Tom Sunić Interviews Greg Johnson

7,159 words

The following text is the transcript by V. S. of Tom Sunić’s The Sunić Journal interview with Greg Johnson about Counter-Currents and the North American New Right. This interview first published at the Voice of Reason network on August 9, 2011 but is no longer online there.

Tom Sunić: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Good evening, dear friends! This is your host Tom Sunić from VoR. Welcome back!

Well, folks, you already know me; I like discussing culture and politics and I keep insisting and I keep emphasizing, I keep pointing out the importance of culture as a main artillery that we need to have in our political promotion, our political activities and our political goals. So, I’m very pleased indeed to welcome our guest, a friend of mine, Dr. Greg Johnson.

Greg, welcome to my show!

Greg Johnson: Thanks, Tom, for having me on!

TS: Well, thank you! It’s a great pleasure. Indeed, long time no see. I understand you’re on the other side in California. Am I correct?

GJ: Yeah, I’m on the West Coast now.

TS: First, let me extend my congratulations and my best greetings. I’m really pleased with what you’re doing. In fact, I’m very pleased with some of your publications. The other day I had this gentleman on my show, Andy Nowicki, and I had a great pleasure. I read the book by the gentleman called Kendall. What’s the title of the book? I received it from you directly, so please accept my gratitude, my thanks for what you did. In fact, they’re excellent, marvelous books. I’ve been following your activities down in California and I’m very, very pleased with what you’re doing.

Could you please tell our listeners what is Counter-Currents, what is this edition all about, what is basically the goal of Counter-Currents? Could you please develop on this theme a little bit?

GJ: Sure, thanks. Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd is a company that my friend and business partner, Michael Polignano, and I created, and the purpose of it is to publish books and spread ideas that are based in the European New Right and the goal of that is to perhaps spark a North American New Right by which we understand a cultural, intellectual, metapolitical movement that may eventually lead to real political change in North America.

We published six books now. We’ve been doing this a little more than a year. Our one year anniversary was the 11th of June this past month. The books we’ve published are Michael O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic, Michael Polignano’s Taking Our Own Side, I put out a collection of essays called Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, then we published a couple of fiction works. You mentioned Andy Nowicki’s book. It’s called The Columbine Pilgrim and Ward Kendall’s science fiction novel which is a re-edition of a book that came out about 10 years ago called Hold Back This Day. Our latest book, which is fresh off the press, is called Summoning the Gods. It’s a collection of essays by Collin Cleary, who is one of the founding editors of the journal Tyr and I’ll be sending off a copy of that for you soon, Tom.

TS: I’m very pleased. In fact, you seem to have lined up some real heavyweights and I’d like to tell you: I think I’m pretty much qualified to talk about this. I’m surprised how good the authors are you’ve lined up, especially Michael O’Meara. I’ve always admired this gentleman. In fact, he’s not just a great author. He’s also a great translator. And you yourself, Greg. Don’t be too modest. You need to tell the folks that you handle the French language very well, and you’re doing a great deal of translation. You also did help me on several occasions.

Could you just tell us a little bit, just in a few minutes about your background, your PhD in the humanities? Could you tell me specifically where did you study, where did you get your PhD?

GJ: Actually, I don’t want to do that and for one simple reason. There are people in the United States and around the world who are trying to suppress the kind of intellectual activity that you and I are engaged in, and so far they have not managed to put together a coherent dossier about me. They’re still wondering who I am. There are a lot of Greg Johnsons in the world.

TS: Oh, good point! That’s a very good point!

GJ: So, I’m really loath to make their work any easier for them. I don’t doubt that eventually they’re going to figure it all out, but they are of course afraid of lawsuits, and if they were to identify the wrong Greg Johnson as the horrible hater who puts out these books and the Counter-Currents blog, well, they might be hit with a lawsuit themselves for a change. So, anyway, let’s just leave that aside.

TS: No, no, that’s a very good point that you’ve made and I’m very pleased that you’ve said it. Unfortunately, my name is pretty much unique. Sunić even sounds like French unique. It’s unique. The French language is full of those antonyms and synonyms. So, unfortunately, I don’t have this chance of going under a different name.

But, anyway, could you just tell me what specifically your interests are? Definitely humanities and languages.

GJ: My main interests are philosophy, political theory, religion, the history of art and music, and contemporary political events.

