Counter-Currents
Vaclav Havel
1,541 words
What put me on the road to White Nationalism was a sense of disgust and outrage at being compelled to lie, or at least go along with untruths. I was compelled to lie about the realities of race, of religion, and of ideology, so I walked away from it all. My experience in college was one of enduring rank hypocrisy and being tempted to join in, seduced by promises of academic success. My revulsion drove me away — into dissident thought and White Nationalism. It meant abandoning “respectability,” but it also meant not having to lie.
Far more than being lied to, I despise being compelled to lie or to engage in hypocrisy and prioritize saving face over truth. When people lie to me, I find them laughable and pathetic, but when they try to recruit me into their lie, I get angry and offended at the very notion that I’d take part in their deception.
For a long time, I conceptualized my quest as being a search for freedom, the desire to be free to speak the truth, which is probably why I spent a while calling myself a libertarian and why I still have a soft spot for so-called “racist liberalism.” Indeed, now that I’ve won for myself the freedom to be racist, I have dedicated my life to spreading this freedom to all white people. As I type these words, millions of white people the world over are forced to deny what their lying eyes see and repeat the official catechism of the woke faith. They are forced to blind themselves to the realities of race differences in intelligence, criminality, economic performance, hygiene, and general affability. They’re forced to affirm their commitment to diversity, equality, and the other gods of the woke faith. They are forced to affirm, both in word and in deed, their commitment to the erasure of the white race and its subsumption into a brown mass made up of all the nations on the planet — Madison Grant’s cloaca gentium.
The ultimate goal of this compulsion is to humiliate white people into inaction. In the words of Theodore Dalrymple:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
It is especially important to the system that Right-wingers, conservatives, and others who may have objections to the system remain on the egalitarian plantation. They will spare no expense, and are even willing to concede much non-essential ground just to keep conservatives and Right-winger affirming the load-bearing lies that All Men Are Created Equal — especially all the races — and that white people are nothing special and have no right to a separate polity. In fact, they have no collective rights whatsoever.
The Right’s participation in the lie must therefore be ended, and this can best be achieved by problematizing, critiquing, and systematically deconstructing all Right-wing narratives which are not white identitarian or White Nationalist. While this may be derisively called purity-spiraling, it is impermissible for those who refuse to lie to give moral sanction to those who are, especially on the core issues of white identity and interracial compatibility. By assenting to the lie, we become part of the problem. By not condemning the liars, we exacerbate the problem. Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless contains the famous parable of the greengrocer who put up the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window — not because he believed in it, but as a gesture of submission and self-deprecation before the Communists. Havel then offers us a counterfactual in which the grocer has taken down the slogan:
The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.
This paragraph is informative, but it is no substitute for reading the entire essay, which you should do immediately. Go do it now! I’ll wait.
You can buy James J. O’Meara’s Passing the Buck: Coleman Francis & Other Cinematic Metaphysicians here.
Back in the old country, I was once asked to give a speech on how we’d get out of a certain political predicament. The details don’t really matter; suffice it to say that just like white genocide, it depended on the majority of people assenting to a blatant and humiliating lie. Having read Havel’s essay, I devised a metaphor: Each man and each institution in society is a repeater, and signals reach them from all over the place: some truthful, others false, and many merely noise. Most men have nothing to say, and a select few have a message to send, but every man has the freedom to either repeat a message which he receives or to not repeat it. His choice to repeat the message or not is his own. It may be influenced by other factors: He may be coerced, threatened, or compelled, or he may be fortified against such pressures by morality, conviction, or an agenda, but ultimately, man must choose to either pass the message on or not — i.e., stay silent.
What can the ordinary man on the street do to help us overcome our political predicament based on a blatant and humiliating lie? Quite simply, he must steadfastly refuse to repeat the lie. As we know from Havel, even a single crack in the façade — even a single man refusing to repeat the lie — is damaging to the system that is based on it. Moreover, every man who refuses to repeat the lie increases the probability that other men who observe him refusing to repeat the lie will themselves decide to do so. Since I was gave the speech to a crowd with many IT professionals, someone in the audience helpfully pointed out that I was describing a cascading failure. Being familiar with the concept, I mused that maybe I should have used that for a metaphor instead of radio repeaters.
In the cascading failure metaphor, each node of the system which refuses to transmit the foundational lie increases the burden on those nodes which persist in it, thus increasing the probability that they, too, will stop transmitting and stop living the lie. Over time, the system made possible by the lie breaks down — not only because nobody believes it, but also because nobody is repeating it anymore.
