Take Your Choice, Part I:
Strange Times Ahead

4,280 words

Theodore G. Bilbo
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization
Poplarville, Mississippi: Dream House (1947)

The final political testament by Senator Bilbo of Mississippi, Take Your Choice, is a useful opportunity to see how well old documents stand in the light of the present day. Viewpoints condemned by The Narrative as outmoded, reactionary, “on the wrong side of history,” and so forth, often were right all along. (Meanwhile, since long ago, Leftists usually have been wrong about everything — what a surprise!) Not only is the book an illustration of this, and a documentary of what a social engineering campaign looks like in its earliest stages, it remains a powerful argument against disappearing forever into the melting pot.

Senator Bilbo’s ideology

Theodore G. Bilbo was from a time, difficult to imagine in the present day, when the USA had an abundance of explicitly pro-white political figures. Moreover, he certainly was the type who would call a shovel a shovel. By the end of his career, the cultural revolution known as the modern civil rights movement was in its first stirrings. Thus, the Overton Window had started moving, and being as outspoken as he was about race (from a white perspective, of course) was beginning to go against the grain.

During the 1940s, a political realignment was taking place. To make a long story short, the Democrats once were the pro-white party, and the Republicans courted black votes. Following that, the positions began to reverse, though the Republicans never really went further than dog-whistling to get white voters on board with false implicit promises. What caused the realignment was when the Democrats made civil rights (or looking at it another way, policies appealing to blacks) part of their platform, just like the competition. Eventually, of course, the Evil Party outdid the Stupid Party in this regard. They certainly got a lock on it when LBJ created welfare a couple of decades later; as he explained in a candid moment, “I’ll have them [African-Americans] voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” There were some dissenters, and even up until the 1980s it wasn’t remarkable to find Southern Democrats who changed neither their views nor their party affiliation.

Despite his outspokenness, Theodore Bilbo wasn’t a “fringe” figure. He had been elected to three terms in the US Senate and had a long career before that in Mississippi state politics. (Despite the name, he never held office in The Shire.) In the past, being pro-white was normal, just as these days characters like Ilhan Omar and AOC can be as openly anti-white as they want without being considered extremists for that. In the 1940s, radical egalitarianism was the fringe position, hardly the orthodoxy it is today. He noticed that it was part of the noisome Leftist froth that sometimes bubbled to the surface of the New Deal era, and sensed where it was heading.

Senator Bilbo’s views could be classified as socially paleoconservative and fiscally liberal. That would make him the diametric opposite of a modern neocon or libertarian. It’s become a somewhat exotic ideological position in contemporary times, found mostly in parts of the Dissident Right. Simply put, he was a champion of the common people, but specifically of his own people. Sometimes his memory still is invoked by the usual suspects as an archetypal evil Southern politician, although he’s less prominent in recent memory than figures like George Wallace and Bull Connor. It’s quite true that his style was rather inflammatory, in many cases about politically incorrect sentiments. Sometimes he was able to get black support, though the relationship always was uneasy.

In principle, it shouldn’t be the least bit remarkable for a legislator to favor the country’s majority and founding population. It really should be a job requirement. Lately, everything is the opposite of sensible. Most mainstream politicians are cucks, globalist shills, or worse. Many will appeal openly to minority constituencies, but few would dare express pro-white sentiments beyond the occasional use of timidly coded language — in other words, dogwhistle politics. Since 1988, the Republican Party has been able to win some elections mostly because they’re not as bad as the Democratic candidate, and they might as well make “the lesser of two evils” their official motto. In the end, they’ve probably signed their death warrant by failing to fix the immigration problem.

Introductory notes

Despite what one might expect, given his reputation as a monster among today’s politically correct types, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization begins on a conciliatory note. It states that the object not about condemnation or denunciation of any race, but rather to preserve the integrity of all of them. Then:

Be it said to the credit of the black or Negro race in the United States that no right-thinking and straight-thinking Negro desires that the blood of his black race shall be contaminated or destroyed by the commingling of his blood with either the white or yellow races. The desire to mix, commingle, interbreed or marry into the white race by the Negro race is advocated largely by the mulattoes or mongrels who are now to an alarming degree found within the Negro race in this country.