So, what Counter-Currents is about is basically this: we realize that political change requires foundations. There are things that come before politics. We call those metapolitical things, and they shape the political and make political change possible. What we want is not considered morally right or even feasible, not even conceivable by people today in today’s cultural climate. If we’re going to halt the dispossession of European White Americans and create some kind of ethnically defined state in North America, the first thing we’re going to have to do is get enough of our fellow White people to think that is not only a moral goal, but also a practical, feasible goal.

And so a lot of political movements start with the foundations. They start with metapolitical foundations and sometimes it takes decades before they can actually break through into the political realm.

The best example I can give of what we’re going to do is actually not so much the European New Right, although a lot of the ideas that we look to are based in the European New Right, the best example from the United States is the libertarian movement.

The libertarian movement really started a little more than 50 years ago. It started in Ayn Rand’s living room in New York City and other places on the East Coast. It was a small group of philosophers and economists and historians who got together and decided that they wanted to promote a certain vision of society, which turns out to be a radically individualist, capitalist vision of society. I don’t agree with that vision. I think it’s wrong. However, the way in which they went about promoting it was very effective. They started out with little meetings and little publications. They won more and more people over to their way of thinking. In 1971, a political party, the Libertarian Party, was founded, and it is the third largest political party in the United States today. Of course, it’s a distant, distant third compared to the major two parties. They created institutes, think tanks: the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, the Independent Institute, the Ayn Rand Institute. They have sponsored summer schools, essay competitions, a whole range of projects, and they have influenced the culture in mostly a subterranean way for decades now.

And then in the last quarter of 2007, suddenly this figure, Ron Paul, who is a very marginal Republican legislator from Texas, who would poll in the single digits even among insider Republicans when it came to potential presidential candidates for instance, suddenly he came out of nowhere and managed to raise $20 million in the last three months of 2007 to run for the Republican presidential nomination. As if from nowhere, all these Ron Paul supporters emerged, raised a huge amount of money, and sparked a very, very active, idealistic political movement. Of course, when he didn’t get the nomination he took nearly $5 million in unspent campaign contributions and endowed an organization he called Campaign for Liberty that fights for his ideas.

That organization and the Ron Paul movement in general, after the election of Barack Obama, really sparked the Tea Party, which is an ongoing sort of Right-wing, libertarian, somewhat populist phenomenon and that is still a very active force in American politics today. Ron Paul’s son is in the U. S. Senate now, and this is going to continue for a long time.

Now, some people were totally taken by surprise at the emergence of Paul and his followers, but actually if you know how ideas percolate through society and how they influence politics. It really didn’t surprise me at all, because I had been following this movement for decades, and they were laying very carefully the metapolitical foundations of political change.

I should say that I follow the New Democratic Party, the NDP, in Germany, and they talk about three elements to their political struggle. One is spreading ideas, the other is building community or community organizing, if you will, and the third is actually trying to get political power. Those first two things, namely getting ideas out and community organizing, those are what I call metapolitics.

TS: Greg, I was wondering, what does the American New Right . . . I understand that you’re not an official, but you’re sort of a leader or spokesman of it. How does it fit into this scheme, this vision that you have just mentioned a while ago?

GJ: If we’re going to have the kind of really radical political change that we need in North America, we’re going to have to lay the metapolitical foundations. That means we’re going to need a movement and, for better or worse, I am going to call it the North American New Right. I am waiting for somebody better to come along to be the leader of this and raise the banner, but no one’s done it yet, so I decided I might as well just try and get this thing rolling and see if we can attract a lot of interesting new people, including better minds than my own.

The purpose of the North American New Right is again to lay metapolitical foundations for creating a White, ethnically defined society somewhere in North America. That’s how I describe it.

The main ideas really come out of Europe. However, there are a couple of places we differ from the European New Right. In Europe, you still have real, living ethnically defined nations and sub-nations. You’ve got the French, you’ve got the Germans, Croatians . . . All of you still have real national identities which can be foci around which you can organize for your collective interests, whereas in the United States and in other what you can call European diaspora societies, European colonial societies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand . . . What you have here is really a core population that was from the British Isles, but generation after generation of immigration from other parts of Europe have really created a blended European identity. We really don’t have a distinct core ethnic identity in this part of the world. We have tried to make do with a set of universal propositions from the Enlightenment, but that is really destructive of peoplehood. It’s very destructive of peoplehood in the United States. It’s very destructive of the French people in France. This republicanism, this ideology of liberty . . .

