Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation
2,907 words
Recently I was asked to make some subtle aesthetic adjustments to the Counter-Currents website. If I’ve done the job well, no one will even notice the changes. The task required me to go through the archives all the way back to the summer of 2010, the year Greg Johnson broke digital ground and Counter-Currents went online. Sifting through 14 years’ worth of articles, essays, videos, podcasts, and livestreams, I came to appreciate even more all of the labor that has gone into Counter-Currents. The webzine is a veritable repository of knowledge, wisdom, and history.
It is also uniquely resilient. Apart from the work of all the writers and contributors, much must be said in praise of the technicians behind the Counter-Currents curtain for the many obstacles they have had to maneuver around. Counter-Currents has survived multiple attacks on its servers, on its payment processors, and on its ability to sell the dozens of books it has published. Just one of these sieges would have been enough to make other websites, publishing houses, and individuals crumble. Like an impregnable medieval castle, Counter-Currents still stands. Why so many threats on Counter-Currents’ life? Because it is a place where men and women say the actual truth, and in this inverted world, telling the truth is a sin. A crime, even.
While my work was primarily cosmetic in nature, I did spend a few moments scanning the contents of some particularly alluring titles and pieces. In doing so, I was struck by how much has happened in the past 14 years. Every year brought back memories.
Memories of the names of those whose lives were extinguished by the hands of a “migrant” or “refugee” or anti-white murderer. Names like Lee Rigby, Kate Steinle, Mollie Tibbetts, and Brianna Kupfer.
Memories of the events that have marked the past decade and a half: the Arab Spring, the Boston Marathon bombing, the first appearance of “Black Lives Matter” after George Zimmerman defended himself from Trayvon Martin, the “refugee crisis,” the terrorist attacks on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo magazine, followed by the terrorist attacks in the Bataclan theatre and other locations in Paris.
Memories of where I was in the world and what sort of person I was when all these things happened.
Our folk were not always the victims. Sometimes they were the perpetrators. Only one year after the founding of Counter-Currents, Anders Breivik would carry out his killing spree. Breivik dominates the site’s early years. Many articles analyzing and denouncing his actions would be published, comprising some of the best material to be found on the website. As the years came and went, more idiotic shooters would come and go with them. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the El Paso shooter who would go on to become the face that launched a million memes, the Christchurch shooter. Sometimes the assassins were non-whites motivated by racial concerns not of the White Nationalist variety, in which case the mainstream media would whisk the terrible news into a cupboard never to be seen or heard of again, leaving sites like Counter-Currents as the only ones to analyze properly what had occurred.
The early years of Counter-Currents seem almost quaint. Setting aside the shockwave that was Anders Breivik, the majority of the site’s space was dedicated to articles about philosophy, homages to important men from the past, and calm discussions on the fundaments of nationalism. Comes the ascendancy of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum. Things start heating up. Then, midway through the last 14 years, we arrive at Charlottesville.
You can buy The Alternative Right, ed. Greg Johnson, here
Oh Charlottesville, so much to answer for.
James Fields. Remember the name? Accused of being a “terrorist” who “deliberately” plowed his car into a crowd of “people peacefully protesting” a “white supremacist rally,” despite compelling evidence suggesting that he was beset by a violent mob out to do him physical harm, James Fields will spend the rest of his life (plus an extra 419 years for good measure) in a prison cell. Such was the naïveté of our movement prior to and in the wake of Charlottesville, and such was the evidence that Fields not only did not “deliberately” drive into a crowd of peaceful protestors, but that he reacted in a panic after being cornered and attacked, that one Counter-Currents writer confidently predicted that Fields would be exonerated. I think we have all come to learn the true nature of the current American justice system since then. No one now would dare to predict a positive outcome for a white man not on the political Left accused of a serious crime, which is why the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict came as such a surprise to both the liberals salivating for his blood and the conservatives hoping against hope that he would be found not guilty.
Kyle Rittenhouse brings us to 2020. What a year. What an exhausting, evil year. The lockdowns, the obligation to wear a medical mask at all times and in all places, George Floyd and the summer of Burn Loot and Murder, the totally legitimate election of Joe Biden. For me it is a year that marks an end and a beginning. Much of who I was and what my life was like died that year. I and my life will never be the same after the events of 2020.
Things would not get much better in 2021, which began with all of us being given the privilege of seeing in real time how The System is able to create its own reality and impose it upon the masses. From January on, 2021 was a slog through more COVID-19 madness, election recrimination, and the biggest crackdown yet on opposition to the liberal world order.