It’s a theme that he reiterates later. I’ll add that those of mixed ancestry often find it difficult to identify with one side or another. They can’t help what their background is, and being confused isn’t their fault. The problem is that a few are enthusiastic about remaking the world in their image. It’s understandable that it would resolve their discomfort about not fitting in, but social engineering on that scale is out of the question. It’s not just a matter of black-white crossings. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian-Japanese trust fund kid who gained the ear of numerous banksters and politicians, became something of a high-level professional activist and made globalism his lifelong quest. Creating a worldwide melting pot was one of his objectives.

Another past example is Frederick Douglass. (This abolitionist ironically became a victim of “cancel culture” after Leftist fanatics destroyed his statue.) Although Douglass was a powerful advocate for the black cause, identifying with his mother’s ancestry and siding politically with it, he wasn’t quite so consistent in his personal life. There were plausible rumors of affairs with two white women during his first marriage. His second wife was white, and twenty years younger.

A more recent example is Tiger Woods. Although he speaks proudly of his tri-racial background, he has a strong preference for white women. Moreover, his choices tend to be Nordic ice princesses, and merely one will not do. Of course, he’s far from the only non-white athlete or celebrity known for white trophy wives, groupies, or both. Lately, these preferences are no longer limited to “mulattoes or mongrels,” as Senator Bilbo put it. In time, this generally became trendy for black celebrities and activists (ridiculous as it is). The depth of envy and cultural cringe that this reveals is positively grotesque. Whatever happened to black pride?

Frank Marshall Davis is a notable example. So is St. Dr. Rev. MLK Jr., who had repeated liaisons with both black and white prostitutes, inspiring the Reverend’s epically embarrassing “I’m not a Negro tonight” and “I’m fucking for God” remarks. The Drum Major of Social Justice also caused an incident on a trip to receive his Nobel Peace Prize when he chased nude Norwegian prostitutes through a hotel — surely after doing something that frightened them. Nicole Brown Simpson would’ve been a great authority on such relationship dynamics — specifically, being partnered with someone belonging to a race that has historic grudges against hers, worsened by decades of constant agitation. For obvious reasons, she’s unavailable to discuss what can go wrong.

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The book emphasizes that time is running out. One professor estimated that races in America would cease to exist after nine generations (about three hundred years). Note well, cultural Marxism was barely getting started; all this was written before MSM propaganda, celebrity airheads, and “woke” advertisements were aggressively pushing these trends. Will all racial diversity disappear by 2250? I would estimate that there still will be remnants of all present races in their pure forms, but incalculable damage will be done unless the present trajectory is changed.

It is indeed a sorry white man and white woman who when put on notice of the inevitable result of mongrelization of their race and their civilization are yet unwilling to put forth any effort or make any sacrifice to save themselves and their off-spring from this great and certain calamity. YOU MUST TAKE YOUR CHOICE!

Personally, the writer of this book would rather see his race and his civilization blotted out with the atomic bomb than to see it slowly but surely destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage, and mongrelization. The destruction in either case would be inevitable — one in a flash and the other by the slow but certain process of sin, degradation, and mongrelization.

Even in 1947, back when America was impossibly normal by Clown World’s standards, he could imagine the white race eventually undergoing a “death by a thousand cuts” if we did nothing. It turns out that this — as well as mass Third World migration — would start getting pushed in all countries across Western civilization. (This began everywhere about the same time; what a coinkydink!) His preface concludes by stating that separation is the only solution.

Earnest Sevier Cox, another notable race realist from those times, wrote the introduction. He explains that there exists widespread black support for a return to the African homeland. As for the opponents of nationalism:

They say that man, regardless of his several biological variations, is essentially the same; that race is constituted of biological evidences which are “superficial,” and for that reason races are “equal.” The miscegenationists, however, are weakened by their own conclusions for if races are “equal” it is difficult to see that any biological advantage would flow from commingling them.

This is similar to a point I’ve made several times. They want to destroy diversity in the name of diversity. If all races are the same, then why are they in such a hurry to get rid of them? Could be there’s an agenda. . .