TS: . . . This is a fascinating point you’ve just made and I hope that our listeners, especially our younger students are listening to what you’re saying. However, this is an irony of history. Keep in mind, and I’m sure you’re aware of that. After all, you have the same degree, you have the same background that I do. But precisely this “tribal nationalism,” Germans, English, French, Croats, what have you, very often functions by default and this is the problem. I hate to say it, but I’ll give a speech on that in D.C. but you can develop on that shortly. The problem is that we often hear in Europe to assert our nationalism by excluding the other European ones. Do you see what I mean?

This is the great advantage of White Americans. From Arkansas to Alaska there is one language, one culture, one people. Of course, of European roots that at least logistically gives them greater strength.

Would you agree with that? I’m sorry to interrupt you.

GJ: Yeah, that’s a very good point and I do agree with that. This is how I look at it. Because we don’t have these compact, historical European national identities over here, we do need to emphasize another commonality. For me, it cannot be some kind of propositional nation based on Enlightenment ideals, because those are applied universally, and they are destructive of peoplehood.

For the North American New Right, biological race is an important thing, because that is a distinct commonality that sets us apart whereas in the European New Right, biological race discourse is not as necessary, because you can fall back on your European national identities.

However, you are completely right to point out that . . .

TS: It’s a good point. It’s a fascinating point that you’re making. I’m very pleased that you mentioned that in American White Nationalism race is a biological determinant. It’s much more important than in Europe. This causes a great deal of misunderstandings and tensions, especially with my French friends here. But go ahead, please.

GJ: There are two issues here. I do agree, however, that European nationalism can be turned against the interests of Europe. I remember a few years ago people were very excited about this Hungarian nationalist party called Jobbik and so I started reading about them. It turns out that Jobbik is all about being mad at the Slovakians and the Romanians.

TS: Absolutely! You’re reading my mind! This is exactly what I’m talking about!

GJ: There are all kinds of people who are genuine aliens to Europe living within the borders of Hungary. Jobbik is not worried about Gypsies or Jews or people from the Middle East or whoever is there. They want to recreate Greater Hungary at the expense of the Slovakians, and I think that is a madness that in the United States we don’t have, and so that’s a strength.

One thing that I think you can say is a benefit of these European diaspora societies with their mixed European identities is that, in a way, it’s at least possible, that what we’re doing here is reconstituting a pan-European identity that existed in Europe too before the emergence of these modern nation-states and nationalities. In Europe in the High Middle Ages, you had a pan-European culture. You had a common language. You had the capacity to unify Europe for geopolitical struggles against Islam, for instance. But then that disintegrated into the smaller, petty nationalisms of Europe today, and that has been something that has weakened us as a race.

So, I do think that some of the deracination, if you will, of these European colonial societies actually can strengthen us as a race, and I think that is a positive thing, and you’re absolutely right to point out the problems with these petty nationalist parties in Europe today.

TS: Greg, I am so glad you’ve mentioned it. Believe it or not, I am not trying to flatter you. You’ve given such a nice speech that many, many academics in Europe would not be able to deliver. I’m not joking. I’m very pleased that you have mentioned that. Look, we’re not fooling each other here. Nationalism has its good side, particularly in the United States where it could have great opportunities. But I know it first hand after this terrible, stupid war between Serbs and Croats quarreling about different mythologies, different lies, different religions. So, folks, rest assured that nationalism always has to be evaluated with the appropriate intellectual and historical context.

Anyway, this is a fascinating topic, but let’s just move a little bit ahead. Let’s talk a little bit about Counter-Currents. Are you actually talking about this on your forum? You were also in charge of The Occidental Quarterly some time ago, or the main editor, so you do have baggage, so to speak, intellectual, academic baggage to be quite versed in different spheres and different fields. Could you tell me exactly how you deal with those topics? My second question is how do you define your relationship with the French New Right, with my friends Alain de Benoist (I’ll be seeing him shortly) and how exactly do you think this cohesion can work together, how you can blend them together? Why do we always have to say, “he’s French” and “he’s an American”? I’m getting tired of those little, petty quarrels and tribalistic wars.

Go ahead.

GJ: Let me answer the second question first about how we relate to the European New Right. Basically, I think that what Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye and Robert Steuckers and other European New Right thinkers are up to is largely correct. I think there are two places where our approach differs from theirs. I mentioned one, which is a greater emphasis on biological race as a commonality. However, I do want to say that a lot of us are not reductionists or determinists when it comes to biology, but we do think it’s an important factor nonetheless. But that’s a genuine debate within our ranks. There are hardcore materialist, Darwinist types, and then there are people who are followers of things like Traditionalism, which obviously consorts uneasily with Darwinism in a lot of ways. So, we are genuinely divided in that, and I’m hoping that maybe someday we can work out some kind of synthesis.