Moving on to 2022, an event occurred that would again bring up thoughts of James Fields and the tragic debacle of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. A man named Shannon Brandt intentionally used his vehicle to kill an 18-year-old Trump supporter named Cayler Ellingson after the two had had a political argument. While James Fields has gone down in infamy as an extremist and a terrorist who tried to kill his ideological opponents, Brandt, who was not under any threat from Ellingson and admitted to killing the teenager because of his political views, was sentenced to a mere five years in prison. Don’t forget these names. Don’t forget these insults and injuries.
Finally, we come to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, followed by the outbreak of another round of extreme violence between Palestinians and Israelis. I have left out a great deal, and not everything was all doom and gloom. On many occasions, I chuckled and even laughed out loud as I rediscovered the origins of certain memes, such as Chet Hanks (“who?” I hear you wondering) gifting us with “White Boy Summer” and the hilarious saga of Gorilla Glue Girl. Remember Gorilla Glue Girl? There was also a story which I had never heard of before: the South African woman who broke the Guinness World Record for live births in one go and whose surname comes so close to encapsulating her country of origin.
However, the main purpose of this article is not to recollect all of the occasions — be they momentous or humorous — of the past 14 years. I would be embellishing if I said that from 2010 through the early months of 2024, one can see a clear trajectory leading to where we are now. In fact, at times it seems as if there is little rhyme or reason to any of it. There are scandals which amount to nothing. There are nothings which become scandals. Names of writers and contributors appear, linger for a moment, then disappear, never to be seen again. Names that I’m familiar with. Names of men I consider friends. Names I’ve never heard of. Organizations are started, then they disband. Personalities emerge in the dissident-nationalist community, then they diminish. It’s not easy to stay at this for a long time. A few recharge their batteries and manage to mount a comeback, but not many. Not most. I came across a multitude of links which redirected to YouTube channels that no longer exist, webpages that have been scrubbed, articles that have been erased from the Internet and might not ever be retrieved. Did any of it matter?
So much has happened in 14 years, and yet . . . so little. My travel back in time served to confirm that there really is nothing new under the sun. We are fighting the same fight that our forebears fought, facing the same forces and the same questions that men faced a century, even a millennium, ago.
One of the first articles published on Counter-Currents is on the Christian Question in nationalism, a question that we are still debating today and seemingly no closer to resolving. The argument over “petty nationalist” ethnostates versus a white civilizational superstate appears in articles dating back to Counter-Currents’ founding year and continues to this day, and to this day we are no closer to the establishment of ethnostates nor the establishment of a white imperium.
Theories are presented, theories fade away. The Cathedral. The Dark Enlightenment. Propertarianism. Everyone’s looking for the best “why?” — not necessarily an answer to the “why?”, merely the “why?” itself. Meanwhile, the migrant boats keep floating into European waters, the United States’ southern border becomes increasingly more like a minor inconvenience for invading hordes, the Western ruling class tightens its grip on every aspect of our lives, technological “innovations” are forced upon us whether we want them or not, and zealous ideologues take the rest of society hostage.
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Western Civilization Bites Back here.
Over the years, several writers on Counter-Currents offered their thoughts on a recurring theme: Why I Write. As I encountered more and more of these thoughtful and passionate expressions of a nationalist writer’s motivations, I felt compelled to write something of my own, something I had been meaning to convey for a while. That is, why I don’t write.
If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. We’ve all been told that at some point, I’m sure. I don’t want to demoralize anyone. Despite liberals’ best attempts to convince me that we are living in the best of times because we have Netflix and vaccines, women can vote, and the variety of restaurants has never been wider, I have the feeling that we are in fact living in rather bleak times. We have less say over our own lives than medieval peasants. Every act of dissent is a tightrope walk, and one misstep leads to falling into years of prison, loss of livelihood, a freezing of your bank account, or maybe — if you are Ashli Babbitt — a bullet to the throat. All this is by design. The trap was meticulously set over decades, if not centuries, and now we are stuck in it. That’s just the fact of the matter. It’s not our fault. We weren’t even born when the trap was devised. But we are guilty of squabbling about how to get out of the trap, and there are some who think the trap wonderful, and some others who refuse to acknowledge that there is a trap at all. That said, I don’t want to depress any of my readers, most of whom will not fall into those categories of people who either like or are ignorant of the trap we are in. They know the score. There is no need for me to inundate them with bad news of which they are already aware.
Another reason why I don’t write is that so much of what I might say has already been said, and said by better men than I and in better ways than I could have ever done. I suppose I could write something about the question of ethnostates versus imperialism, but Greg Johnson has already done that, and done it very well, and before him Wilmot Robertson literally wrote the book on the matter. And that’s just in the Anglosphere. Outside of the English-speaking world, there is even more material on these topics stretching back decades and decades. It’s all out there. Honestly, I would rather encourage my readership to go back through the Counter-Currents archives and discover — or rediscover — for themselves some of the great veterans of the nationalist movement, both in America and in Europe.
Not only has everything been said by the men who came before me, but I myself have said nearly everything that I wanted to. The Christian Question is ages old, and if you’d like to know my thoughts on it, they can be found here. I have made my contribution to that discussion, and there’s no point banging on about it anymore. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but I think I have written a handful of decent works on essential topics that people in the nationalist movement can refer to. Let’s say someone, perhaps someone new to nationalism, is being told that we need mass immigration because our birth rates are too low. I have dutifully dismantled those claims here. Or maybe the new nationalist doesn’t know what to think about all the Sikhs and Nigerians who were born in his country. Are they just as much a part of his nation as he, a native? Well, he can read this. As our fledgling nationalist pops more red pills and tumbles into deeper rabbit holes, he will surely crash headfirst into the Second World War and the differing accounts of what happened and what it was all for. To help him understand things a bit better, I have written this and this. On the friction that sometimes flares up between the Americans in this movement and the Europeans, I have written about some of my thoughts and experiences as a man who is a part of both sides.
There’s really not much more I need to say. I’ve touched all the bases. I suppose I could come up with my own theory about why things are the way they are. I could build a Basilica to compete with Moldbug’s Cathedral. But why bother? Intellectual pursuits are worthwhile, but at some point it’s less important to figure out why all this is happening, which ideology is to blame, and who’s pulling the strings of power, and more important to get to work making things the way we’d like them to be instead.
The online Right exerts a lot of energy reacting to the chess moves of our opponents. “Look at what the social justice warriors did now!” “BlackRock to fast track digital currencies. Here’s my hot take!” “National judge rules that ‘mother’ and ‘father’ be stricken from legal documents and replaced with ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’. Look! Be angry!”
Remember the “reeee!” meme? At times, are we not guilty of “reeeeing” ourselves? Of course, it is necessary to record these abuses, schemes, and sacrileges, to raise awareness about them, and if possible to orchestrate any kind of resistance to them, but the world is a very noisy place nowadays. There is a lot vying for our attention. Is it really so important for me to add my own voice to the cacophony? For many of us, turning away from the constant barrage of maddening news would be an exceptionally healthy thing to do, and as I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of other people who are documenting the decline in ways better than I could come up with. Who doesn’t enjoy reading Jim Goad’s summary of each week’s “worst” events?
Rather than always reacting to our adversaries’ schemes and chess moves, I would love to see a nationalist Right that produces more, that executes more of its own schemes and chess moves. That’s why I wrote this. In the future, I think — or at least hope — that I will focus more of my time and energy on developing something for our movement. I have made my contribution to the various timeless debates, now it’s time for something a bit more creative; artistic, even.
Starting this year, I’ll be hosting a ten-episode podcast series featuring numerous guests from within the nationalist movement, the aim of which is to present a clear idea of twenty-first century nationalism to as wide an audience as possible. Something else worth keeping in mind: It’s admirable to devise theories that might help explain the world today, and it’s understandable that some of us might get bored or frustrated with politics and ideology and focus on other things to make “content” about, but at the end of the day, we are doing this for a reason. We want to put an end to the forced mixing together of all the world’s peoples in our homelands. We want to reestablish nation-states based on shared blood, shared customs, shared language, and shared heritage. We want to uproot the rotten tree of anti-white ideologies and rescue European folk from the institutionalized hatred that is directed at them every day. Yes, you may have heard it all before, but many more haven’t heard it even once.
As I set my aim on other targets, it won’t mean that I no longer respond to the goings-on in the world or share my thoughts on the swarm of issues that will surely arise, but if, from time to time, a few months pass and you don’t hear from me, you’ll know why.
11 comments
Very well said! We are all very lucky that someone as talented as you is on our side. Thank you for all you do!
I’m embarrassed to say that I wasn’t a regular reader until somewhat recently. There’s a gold mine of content here that deserves to be “brought back” and disseminated whenever possible and recommended and easy to find. Something I like is when special collections of relevant articles are promoted on certain holidays; for example, I liked how, on Columbus Day, there was a collection of Columbus (I think) and Amerindian-related articles. There was one article, in particular, from that collection that talked about how violent the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas sometimes were, and I always share that with everyone I know on Columbus Day, along with a couple related AmRen Jared Taylor videos.
The one site element I really wish CC would resurrect was its previously chronologically much broader set of picture links under the RELATED heading which follows each post. I seem to recall that, at least pre-pandemic, those links were “all over the place”, as opposed to now, where they’re mostly links to other recent articles (perhaps emphasizing other articles by the post’s author). Those seemingly random prior sets of picture links were a gold mine for helping interested readers stumble upon new topics and past authors.
(Great post, btw!)
The one site element I really wish CC would resurrect was its previously chronologically much broader set of picture links under the RELATED heading which follows each post. I seem to recall that, at least pre-pandemic, those links were “all over the place”, as opposed to now, where they’re mostly links to other recent articles (perhaps emphasizing other articles by the post’s author). Those seemingly random prior sets of picture links were a gold mine for helping interested readers stumble upon new topics and past authors.
I concur about the suggested related articles being shown pre-pandemic seemed to have had categories. Now there are just other recent articles.
No one should say CC eshews diversity. I still chuckle at the March 2020 podcast picture shown here: https://counter-currents.com/2020/03/counter-currents-radio-podcast-no-265-corona-chan/. I believe an even more fearsome illustration of Kali was in place before the mask illustration now at the primary article. https://counter-currents.com/2020/03/how-coronavirus-will-change-the-world/. Now if CC was truly Euro-centic wouldn’t it have had allusions to the plague horses of Revelation? But CC looks farther into history.
Right after reading this excellent essay by Angelo Plume the internet threw this saying up in the sticks to me. It applies somewhat.
“Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice.”
—Xun Kuang, Confucian philosopher
Or as someone else translated it:
“Not having heard something is not as good as having heard it; having heard it is not as good as having seen it; having seen it is not as good as knowing it; knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice.”
To Westernize it, Ben Franklin said something similar:
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
The military called it OJT. (On the job training) You can only learn so much from study. “Just Do It” as Gary Gilmore once said.
Thank you Mr Populi/Signor Plume. I followed your link on the Christian question. Whilst I share your frustrations with modern Christianity in so many of its manifold variations I would implore you and the editor not to give up on it entirely. The last forty years have surely shown us that Christianity can be subverted in ways that 20th century folks, let alone our earlier ancestors, would never have believed. If our enemies can pervert our own religion – and despite its long-ago Hebrew borrowings, it is ours – against us, is there any reason why we can’t revert it to a White nationalist creed, something like that of the old South?
Is there any Biblical evidence for a theology like “Christians Unite! — Seperately, in their own nations”?
We can absolutely subvert Christianity, and build a functional White nationalist society, without going to the trouble of expunging it – evidenced by the great European achievements of centuries past, the conquest of the world in defiance of the world-denying creed, the Reconquista and the Crusades in defiance of its pacifism, etc.
We can do this, and it would be better than what we have now- in the same way that a return to the ethics of mid-century America, before the Civil Rights Act and the Hart-Celler immigration bill would be preferable to the current state of affairs. And it is useful for us to think like this – in terms of priorities.
The problem in both examples is that these societies were built on poisonous roots which quite predictably created bad outcomes
Christianity is ultimately, at its roots in the Bible, a Jewish universalist religion, which preaches slave morality and the eternal life of the INDIVIDUAL, as an independent entity in a contract with the Jewish God (as opposed to Pagan collectivist values of genetic reincarnation, the importance of honor, struggle, and victory for the tribe in THIS world, not the ‘next world’ of Jewish imagination) – and these root values re-emerge constantly throughout the history of Christian Europe
The immediate and highest goal is to secure White homelands
Replacing Christianity with an ethnocentric White creed would serve this goal, of course. But it’s probably not possible for us to create a sufficiently large vanguard-culture (as Pierce attempted) within the current society. The Amish came to America and flourished here, because they had freedom of religion. But White nationalist communities have nowhere to go to escape diversity, modern materialistic and individualist culture, Jewish politics and religion, the impending war, etc.
So, we cannot heal our society from the bottom up by replacing its foundations. We must gain control of it, and heal it from the top down
The European populists achieving inspiring successes and moving closer to remigration are not radicals, and will not (at least not yet) restructure society, they will not propose entirely new values and systems of social organization. But they are on track to at least reclaim White homelands in the short term (with leftover minorities, occasional kebab purveyors, and mixed children tolerated) – top-down healing
All of this is commendable. And we can hardly ask any more from masses of Germans, for example, who are rejecting decades of social conditioning, occupation propaganda, and rabid leftism to support the AfD in record numbers.
But there is no question in my mind that once we have destroyed the immediate threat of White extinction, we should purify our societies, to prevent its re-emergence. Our religion and cultural values must reinforce ethnocentrism and long time-horizon thinking, we cannot be so open to outsiders (as to listen to Jews whether on matters spiritual or temporal) and focused on short-term material gains (as to colonize again and get mixed up with other races, or to support mass migration as a means to GDP growth, despite the many concomitant problems, which have been discussed here at great length)
A great trip through Counter Currents’ accomplishments for the past 14 years. I plan to go through the highlighted posts as well. Thanks for your hard work and dedication bringing all this together,
That was a great trip down memory lane, yet I wish he would still write, although I think the podcast idea is fantastic. I’ve been reading counter Currents from the beginning, even before that when Johnson edited Occidental Quarterly, always been my favorite website, so I remember much of what was discussed in the article. I grieve for many of the early writers who made the website so great who no longer write, such as Irvin Vincent, Andrew Hamilton, Matt Parrot, et al. So many greats have come and gone. The character of CC has also changed over the years. In its early days it was more radical, fire in the belly, than nowadays. They used to recognize William Pierce’s birthday, for example, and while they didn’t necessarily subscribe to all of his politics, I respected the refusal to marginalize what the left demanded. Now, the website has evolved more to a hybrid of Amren and Taki’s. I’m not sure if that represents a true ideological shift on the part of the editors or if it’s merely the circumstance of what writers are available, or perhaps a fear of persecution(which is understandable).
I’m not so sure that online activism was a failure, though. The deplatformings and free speech persecutions post Charlottesville were a desperate reaction by the establishment that felt threatened. They took unprecedented radical action, and that means our side was successful, if only for a time. On the other hand, the far right has always sort of existed as this small “counter current” marginalized outside mainstream. If one reads the old Instauration articles, they were treading the same ground as our contemporary publications. It was all very much the same forty and fifty years ago, allowing for some theoretical smoothing from Kevin Macdonald and later developments. It always seems to have been this weird quilt work of people “they” were after and “on team” people, kept alive on the margins, perhaps intentionally. For this reason, I consider white nationalism, altright, however one styles it, as more of a hermetic sect than an actual political movement, similar to stoicism, epicuriansim, or the mystery religions that populated the later Roman Empire. Maybe that’s why so many philosophy majors seem to be involved. for me, it’s more about similar minded people coming together to commiserate and find spiritual support in a turbulent world than enacting political change on any grand scale. As such, writers accomplish the former purpose at least.
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”
You may be correct in fact about the “hermetic” aspect of CC and similar venues, but I for one hope that such hermeticism was never their founding intention. I haven’t involved myself for over 45 years in the cause of Western Man simply to find a few likeminded souls to join me in cursing the rising tide of darkness. I’ve always been in this thing of ours for the folk, to add my tiny weight to the great mass of my brothers fighting for the noblest cause in history: the preservation of the best, truest, and most beautiful race, the one which has done more than all others, indeed, all others combined, to drag our species of bipedal hominids from animalistic savagery to occasional outbreaks of grand civilization.
I see some positive changes in the arts. A few years back I was one of those lamenting that there were few recent notable contributions from the right. In comedy, right leaning comedians limited themselves to Larry The Cable Guy type stuff. Now the best comedians are centrist or strongly critiquing the left.
Film and TV have been dominated by the left for some time and still do. But wokeness has mortally wounded the output of just about everything it touches there with overreaching sanctimony and forced rather than organic diversity. A mainstream director like Christopher Nolan continues to make noteworthy contributions while making measured concessions to the left zeitgeist. Hard literature gets away with conceding less as it is cheaper to produce and not censored as aggressively as fewer eyes are paying attention.
Classical music is still struggling with diversity mandates. There is a mania to elevate a black female composer, a mediocrity like Florence Price. It’s not like there haven’t been notable black women in music and there much to say about Bessie Smith or Ella, but the modern left never ceases to overreach. In fifty years I have no doubt much of their claims will be mocked like the futility of hippies living in communes demanding free access to private property.
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