I’ve recently become fond of saying, “The elite are those who refuse to lie.” Until today, I did not fully understand what I actually meant by it. In this essay I have endeavored to begin from my own distaste for being compelled to lie to this phrase that has been haunting me. It is a story like any other, spun to bridge a gap between emotion A and concept B. Life is messy, which is why we tell each other stories and spin narratives. This is why the answer to questions such as “Why do you write”” is often a semi-fictional fabrication. Men often know in their hearts what is right and what ought to be done long before they can give an argument for it. Given enough time, they’ll work something out — perhaps logical, perhaps magical.
For my part, I know that I will never perpetuate the system’s lies, nor will I remain silent when others do it. They rule us by the lie, so we will destroy them with the truth. The elite are those who steadfastly cleave to the truth and refuse to lie at any cost to themselves. They are the first dissenters, and the first who dare assent to the truth. Most importantly, they are those who, in the face of overwhelming odds, threats, censorship, persecution, deplatforming, arrest, and the loss of livelihood — and occasionally their very lives — refuse to lie.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “Paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
- Third, Paywall members have the ability to edit their comments.
- Fourth, Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
22 comments
Bravo! Let the failures cascade so the dam may break. From the real elite to the pretenders we say, we’ll be too preoccupied with the business of restoration and constructing new glories to be bothered as you drown.
Excellent article. The Dalrymple quote, when I first read it several years ago, formed a critical insight in my journey into the fold of the dissident right. “Emasculated liars” remains the most lucid, concise definition of the woke masses in their aversion to objective reality. The linked Havel essay is penetrating in its own right. He makes the compelling (and prescient) argument that the ideologies of a diseased, totalitarian political structure become a secular religion. Dissent follows as the only rational reaction, since nonconformity–a natural occurrence in healthy societies–has become impossible.
The Dalrymple quote did it for me as well a few years ago. It ignited something in me.
Excellent essay, Mr. Jeelvy.
There is a new essay over at The Occidental Observer by Karl Haemers that starts off with the Dalrymple quote and goes from there.
Václav Havel was a fake dissident and a progressive and liberal Czech politician and a bad philosopher. Václav Havel was the main promoter of globalism in the Czech Republic. He never stood up for the modern dissidents who were persecuted for their views, after the regime change he no longer fought for freedom of speech. This man and his friends failed in everything they did. Thanks to them we have a dysfunctional economy, a divided society, a debt ridden country, young people can’t afford to own their own homes and have white children, we have a one sided liberal media, thanks to them – people end up in jails for the truth. Vaclav Havel is a mental cancer.
I can agree with all of that and still find the framework presented in Power of the Powerless useful.
I agree with that. But a philosopher must confirm his work by his life. And that hasn’t happened in this case.
Perhaps you would consider writing a post expanding on these criticisms for those of us completely ignorant of Czech history, and of Havel? I would read it eagerly. I am of a generation that thought very highly of that whole bunch of East European dissidents: Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Walensa, and, yes, Havel. But my views were formed near-exclusively by the conservative American mass media (National Review, Wall Street Journal) of the 1970s-80s (not to be confused with the “American mainstream media”, which since the New Deal has been overwhelmingly left-liberal, and soft on communism), much of which may have been nothing more than “right-globalist” propaganda (except wrt Solzhenitsyn; I don’t think anyone will be able to convince me that he was less than a giant). Please consider writing a post of “Havel revisionism”.
Havel was a classic liberal or “liberal” characteristic of (post)-Communist countries. While they were dissidents during the communist era, after the (Berlin) wall came down, they fully embraced Western liberal thought and thus considered traitors to white individualism/conservatism. He was Jewish, with a bourgeois background (all his family’s wealth lost due to post-war Communism). His life exemplifies many similar in former Soviet-bloc countries. Typically, after being dissidents during the Communist era for many decades, it took only 4 years after the first free elections of 1990 that liberals (Free Democrats Party) joined the Socialist Party (all former Commies) in 1994 to form a joint government in Hungary. They hated (or were afraid of) conservative whites more than they did Communists. White Conservatives were thoroughly disillusioned by what they perceived as betrayal from liberals.
Havel was Jewish??! Really? I’ve never heard that. Do you have an authenticating source? What did Havel do in office that was bad (from an Occidental perspective)? {Note: I guess around nationalists one must distinguish between the “Occident” and the “West”, with the former denoting white, European civilization, and the latter, the postwar, Jewish-American-led, liberal world order, which includes the globalist EU.}
Excellent, as always. Truth is so much more demanding than the facile lies. Covid, and all the punk stupidity that went with it, being the biggest example of my lifetime. “Stand six feet apart!” “Walk one-way in the grocery store or you’ll die!” “Take this vaccine or you’ll kill granny!” I am tempted to admire the blacks who refused the vaccine at the rate they did until I notice the vast amounts of them still wearing masks, especially while driving alone.
As the author knows well, the first step in opposing a falsehood is not to contradict it but to not assent to its propagation.