The Race Issue: Our Greatest Domestic Problem

This chapter has an interesting opening. Recall that it was published in 1947, soon after we’d Made the World Safe For Democracy, by gum. Senator Bilbo probably wasn’t really taken in by “Spitfire Nationalist” types of pieties, but the following grows increasingly ironic with the passage of time:

As The United States of America, the most powerful of all the nations of the world, and her heroic Allies are celebrating complete and final victory and writing finis to the greatest war in human history, there is an internal problem which looms high upon our national horizon, casting a shadow across the length and breadth of this land. The eternal question of color — the race issue — the Negro problem. Call it what you wish. It must be faced!

No matter what happens in the coming days, be comforted that at least we’re not all speaking German! Then there’s a point that will be of little surprise here:

From the time of slavery through the bloody years of the War Between the States and the days when the South drank from the bitter cup of Reconstruction down to the present time, the Negro problem has been before the American people. It has been, and is today, our greatest domestic problem. No other issue has been such a source of constant friction, has demanded so much thought and attention, nor has lasted so long.

He noted that over two hundred books advocating radical racial egalitarianism had been published over the previous four or five years. Meanwhile, only five or six books came out with a contradictory message. Many of the egalitarian books also promoted race-mixing. Obviously what he noticed was hardly even the tip of the iceberg compared to the propaganda deluge in later decades. Ja, aber zumindest sprechen wir nicht alle deutsch.

I’ll add that things weren’t always this way. In earlier times, pro-white authors like Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and Paul Popenoe dominated the discourse. What the Senator observed was merely the beginning of a major push to change public opinion, one of the first effects of early cultural Marxism. Just as obviously, the major publishers actively participated in this ideological bias. This new deluge of radical egalitarian books was an early instance of “Woke Capital” in effect. One may, of course, draw conclusions about who was doing this and why.

Other than that, counter-Narrative literature eventually became practically unobtainable, including the book he wrote. (David Duke’s first Red Pill moment was in 1963. While researching for a civics class project, he found plenty of books opposing school segregation in his library and local New Orleans bookstore. However, he found not a single one arguing for segregation until he discovered the White Citizens Council office with a wide selection of works from eminent authors.) Thanks to corporate ideological conformity, pro-white books became nearly as underground as samizdat texts in the USSR. Only someone with access to obscure academic collections, or who had contact with Dissident Right circles, was likely even to know about it. For everyone else, one might’ve imagined that multiracialism had near-universal agreement, opposed only by a few hillbillies with green teeth. This persisted until the Internet partially circumvented the corporate information blockade.

Then the book mentioned the recent desegregation of the military, sparking riots in Detroit, Beaumont, Columbia, and New York. This was, of course, the first major instance of our armed forces being used as a testbed for rolling out social experiments. Moreover, the desegregation effort was just beginning; the greatest part of that began during the mid-1950s, and the de jure form ended by the mid-1960s. The bumpy ride called the civil rights movement, with St. Dr. Rev. MLK Jr. as the main figurehead, eventually set the Overton Window on course for contemporary dysfunction. To name a few items, this includes a massive crime wave, moral huckstering, the takeover of countless neighborhoods, shakedown artists, the “walking on eggshells” reign of political correctness, and the Obama presidency. At the present point on the primrose path to social justice, we got coast-to-coast riots about a dead drug-sodden criminal, an unprecedented wave of vandalism, and brain-dead leftists demanding to abolish the police. Ah, Progress!

Indeed, Senator Bilbo was presciently aware that some major efforts were afoot, and what might eventually become of it. He was looking at things in a very long time horizon, which these days would be a rare gift in a politician.

Time waits for no one and fate plays no favorites. If we do not choose to save ourselves. then our destruction is inevitable. And our time for choosing is limited. Segregation is only a stop gap-it has and will delay for awhile the inevitable results of mongrelization. But there is a day in the future when we may be lost without redemption.

