Parrott on Conferences

StillLifewithPie [1]943 words

I would like to respond to Parrott’s essay [2], answering Greg Johnson’s original piece [3] about “White Nationalist conferences.” Two points to begin with.

First, with respect to the actual debate, I agree with Johnson as regards the situation today; however, if at some point in the (hopefully not distant) future, pro-White activism sufficiently expands, then real-world analog conferences would be a good thing. So, I agree with Parrott regarding all the advantages of such conferences (and Johnson admits these as well), the problem is that as they exist today, such conferences do no good. And some do more “no good” than others.

Second, similar to what Johnson wrote in his piece, none of this should be construed as being an attack against Amren or any sort of personal attack against Taylor. Amren/Taylor have done a lot of good over the years for pro-White activism. I appreciate Amren/Taylor for publishing a fair number of my own essays, particularly those that brought the work of Frank Salter to the attention of a wider audience. That’s all to the good. However, to answer Parrott, some honest and dispassionate criticism of Amren will be required, although this criticism is mostly aimed at Parrott’s misrepresentation of the facts. Emphasis added:

American Renaissance has been, and will hopefully remain, a tremendously useful ecumenical event where the ever-divergent and alienated factions and subcultures within White Advocacy can converge in one physical space for one magical weekend and network. Jared Taylor is an institution in himself, a unifying figure who even the most avid anti-semites and milquetoast mainstreamers respect.

This is absolutely incorrect. As someone with years of experience in pro-White activism, as someone familiar with all the intra-movement “flamewars,” how could Parrott write something so absurd? There are a number of prominent “anti-Semitic” activists who have been extremely harshly critical of Amren/Taylor, up to and including the use of personal invective. Parrott surely disagrees with those viewpoints, but it is the height of dishonesty to pretend they do not exist.

Many other activists are displeased with the perceived pro-Jewish outlook of Amren, although these others either keep silent and just ignore Amren, or express their views using more mild language. On the other hand, some of the “milquetoast mainstreamers” (e.g., Auster, Jobling) have been sharply critical of Amren/Taylor for being insufficiently pro-Jewish.

In my case, I ended my association with Amren after the “Hippocrates” controversy and my perception that Amren was becoming a HBD, rather than White nationalist, enterprise. For all the good that it has done, Amren has been as much a divisive and controversial entity as a “unifying” one.

The idea that Amren conferences are such an “ecumenical” event was reasonably refuted by the events of the 2006 conference and its aftermath. Things were never the same for Amren after Hart’s vulgar tantrum; subsequent events, such as the Jobling split and the “Hippocrates” disaster, just added to the division.

And that’s why AmRen is so valuable. I’m fearful that the year he stops organizing AmRen (hopefully many years from now!), all of our disparate factions will file off into our respective Christian crusader, pagan revivalist, philo-semitic, dorky HBD, and wonky mainstreamer corners, never to converge and unite around White Identity in quite the same way again.

What fantasy land does Parrott live in? All these “disparate factions” are completely divided today, and Amren conferences have had absolutely zero effect on breaking down these divisions. There is certainly no convergence or unity among these factions, inside or outside of such conferences. They attacked each other at the 2006 conference. After that, the hardcore anti-Semites stopped coming and then the extreme philo-Semites broke away. It’s now more or less a “mash-up” of southerners, HBDers, and mainstreamers. There is no longer any sort of general representation of the “movement” there, certainly not among the speakers. And are all the attendees, never mind the speakers, converging and uniting around “White Identity?” Is that what Derbyshire does there? Really?

Greg proposed that we shift to a more localized and specialized model of meeting up. That’s all well and good, but it didn’t take the commenters on the article long to vividly describe from first-hand experience what a boondoggle that proves to be in practice. AmRen’s expensive and stuffy atmospherics and basic filtering for cranks (hopefully, I’ll still be allowed this coming year!) guarantee a safety and sanity which can’t be guaranteed in smaller regional venues.

Yes, tell Michael Regan all about the “safety.” [4] Tell the attendees of the 2006 conference about the “sanity.”

We belong to a broad array of subcultures, social classes, and ideologies, and that often devolves into a circus.

Er . . . didn’t Parrott just tell us how wonderfully unified we are all due to having Amren conferences? How are the conferences helping to bring us together then?

AmRen is, to my knowledge, the only platform where a Zionist Jew, a professor with an Asian wife, a homosexual pagan revivalist, and a guy more comfortable in a Skrewdriver t-shirt than a dinner jacket can all converge on the same room to discuss racial issues without Yackety Sax background music.

And this is good how? This demonstrates an identity crisis. Are Amren conferences “HBD/race realism” meetings? White nationalist get-togethers? Both? Neither? Maybe one reason why things never got accomplished at the meetings is that they used to mix together disparate and non-unified groups, often hostile to each other, with nothing in common. Dedicated anti-Semites with Zionists? Radical national socialist racialists with miscegenating White nerds and their Asian wives? Traditional Christian conservatives with homosexual pagans? “Wine and cheese” elitists with “chips and beer” skinheads? That is all better than more narrowly defined local meetings how?

Source: http://eginotes.blogspot.com/2014/12/answering-parrott-on-conferences.html [5]