The other area where I think that we differ is that in the United States we certainly are, I think, much more explicit about the whole so-called “Jewish Question” than the European New Right. There are real debates on that. Guillaume Faye’s book, The New Jewish Question, for instance. I think that with the European New Right it’s possible for you to deal with a lot of these issues that we deal with under the rubric of the Jewish Question indirectly, in effect by proxy, by just being anti-American, to put it crudely. But really the United States is the citadel of Jewish power in the world, and I think that we have to name the problem and deal with it explicitly. So, that’s one thing that we try to do.

However, I do want to specify that I don’t want to compete with Kevin McDonald’s work on this topic, and The Occidental Observer is a very, very good publication. So, it’s an issue for us, but it’s not our main focus, if that makes sense.

TS: Of course, we have to point it out to all of our listeners that what I personally like about Counter-Currents and your publications is that you don’t seem to be obsessed just with one single issue. Of course, you talk about race, you talk about the Jewish Question in a very critical manner which we cannot even imagine or think about here in Europe for obvious reasons which we don’t need to be that explicit. But I am pleased that you actually extend the horizons, that you cover poetry and you cover art and other fields. And this is something I’d like to focus on now in the second segment of our show.

So, go ahead. Could you just give me a short summary of how you actually grapple, how you cope with that?

GJ: OK. I am obviously an intellectual, not a businessman, because if I was really a businessman the first thing I would have done is given the web address for Counter-Currents right up front. So, let me give that now. It’s counter-currents.com and that is the website of our publishing imprint, but the first thing you’ll see is a kind of blog and five days a week we put up articles and reviews. That is really the thing that I spend 60-70% of my time working on, just the webzine. Then we also publish books.

The focus of the webzine eventually will expand. I hope to have full coverage of all the important works coming out of Europe. I hope to have a lot more coverage of High Culture, if you will: art criticism, music criticism, things like that and also pop culture and musical sub-cultures on the Right. That’s a very important area. We just don’t have the coverage yet.

What we are trying to do though is we want to cover everything. Why? Well, because the European heritage encompasses everything. You don’t have to go too far back in history, either, before you find that every great philosopher would be considered a Right-wing extremist by contemporary standards. We want to recover that tradition for us and show that the Western philosophical tradition, the Western theological tradition, Western literary and artistic tradition really point in the direction that we want to go rather than in the direction of this kind of homogenized, global, multicultural, commercial melting pot.

So, we have a lot of stuff on literature, a lot of stuff on art and music and also film. Film is probably the thing we’ve got best under control.

TS: That’s very important, the film.

GJ: I actually think that what Wagner was describing as the complete work of art that integrates all the other artworks was realized better by film than by opera. I think that film is the most powerful intellectual tool for creating a world-view. Unfortunately, for the most part, it creates a bad worldview and reinforces it.

TS: . . . Please do tell just in one little sentence or one little paragraph, if I can put it that way, what exactly is the difference between the European New Right and the North American New Right? I don’t see any, but just try to make those distinctions quite clear for our younger audience, for our younger students here.

GJ: Well, I don’t think there’s that big a difference, but I do think that within the North American context, and also the context of countries like Australia and New Zealand where you have more of a blended European identity and the old European national identities are disappearing, that the commonality that we need to stress is going to be based on a common European history, but also a racial identity, racial distinctions.

TS: Talking about commonalities, I’m glad you mentioned that. Are you in touch with your colleagues, with our friends from Australia, from Down Under? Mr. Herfurth? Welf Herfurth? I’ve just written a preface to his book that should be out shortly. Do you know the gentleman?

GJ: Oh yeah, I met him. He was in San Francisco last year, and I met him. He’s a nice fellow. He’s a National Anarchist. I’ve never quite understood what National Anarchism means, but I think he’s a very fine person. I enjoyed listening to him speak and talking to him, so I wish him the best.

I know a lot of people Down Under. There are a lot of really good people in Australia and New Zealand.

TS: I just want to make sure that our folks don’t get side-tracked. Alain de Benoist has probably told me two dozen times, and I’m sure you’re aware of it, but we’re using this term that’s a little bit clumsy: the New Right. It’s not a self-chosen word. It was actually labelled on us. It was pasted on us by our opponents. So, I just use it by default, so to speak.

