Ideas Matter

[1]

"The Philosophers" by the anonymous Italian painter of the early 17th century known as the Master of the Judgment of Solomon

1,881 words

The documentary Mugabe and the White African [2] tells the story of a family of Whites trying to cling to their farm in Zimbabwe. The family isn’t racist. They’re anti-racist, claiming (rather credibly) that Robert Mugabe is the real racist. They gush about how their employees — every last one of which is Black — benefit tremendously from their presence. They brag about the women being empowered to have several children and work up sentimental tears as they reminisce about their love for “the help.” They insist that “We’re all God’s children” and appeal to Enlightenment notions of liberty, equality, and the brotherhood of man.

They’re just about the last of their kind in Zimbabwe, and yet they still cling to these suicidal and wrong ideas. Actually, they “were” just about the last. I say “were” because Mugabe’s cronies savagely attacked them, bludgeoning the patriarch and his son-in-law nearly to death. The Blacks burned the highly productive farm to the ground, driving the grievously wounded family from their land once and for all. A few months after this incident, the patriarch, Mike Campbell, succumbed to his injuries.

This family clung to those suicidally wrong ideas long after they lost political power, long after daily life brought a constant threat of violence, and long after there was a credible strand of hope left for them or their way of life.

That’s the power of ideas.

White Americans weren’t awakened when they woke up one morning to find a Black man in their White House. They won’t be awakened by another inner-city riot or another frightful tale of anti-White rape and murder, or even one of murder and then rape. The Census Bureau has come out with a projection which only fiery-eyed Klansmen had dared to project a mere generation prior: that the current rate of non-White immigration, assimilation, and insemination will — within a couple decades — result in our being eclipsed in the land our forefathers gave their lives to secure for us as a sovereign inheritance.

White Americans yawned, then went right back to sleep. And they’ll remain in their beds as long as they’re comforted by the dreamy fluff that passes for virtue, principle, and morality in this decadent West.

Arthur Kemp claimed that “South Africans would rather be killed in their beds than make them.” There’s some truth to the claim that the Whites who are materially benefiting from the current system will resist attempts to upend it. But I don’t believe that’s the whole truth, even for the small and shrinking subset of White elites who are actually benefiting from it. There’s also some truth to the claim that people are generally resistant to change. But that’s hardly the whole truth, as they’ve tolerated the countless seismic changes necessary to accommodate these bad ideas.

Ideas matter. Big abstract ideas matter. The kinds of vague and even . . . esoteric . . . ideas bandied about by “extremist” sites like Counter-Currents matter. In fact, if we don’t get the big ideas right, then nothing else does matter. We can achieve all the paleoconservative and “White Civil Rights” victories in the world, but they’ll only amount to the “death by halves” that Dr. Pierce famously warned about in his landmark address “Why Conservatives Can’t Win [3].”

We can abolish Affirmative Action, only to watch India and China pour its technocratic elites into the seats we pried Black Americans from. We can build the wall, but there are already enough of them on this side of it and enough of them have their papers in order that the invasion is a fait accompli. We can hold off war with Iran or Syria for another election cycle, but the Military-Industrial Complex will absolutely never be deployed in defense of the people it was created to serve.

Our critics argue that our radical ideas “won’t play in Peoria.” But Peoria’s schools are already majority non-White and the whole city will be majority non-White by the time they take the next census. If you conclude — as I have — that Peorians are doomed unless we can radically transform their worldview, then we have no choice but to figure out how to play it in Peoria. Peorians need to reject democracy. Peorians need to reject equality. Peorians need to reject “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

To sum it up, Peorians need to reject America.

Our founding fathers weren’t lacking in genius. They weren’t lacking in courage. I’m proud of my founding stock forefathers (none of whom were founding fathers), and there’s a lot about America that can and should be preserved. But, in hindsight, they got it wrong. They got it disastrously wrong, and we’re bearing the consequences of their false premises and miscalculations in real-time.

Several years ago, inspired by reflecting on my own experiences and prodded by Nietzsche, I concluded that living just to live, doing what I felt like doing, and pursuing my own happiness as an end in itself was an awful way to go about things. The thing about happiness is that we’re wired for struggle. We only experience true bliss when immersed in a transcendent struggle with the seriousness of a child at play. It’s just like with cats. They’ll chase a string for hours, but if you simply hand them the string, they’ll bat it around for a spell, then grow bored and distracted.