If we do nothing, eventually distinct races will be blended out of existence. Even at this early point, there were some who thought that would be wonderful. As Sir Oswald Mosley put it later in 1963:

They talked of what they called “multiracialism,” which was simply a universal mix-up: Take humanity, put it in a bag, shake it together, and heaven knows what would come out. They wanted to get rid of what existed, all the little grey people of the world who hate the beautiful diversity of human development. They always want to get rid of the natural, the noble and the beautiful. They wanted to get rid of it; they wanted to make all nature as grey as themselves. It was their deep instinct.

That much hasn’t changed since then.

Race and Civilization

This chapter describes the fates of several ancient nations, particularly in the Mediterranean region and India. I’ll add that this was from a time when the Near East was considerably whiter, and North Africans had greater similarity to primordial European populations of the Mediterranean. These areas are still recognizably Caucasoid, though pure white phenotypes are in the minority. Obviously, this represents a vast expanse of lost territory.

Some of these civilizations started as all white. Others had a white ruling class (which surely felt assured of its prominence at the time). Initially, all of them were very promising. Eventually, migration from abroad, slavery, and warfare led to gene flow. After the white element got mixed up in the multiracial hodgepodges, these civilizations lost their dynamism and fell into decline.

All this, of course, is fairly familiar ground for race realists today. We can go the way these other civilizations went, or we can choose separation.

The Negro Problem in American History

This begins with a description of how slavery developed, which Senator Bilbo realizes was a terrible mistake. What might surprise some is that there was a time when it wasn’t only a Southern problem.

There was also a demand for slaves in the colonies in the Northern section of the country. As early as 1741, Negroes were so numerous in the City of New York that panic-stricken colonists feared for their own safety, and by the time of the Revolution, there were 26,000 Negroes in the colony of New York.

The North didn’t develop an extensive plantation economy, but they did play a key role early on:

The slave trade was a regular business with the colonial Yankees; it furnished wealth and adventure. Having some one hundred and fifty vessels engaged in the African slave trade in 1770, Rhode Island is said to have been responsible for bringing more Africans to this country than any of the other New England colonies.

He doesn’t give further details about who many of these merchants running this dirty racket out of Providence were. Some of their modern relatives endlessly scold other people about what happened a long time ago, yet conveniently forget their own role in it. I don’t buy into collective guilt, but those who do should remember that it cuts both ways. In other words, they should stop doing that.

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Rising tensions concerning slavery led to Secession. Soon after, the Civil War erupted. (Despite occasional grumbling on the Dissident Right about “Tyrant Lincoln,” he actually was on our side. We should save our rhetorical firepower for his successors, like the mattoid Thaddeus Stevens.) Senator Bilbo quotes extensively from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example:

A SEPARATION OF THE RACES IS THE ONLY PERFECT PREVENTIVE OF AMALGAMATION; But as an immediate separation is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. . .

Such separation, if ever effected at all, must be effected by colonization; and no political party, as such, is now doing anything directly for colonization. Party operations at present only favor or retard colonization incidentally. The enterprise is a difficult one; but ‘where there is a will there is a way,’ and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.

LET US BE BROUGHT TO BELIEVE IT IS MORALLY RIGHT, AND AT THE SAME TIME FAVORABLE TO, OR AT LEAST NOT AGAINST, OUR INTERESTS TO TRANSFER THE AFRICAN TO HIS NATIVE CLIME, AND WE SHALL FIND A WAY TO DO IT, HOWEVER GREAT THE TASK MAY BE.

Note well, separation was hardly an “extremist” position. Instead, it was a mainstream position for a very long time. Early on, Bilbo listed the following like minds: “Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Clay, Webster, Fillmore, Lincoln, Grant, and other great Americans.” Of course, some of them are running afoul of today’s “cancel culture,” but really, anyone to the right of Ho Chi Minh is at risk of getting thrown down the memory hole. Who better represents what America is all about — today’s politically correct zombies trying to hijack the country, or the guy on the $5 bill?

Then this:

In his first annual message to Congress in December, 1861, President Lincoln recommended that steps be taken for the colonization of the Negroes “at some place or places in a climate congenial to them.”

