the topic of Chapter 5, “In the Short Run.”

To create or restore white ethnostates, different groups sharing the same territories must separate. This requires moving borders and people. In Chapter 6, “Restoring White Homelands,” I argue that the process of racial separation—which our enemies stigmatize as “ethnic cleansing”—need not be swift, violent, or inhumane.

In Chapter 7, “The Ethnostate,” I clarify the concept of ethnonationalism and envision an ethnonationalist alternative to globalization.

In Part Two, “Basic Concepts,” I clarify five fundamental ideas. Chapter 8, “Whiteness,” deals with objections to the very idea of whiteness. Chapter 9, “Supremacism,” deals with the distinction between White Nationalism and white supremacism. Chapter 10, “What’s Wrong with Diversity?,” explains why diversity is a problem for any society. Indeed, I argue that even if whites were not facing extinction, the problems with diversity still constitute a case for ethnonationalism. The opposite of diversity is “Homogeneity,” so in Chapter 11, I explain what White Nationalists mean by this term. Finally, in Chapter 12, “Whitopia,” I discuss the question of utopianism: Who is guilty of utopian political fantasies, White Nationalists or multiculturalists?

In Part Three, “Building a Movement,” I describe features of the cultural and political movement necessary to make White Nationalism a reality. In Chapter 13, “Politics, Metapolitics, & Hegemony,” I define what victory would look like and how to get there. Chapter 14, “A Winning Ethos,” lays out a few simple rules that will allow the White Nationalist movement to become maximally powerful and persuasive. In Chapter 15, “The Relevance of the Old Right,” I explain why White Nationalists need to distance ourselves from National Socialism, Fascism, and similar political movements to which our enemies—and many of our friends—continually try to link us. Finally, in Chapter 16, “White Nationalism is Inevitable,” I end with reasons to feel optimistic about our cause.

I believe this book has something to offer white patriots of all nations. But the fact that I am an American inevitably colors my outlook, particularly in Part Three. I believe that our movement needs to emphasize “metapolitics,” i.e., creating the conditions necessary for political success, wherever those conditions do not exist. But where such conditions do exist, for instance in countries like Italy, Poland, and Hungary, the focus of ethnonationalist-populist parties should be on actually winning political power. But in the United States and the rest of the Anglosphere, as well as most of Northern and Western Europe, the metapolitical conditions are not yet right. The purpose of this book—which is an essay in metapolitics—is to help change that.

The greatest difficulty I faced in writing this manifesto is the feeling that I was repeating myself. Most of the ideas—and many of the words—in this book will be familiar to the readers of my five earlier books, my new book Toward a New Nationalism (which I think of as a companion volume to this manifesto[2]), and various uncollected online writings. But I prefer to think of my earlier works as a rehearsal for this manifesto. The purpose of this book is not to be novel, but to offer a clear, concise, and persuasive synthesis of arguments that I have been developing for more than a decade.

Notes

[1] That’s homogenEous, not homogenous, like milk.

[2] Greg Johnson, Toward a New Nationalism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).