This principle is as true with the life of a nation as it is for the life of a man. America batted its “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” around for a few decades, then grew bored and distracted. With no “tyrants” or “priests” left to curb the power and practices of the merchants who seized control of America, these reactionaries had nothing left to react to. And now they’ve woven the string together into a rope to hang themselves with. America’s ongoing act of auto-erotic asphyxiation is the final stage in this self-destructive cycle, the stage at which one becomes so overwhelmed with nihilism, ennui, and self-loathing that self-abuse and self-destruction become the transcendent goal.

America is capsizing, but we, the tribe of men with relatively similar linguistic, cultural, and historical roots who can be broadly described as “White Americans” don’t have to go down with the ship. Many in Europe’s fascist political tradition perceive us as the very epitome of modernity and innately irredeemable. They see us as the very embodiment of Jewish and mercantile ideals made manifest. We were, after all, “patient zero” of this Mercantile Age. We do, after all, have the highest serum level of the Jewish pathogen. But I believe that it was primarily the ocean of distance from the two historical buffers to mercantile and Jewish power — the nobility and the priesthood — which led to our being afflicted the first and the worst.

We are not innately more decadent than our brothers abroad. We as a people are not beyond redemption, and my life’s work is to demonstrate that.

How, you ask? Well, I’m working on that, and I won’t be able to accomplish it entirely on my own. Until I’m further along in my research, or until somebody else shows it to me, I won’t know exactly what it is. But I am far enough along to describe what it isn’t.

It isn’t democratic.

When a nation’s state becomes a democracy, it is delivering itself up to be controlled and ultimately destroyed by the market. When a family business launches an IPO, “mom and pop” insist to their employees, their vendors, their customers, and their children that things will carry on as usual, even improve. And for a time, things do carry on as usual, and the infusion of capital is welcomed. Modern democracy is a market, and each vote is a share to be purchased. Sooner or later, a vulture capitalist like Mitt Romney is going to come along and raid its reserves, strip its assets, and sell it off piece-by-piece to further enrich himself.

It isn’t egalitarian.

I’m neither bred nor raised to be an elite. My father was raised on a hog farm, and some of my earliest memories are of him coming home covered in soot from the coal mine. My mom was raised in a small rural shack with six other siblings. Her father, my grandfather, cleverly adapted a discarded pontoon boat as a front porch. I grit my teeth when some in our movement speak a little too eagerly about eugenics and the need to cull the herd, or speak disparagingly of “hillbillies,” “white trash,” and “Wal-Mart shoppers.”

I am a Wal-Mart shopper, and my first concern is for my fellow Wal-Mart shoppers. But Tradition clearly states and history clearly demonstrates that the only true and lasting salvation of the folk is found in submission to a rightful and righteous indigenous elite. Marxism, mass democracy, anarchism, libertarianism, and other popular scams promise the masses “liberation,” only to deliver the people up to an elite even more alien and decadent than the elite they were being “liberated” from.

I insist that a robust hierarchy must allow for social mobility, and perhaps that’s special pleading. But there must be a hierarchy. A subset must be empowered with true power, not the vacuous and ephemeral power that comes with being elected to an office for a couple years. It’s not the vacuous and ephemeral power that comes with the necessity of negotiating the byzantine maze of special interest groups, ethnic lobbies, and money changers required in order to merely cling to the office, much less accomplish anything in it.

Not that Byzantium was anywhere near as byzantine as this cluster**** we charitably call a “system.”

This is not the dungeons and dragons fantasy talk our “mainstreamer” critics imagine it to be. A return to monarchy or some other form of overt (rather than our currently covert) elite control is certainly a counter-current in contemporary American discourse. It won’t play in Peoria . . . yet. But look around. China’s indigenous “inner party” is proving itself capable of concocting and implementing major plans for the distant future while our own system can’t even patch up the crumbling infrastructure our ancestors built. The Muslim Brotherhood is making advance after advance in the Middle East, exploiting each attempt by us to impose democracy by persuading the mob to vote for something other than mob rule. Iran continues to hold firm despite tremendous social and economic pressure precisely because it’s not a democracy. The former Soviet bloc is also rejecting the Western model.

For Peorians, discarding the American system remains an unthinkable idea. But it’s an idea whose time has come. For Europe’s New Right, our taking a leadership role in the Restoration of tribe, tradition, and transcendence remains an unthinkable idea. But it’s an idea whose time has come. Ideas matter, and that’s why Counter-Currents Publishing matters. I’m honored to be in the presence of so many great thinkers — thinkers who’ve taken that critical step of investing their reputations and life’s work in our struggle. I look forward to collaborating with you all in the ongoing development of our ideas and in the coming struggle those ideas will inspire.