GJ: Well, yeah, we are using categories that have been imposed upon us by our opponents. That said, however, we do have to recognize that whatever we are our roots are now primarily on the Right. And not the Right in the sense of the American Right, which is basically classical liberalism, but the European old Right which is rooted in more traditional, hierarchical model of society. We do embrace that. A lot of things that are conventionally Left-wing by contemporary standards are not so different from things that were defended by Traditionalists in Europe in the past. So, we tend to have a critical attitude about capitalism, we tend to be opposed to the despoiling of the environment or the destruction of history, of walkable communities, of processed, crappy food, and things like that tend to be in many ways, in terms of lifestyle and aesthetic tastes and things like that, aligned with people who are contemporary Leftists. But I would even say that the contemporary Left has roots if you go back far enough where things blend together with things that are more Right-wing, if you will, or let’s just say European traditional forms of society.

So, one of the things that I talk about is what I like to call West Coast White Nationalism, because a lot of the people that I know on the West Coast who think in terms of wanting a racially defined new order of society you could take one look at them and you’d think they’re hippies or you’d think they are liberals. Their lifestyles and their attitudes embrace a lot of things like being into Eastern spirituality, drinking fruit juice and wearing sandals and granola and vegetarianism and organic food and organic farming. All these sorts of things that you think are kind of hippy things. Well, if you look at the roots of a lot of West Coast hippy culture and also the hippy culture in Europe for that matter a lot of it comes from Tolkien. What doesn’t come from say the Frankfurt School and things like that, a lot of it comes from Tolkien, which is pretty directly connected with European traditionalism.

So, we are sort of beyond Left and Right. Especially beyond Left or Right in terms of the superficial Left-Right distinction that you have in American politics. But we still have roots that are, I think, objectively on the Right, especially when you talk about what was the Right at the time of the French Revolution or something like that.

Evola when he was put on trial said, “Look, you can say that I’m promoting Fascism, but the ideas that I promote were the ideas of every serious thinker before the French Revolution.”

TS: Absolutely, that’s a good point.

GJ: So, these are very deep roots, and when you pursue those roots back far enough we don’t represent Left or Right. We just represent the center, the core values of European civilization.

TS: Greg, let me ask you this. This Counter-Currents project, actually it’s a press, is this a one man show? Is this just you picking up the tab, if I can put it that way? Or do you have some assistance? Because, as I said a while ago, you’ve lined up some real big shots, some real big guys like Michael O’Meara, who does some good translation. Indeed, I was struck by the good translation of Guillaume Faye, because I know Guillaume Faye. He actually caught his style, or rather meta-style, he caught his sentiments. I know Guillaume Faye very well. Are you doing that all by yourself or is somebody assisting you other than Michael Polignano?

GJ: Well, Mike Polignano is the guy who deals with the sort of technical and business side of things and I deal pretty much with all the editorial work of this project, and so I work very long hours, because I also do outside work to pay my bills. It’s challenging, but it’s also very enjoyable, because it’s what I really want to do, and so when you’re doing what you really want to do it’s always possible to find energy to do a little bit more. I am hoping to get more collaborators involved. So far, we have virtually no money, so it’s almost impossible for us to pay authors for their work. But yet we have managed to get a lot of really good authors to write really good pieces without paying them just because we have managed to appeal to their idealism and stoke their idealism, and you can go a long way with idealism. The only trouble with idealism is that if there aren’t other objective frameworks like institutions and money and incentives like that, a feeling of community, a feeling that you’re moving forward and positive feedback, it tends to run out.

So, one of the things that we’re trying to do now is raise funds so we can pay authors. We’re also trying to create a community of contributing editors who have a sense of ownership in the project and we’re hoping that will draw more work out of people and sustain their interest of the long run. Because the way I look at this project, this is what should have started 50 years ago.

TS: Exactly.

GJ: And I’m not going to point fingers and blame people for not doing this. There’s nothing productive to be gained in that, and every bit of energy that one could use doing that should be used to move things forward, so that’s how I tend to focus. But I do think this will be a multi-decade process, if not a multi-generational process.

I do, however, take solace in one fact and that is that whatever we have to do we are certainly not going to have to overthrow the United States government or anything grandiose like that. My feeling is that the system that holds Europe and the United States in its grasp is self-destructive.

TS: It’s a good point.

GJ: Although, the only question is will it destroy us before it destroys itself?