If that wasn’t enough, the Emancipation Proclamation itself explicitly mentioned colonization as a desirable outcome. These plans didn’t get carried out for obvious reasons:

With Lincoln’s death on April 14, 1865, his plans for rebuilding the South and reuniting the Nation as well as his plans for solving the Negro problem were completely cast aside and forgotten. While a Nation mourned for her fallen leader, a group of powerful politicians, led by Thaddeus Stevens, planned to take over the reins of government and force Negro domination upon the South. They were destined to write the blackest pages in American history.

The book provides a brief description of the colossal fiasco called the Radical Reconstruction. Freedmen became political pawns, manipulated by carpetbagger demagogues. During this time, the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, passed legitimately. However, the author makes a good case that the 14th (much abused by liberal judges) and 15th Amendments were illegitimate. Much chaos and misrule followed. (Specifics about the gruesome crime wave are left undescribed.) After that, the Southern whites arose and threw off the yoke, and the Redemption ended the Radical Reconstruction.

Southern Segregation and the Color Line

Much has been said about segregation in the long national debate, but it all boiled down to this:

Briefly and plainly stated, the object of this policy is to prevent the two races from meeting on terms of social equality. By established practice, each race maintains its own institutions and promotes its own social life. The residential areas of the towns are segregated; separate schools are maintained; separate accommodations are provided for the members of each race in public places and on the trains, busses, and streetcars.

I’ll add that it’s understandable that blacks felt offended by having to use separate lunch counters and waiting rooms and so forth. Still, these measures weren’t motivated by mean-spiritedness, but rather to prevent a renewal of the violence and reprisals that had characterized the Radical Reconstruction. Note well, after segregation ended, the crime rate increased dramatically and is still out of control. Family disruption was one problem, a consequence of libertinism and welfare, and so was judicial leniency of the “society made him do it” sort — all ways that bad Leftist ideology hurt the black community. Moreover, there were no longer limitations to prevent street crime from spilling over into white areas. Oddly, we’re blamed for not wanting to live around them.

Another practical reason for separation, as the book points out, is preserving genetic integrity. Latin America went in a different direction, one that led to massive genetic confusion. The following description doesn’t even cover half of the odd terminology once used in the attempt to classify the chaotic results:

The fusion of whites and Indians produced mestizos; the fusion of whites and Negroes produced mulattoes; the fusion of Negroes and Indians produced zambos. Mongrelization started in South America, and there was no power to stop it. The population began to consist of mestizos, mulattoes, zambos, terceroones, quadroons, cholos, musties, fusties, and dusties. There were crosses between Spaniards and Indians, Spaniards and Negroes, Spaniards and yellows; crosses between these half-breed off-spring and the whites and blacks; crosses between mongrels of one kind and mongrels of another kind; half-breeds, cross-breeds, mix-breeds soon infested the land!

Leaving things up to personal preference is not enough:

There are all sorts of people, and there is no explanation for the actions or tastes of some individuals; for example, note the recent marriage of the twenty-one-year-old white girl from Canada to the corpulent, fraudulent, pot-bellied, coal-black, seventy-year-old Negro who calls himself Father Divine.

I’ll add that Time wrote about the marriage of the elderly cult leader claiming to be God to this “21-year-old blonde from Vancouver” in their August 19, 1946 edition. The article was called “Made in Heaven,” about what one might expect from Time.

Senator Bilbo also understood that normal people in normal circumstances have little enthusiasm for race-mixing. (There may well be something instinctual accounting for the feeling of disgust that it still evokes, despite a massive indoctrination campaign to normalize it.) However, factors such as propaganda could accelerate degenerate tendencies.

If the racial instinct of the white race is so strong, then wherein does the danger lie? There is, of course, no real danger when the instinct is aroused and on guard. Without a doubt, this has been the salvation of the South. But today a constant warfare is being waged against this instinct, and every conceivable effort is being made to destroy it altogether or to drug it to sleep in the name of science, of democracy, or of religion.

Since then, of course, hair-raising instances of race-mixing have become much more commonplace, especially now that certain celebrity airheads began promoting it aggressively, even the British royals now. So are the MSM, advertising firms, and even the porn industry. Note well, I really would prefer not to have to call out certain groups for bad behavior, but the ones involved need to stop doing that.

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