We don’t have the power to do that, so how can it be a first step?
In any situation this is the smoothest way to bringing truth to power.
well isn’t this what he said in the article
Excellent essay. I appreciate the Dalrymple quote; it really gels something for me. The thrust of this essay reminds me of a quote from Gogol I came across in the late 80s, in which Russia was compared to a riderless chariot careening across the steppes (ie, a vehicle, or an idea, a system, etc., now moving merely from its own accumulated energy). I recall thinking at the time that this was what our system was : few believe the Regime’s lies, but they have a momentum of their own, difficult to stop.
However, I now think this metaphor is less applicable; or at least, a less apt description of the American people than it once was. After 35 additional years of full-spectrum brainwashing, many people don’t merely repeat, but actively embrace, the lie. By the end of the Cold War, most Eastern Europeans knew communism’s promises were utopian, and unlikely to be fulfilled. But the system was physically entrenched; who wanted to be the first to stick his neck out in opposition?
The lies of liberalism are much sturdier, because their entrenchment is psychological and even moral, far more than physical. Refusal to repeat is helpful, but it will never be decisive. Ditto for active opposition. What is necessary is group organization and physical separation – not only from our nonwhite colonizers, but from our own traitors. And then our own sovereignty.
Good thought-provoking article. I disagree with the thesis that “he must steadfastly refuse to repeat the lie.” as the only or even a necessary thing that he does.
In some cases, it may be necessary to perpetuate the lie “that all men are created equal” which is antithetical to white nationalism {WN}. If we are not independently wealthy or embarked on a profession solely within WN then we may have to lie a little to have a job.
“The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious”
Well many systems have pleasant untruths and by taking down the banner the greengrocer has signaled his disapproval of the system but many know it is a lie. The communist system as established was a masked dictatorship or oligarchy and I don’t believe its slogans and philosophy were the reasons behind its 70-year persistence. It was really due to a type of masked power.
Rather than “he must steadfastly refuse to repeat the lie.“, I prefer the philosophy of each white person doing what they can to further the cause according to their opportunities or abilities.
“My experience in college was one of enduring rank hypocrisy and being tempted to join in, seduced by promises of academic success. My revulsion drove me away — into dissident thought and White Nationalism.”
Did you actually graduate? I went to college in 1992 to study Humanities as a young mature student aged 27. I managed to stick it out for a year before quitting. A decade earlier, I’d become involved in what was then a peripheral British White Nationalist movement, hopelessly bogged down in the mud of fringe political trench warfare; trying to promote ideas to an intransigent public that simply didn’t want to know; the plastic Union Jack flag-wavers had Margret Thatcher and her victory over Argentina for possession of the Falkland Islands in 1982. I eventually came round to the idea that by going to college, perhaps I would be able to contribute more to the movement. Whilst at college, I was careful to just stay in the background and not draw too much attention to myself. Aged 27 I looked back at my 17 to 21 year old self with a certain detachment. These anti-White pseudo-liberals seem to be able to sniff out anyone who they think challenges their precious orthodoxies real or imagined. A young woman I made friends with told me that one of her other friends had warned her against having anything to do with me as I was considered to have possible extreme right-wing sympathies, this despite me resolving to keep my mouth shut – and at a time when the internet was not widely accessible and social-media as we know it today completely non-existent. I thought to myself that this would be the type of atmosphere I would be exposed to after I’d graduated and gone into some moderately well-paid but completely inappropriate and crushing government sector job.
Now, I get by and I make a living – but on my terms.
I think prowhites with higher IQs should go to college, and grad school, but just keep a very low profile while there. There are still a lot of whites in the ideological “squishy middle” -ie, they’re teachable, but they tend to admire and grant greater credibility to real professional credentials (indeed, increasingly so, especially among and for whites, given the intensifying awareness of the injustices of DEI and the exclusion of white men from prestigious institutions – all my white and Jewish friends’ college or grad school-age children talk about the antiwhite double standards in “higher ed”; ergo, I have a certain “a priori” respect for people like Senators Cotton and Hawley, and Gov DeSantis, with their HLS JDs, and I suspect many other whites would, too).
“I think prowhites with higher IQs should go to college, “
Yes – they should – the earlier they start and the quicker they get through the process, the better, with emphasis on the hard sciences whenever possible. But this comes down to two things: Firstly – academic aptitude; secondly – competent parenting that appreciates and encourages academic performance – this latter usually having an inter-generational causation. Also, young college-age whites should heed the advice given in a book, written by an individual who attempted to rescue Europe from Bolshevism – words to the effect that political activity, especially in its wider organisation is best left to those over the age of 30 – but a 17 to 21 year-old think they know everything.
Oh, that “individual”. What a great man! Only if the white race had another individual like him!
Fantastic essay.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment