1,175 words
“Bad optics”?
So far, the Aeon of Horus has turned out to be one fine mess after another. There have been some promising moments surely, but for the most part it’s turned out to be a century-long train ride to hell. Still, there is a glimmer on the horizon which, with some luck and right action, could make for a turning point to recovery. This could become the best news we’ve had since 1989, or maybe even better, depending on how we play it. So this is an opportune moment to look at where we were in earlier times, where we are now, and where we should go.
Flashback to the 1980s
Early on I became a young nazbol and was observing the scene carefully. Society looked like a mess, and I sensed that things would get worse. Surely I seemed like a doom-saying fanatic. Still, the truth about what was ahead turned out to be beyond my imagination. If I’d received a plain description of the future, I would’ve thought it could only be a biting dystopian satire like Merrie England 2,000.
Back then, there were just three commercial TV networks and – ugh! – PBS. Independent stations weren’t any different from the usual fare. Cable (cabal?) TV was barely getting started, adding little extra than movie channels and continuous sportsball. Newspapers and the glossy weeklies were pretty much the same old slop. The mainstream media’s corporate information dam was solidly in place, as imposing as the Great Wall of China in ancient times.
Conservative talk radio, thin gruel though it was sometimes, didn’t really pick up until the 1990s. As for National Pinko Radio and Pacifica, fuhgeddaboutit. For broadcasts with anything resembling diversity of opinion, your best bet was owning a shortwave receiver; Radio Moscow’s repeater at 9600 KHz came in loud and clear from sunny Havana. It was a real hoot sometimes! A friend and I had a good chuckle when they brought in some “expert” who proclaimed that the situation at the Chernobyl reactor was normal. Another time, we were in stitches when they proudly discussed how Cuba built a factory to turn manure into fertilizer. It already is fertilizer. No shit, huh?
Hardly anything squeaked through the MSM information dam, and certainly not enough to affect public opinion. There were a few Dissident Right publications, but you had to know where to get them. Instauration and National Vanguard were the best. (Luckily, I knew someone who knew someone.) There were some others, generally rather so-so. As for the scene itself, this involved a handful of militants, some loosely-organized skinheads, the venerable but shrinking Fraternity Tri Kappa, a sprinkling of microparties often headed by an armchair Caesar, and a few larger foundations which weren’t all that much bolder than high-functioning libertarians loosened up with a few beers. If you selected out the organizations that didn’t stand the test of time and the ones with an unacceptably high FBI-agent-to-member ratio, there wasn’t much left.
Any news about us came from the usual sort of MSM hit pieces. Therefore, we had no effective way to make our appeal to the masses in our own words. Moreover, there was a strict barrier between “respectable” conservatives and rightists who want to do more than conserve the rotten status quo. Back then, the far left was pushing their side of the Overton Window. Meanwhile, the mainstream right was led by pusillanimous pussies who played by rules set by their opponents, all too happy to gatekeep and tone-police their own side. Only in very recent times has this barrier begun to break down, and there’s still work to be done on that. Perhaps worst of all, much energy was blown off by infighting rather than public outreach. It makes more sense to save the polemical firepower for enemies rather than sniping at our own side.
Today, we think of the time as remarkably paleoconservative. There was something to that, especially compared to recent Clown World conditions, yet there was certainly an undercurrent of the snippiness that later would metastasize into political correctness. Being openly pro-white was a big taboo. Any appeals by politicians had to fly under the radar as “dog whistling.” Meanwhile, minority motormouths like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson could appeal as explicitly as they pleased, and nobody called them “haters” for it. This taboo against white advocacy went back to the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, criticizing Zionism was an even easier way to get cancelled, though we weren’t calling it that yet. For future generations who didn’t live through the age of taboos or the information blockade, it will seem very strange. They’ll ponder our modern history and wonder, “Why did practically nobody speak out all this time?”
Personal outreach is something that can’t be censored or controlled by like-minded corporations. Still, it was pretty hard to get through to Joe Sixpack. Although non-whites were flooding across the border, with an eventual outcome that should’ve been obvious to anyone with a functioning brain, America was still about 80% white. What’s the problem, right? Don’t worry; be happy. Besides, they were there to do the jobs we don’t want to do. “What, you want lettuce to cost $10 a head?” Someone actually told me that once. I wasn’t the only one finding it difficult to awaken Joe Sixpack. I recall a commenter to Instauration who frequently heard something to the effect of, “I don’t believe your paranoid conspiracy theories. Now please don’t contact me again, because I’m afraid of getting put on a list.”
Then there were those who’d internalized the taboo against white advocacy, effectively acting as crabs pulling their buddies back into the fisherman’s bucket. For example, one time I met two guys who seemed like they might be based (as we’d call it now). I brought up the subject of Nationalist literature. One registered incomprehension, as if I were speaking in Sumerian. The other said to him derisively, “You know what he’s talking about.” So I got the stink-eye, much as if I’d demanded a blowjob. In college, I saw that a couple of guys had hung a very naughty flag over their dorm room’s window, one that these days would get them expelled immediately and probably blacklisted for life from academia. I dropped by for a chat, hoping to make some new friends. Again, one of them was uncomprehending, and the other blew me off.
A couple of years later, I talked to a guy I knew, and found that he’d lost his enthusiasm. He’d gotten tired of trying to reach out to the public, only for yuppies to lecture him prissily about his politics. He said something to the effect of, “Why should I bother trying to save them when they don’t want to save themselves?” I wanted to deliver a pep talk, but I was at a loss for words. What can you do with complacent sheeple who call you a “hater” for trying to show them what is happening to their country? It was getting pretty close to my years of wandering in the wilderness too.
20 comments
The MSM did have their guffaws. Remember when Lester Maddox made a monkey out of Jim Brown?
https://youtu.be/TAMWsWvcbtg?si=dFNlN5CXKo6B5RAy
Good one! I’ve saved it to the archives.
To me Tom Metzger was always a huge voice of reason back then. Ahead of his time. It was maddening trying to wake people up when we could all see the third world invasion on the horizon and people just didn’t want to hear about it.
Very true. The one silver lining here is that The System tried to push things too far and too fast. Now, the “boil the frog slowly” strategy stopped working.
Great article, the only White people that are worth a damn are already here with us on this website, and other websites like it. 🙃
I’ll do whatever I can to spread the sunshine and bring enlightenment to the masses until the job is done. When that happens, I predict that many will say they were on our side all along, but those who never so much as lifted a finger to do their part won’t be able to share in the glory.
My awareness of White Nationalism in the 1980s was Geraldo Rivera getting bonked on the nose with a chair on live TV. It wasn’t until the alt-right era that I discovered Amren, Counter-Currents and the others.
Let’s give PBS credit for airing I, Claudius in the 1980s.
I guess I’d heard of skinheads back then, but to me they seemed like shaved-head cretins down to their last three teeth, bashing empty Budweiser cans on their Swastika-tattooed foreheads, screaming “White Power”; berserkers.
That Geraldo episode was something else!
Back in the day, I used to hang with the local skinheads. They’re not quite deep philosophers, but they certainly didn’t lack for enthusiasm. There was truth to the Budweiser thing, though, at least some of them.
I remember when I was a teenager in the late 1980’s, walking home from school one rainy day. I came across a soaked pamphlet lying on the sidewalk and picked it up out of curiosity. It was a White Nationalist tract, something I had never seen before. I looked at it with fascination, feeling like I was looking at something I shouldn’t, something highly underground and forbidden, like pornography. I was still indoctrinated by the anti-racist liberal consensus fed to us all in those days by the media. It makes me laugh now, because it was just basic information that we all take for granted in the DR now- non-White immigration is bad, blacks commit a lot of crimes, etc. Really shows the power of societal brainwashing that I felt I was looking at something terrible and dark and I dropped it back on the sidewalk after a few moments. I wish I’d kept it now.
If a similar pamphlet is found on a school campus or some other public space, many people get upset and demand an investigation. It doesn’t even have to be a pamphlet; it can be a flyer found on a college campus that says, “It’s OK to be White”.
Oh, I know – it’s so bizarre! I heard of the police being called over “It’s OK to be White” posters, a waste of local government resources on a very simple and innocuous message which is clearly legal as free expression. Then the media reports it and of course makes mountains out of molehills. White people are the country’s founding population, yet The System will flip and trip about a positive message like that? It really shows where their priorities are.
That certainly matches the spirit of the times, in which pro-White messaging was treated as if it were radioactive. (There’s still much pearl-clutching these days, of course, but the atmosphere of fear was more intense back then.) Do you remember which organization printed it?
No, I have no idea. It was so weird that it was just lying there on the sidewalk. I never met or even heard of a WN in the town I lived. But there must have been at least one I guess.
At one point, I was in contact with a guy who was on Geraldo Rivera’s show and fought on the side of the skinheads. He had some incredible stories about how it all went down back then and what that show started. If I can find it somewhere, I might turn it into a retro article similar to Beau’s.
Today, CC is read by many more people, including more educated people, than back then when people read underground publications and WP leaflets. If it existed, I would love to visit a museum dedicated to WP, the KKK, skinheads, etc. There used to be a Redneck shop, and behind it was an authentic KKK museum. It’s a shame that it’s no longer there.
That sounds like the Geraldo story would be a fun read!
A museum would be a fine idea, and I bet it will happen one day. (To digress a bit, long ago, I hoped that we’d one day get to the point that we could have Skrewdriver albums on CD, rather than just cassette tapes which were copies of copies of copies. Then this simple wish came to pass!) For now, there could be an online exhibition of White Nationalism. It would take some doing, but it would be easier to set up than maintaining a physical space.
So, you are a convert….
That explains your deep knowledge of enemy doctrine. know thy enemy and all that, but sometimes you go too far.
I started as a red diaper baby, but fortunately thought my way out of that early on. Then I got bathed in leftist propaganda during college, which just strengthened my resolve to resist it. As aggravating as it was, I don’t regret it, since I learned how they think (well, sort of).
And did you meet any National Bolsheviks in the US? I’ve always wondered whether a non-liberal, non-Jewish, patriotic or even nationalist left wing has emerged in the US. Surely it’s not possible that the only choices are anti-racist liberal conservatism vs. anti-racist liberal leftism. Both movements are strongly controlled by Jews. There is no point in fighting such a war, because both are the same except for the economy. And in both, the economy is controlled by Jews. Feel free to describe some stories about National Bolsheviks in your next work.
Over here, they’ve been nearly nonexistent. The only one I can think of is Jack London, who lived over a century ago.
American mainstream politics really is about like what you imagine. The Evil Party and the Stupid Party seem like fierce rivals, but at the end of the day, they all answer to the same special interests.
Would Jean Thiriart be considered a nationalist-bolshevik cause I believe I’ve heard the slander thrown his way.
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