TS: That’s an even better point! Excellent, Greg!

Greg, if you don’t mind, you’re a very prolific author, so I must again thank you for all the books you have sent me. What’s your last book about and could you just give me the crux of the message and why is the book important?

GJ: Well, I hope it is important. It’s important to me. It’s a collection of essays called Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, and the basis of it was an email from one of our readers who said, “Look, why don’t you put together a collection of your simplest essays and reviews that I might be able to give my brother or cousin who’s not quite on board with us yet and would be somewhat seductive to them. It would be sort of an introductory collection of short works. Some of them rather topical, commentaries of news events and things like that.” So, I thought that’s a good idea, and I opened a file where I keep a list of all my writings, and I started shifting things around and within a few minutes the whole thing sort of fell together.

It’s in three parts. One is called Finding A White Voice, which just basically talks about how I and others can start thinking explicitly in terms of racial identity in all these political struggles that are going on about multiculturalism and so forth. The second part is called Polarizing Moments and that deals with political events that I thought were interestingly polarizing in the United States. Things like the Henry Louis Gates controversy, the 9/11 mosque controversy, the election of Barack Obama, and things like that. The last section is called White Lifestyle Politics and that’s where I develop some of my ideas on West Coast White Nationalism, and I try to show that you can be a racially conscious person without necessarily being a reactionary or a Republican. It’s an attempt really to show that you can get outside of that American Left-Right dichotomy and so there are essays in there about drug legalization, race mixing, I have a review of Jim Goad’s book Shit Magnet, which is kind of a funny review, and things about Christmas. It’s all over the board. And I have two essays at the end about Alan Watts, who is one of my favorite thinkers.

Watts is really a fascinating guy, because he was one of the great popularizers of Zen Buddhism and Taoism and Vedanta in the English language. He was a profound thinker, I believe, in his own right and he was also a man of the Right. It was not apparent to most of his followers, who were sort of New Left hippy types, but he was deeply rooted in what we would call Traditionalism, and he was a fascinating figure. I think he was in some ways a hero of mine, although there are certain things about him that I don’t admire. But still he’s an example of how a lot of our best minds really fall outside that Left-Right dichotomy, and they’re radical thinkers.

Kerry Bolton has written lots of really good essays that I am now going to publish as a book called Artists of the Right about artists in the 20th century, some of the greatest 20th century artists, who were men of the Right. The Right in the traditionalist sense that we talk about. A lot of them were modernists like Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis. So, we have to expand our minds to grapple with that kind of paradox of the radical artistic modernists like the Italian Futurists who were also men of the Right. So, that’s one of the projects we’re trying to do.

The long-term goal of this, again, is metapolitical. It’s cultural. What I would love to do is in some way work as a midwife or as an encourager of a new artistic movement. There’s a lot of artistic activity going on in the European and American racially conscious community, and yet a lot of that goes on cut off from the earlier tradition of the great 20th century writers like Pound and Knut Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence and others like that that these people could look to and take inspiration from. Much less cut off from the whole tradition of Western high art. So, one of the things I would dearly love to do is enrich and encourage this artistic subculture that’s going on and that’s absolutely necessary because art reaches more people than intellectual work ever can and it reaches them on a deeper, more emotional level.

TS: Just like the movies, right?

GJ: Exactly. The Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy that Peter Jackson did: that is one of the great works of cinema, and it’s a very powerful thing for our cause, if you will. I think it’s one of the great subversive achievements of the Western film industry. So, I would like to see more work done in that vein. I’m very delighted that Peter Jackson is now directing The Hobbit.

TS: Greg, let me ask you. Your website and publishing efforts are really fascinating. I enjoy talking to you.

I also know other people from other publishing companies who also have their “institutions” and publishing things. I don’t know if you’re familiar with a gentleman, he’s a good friend of mine, Richard Spencer, who runs Alternative Right? A website with very good publications, very good pieces. I was wondering if there was a chance of fusing our efforts together or regrouping or scooping up those people that I know personally like Australia Down Under, I know folks in England as well like Arktos? You mentioned Arktos. It’s a fascinating publishing company. They published a book of mine. Aside of our little rivalry, and of course I understand we all have a little bit of egos, is there a chance of just pulling all our efforts together and bringing them in one single place?

GJ: Well, that’s a good question. When I created Counter-Currents the initial idea that I took to Mike Polignano when we discussed this was I really wanted Counter-Currents to be the publisher that would bring out English translations of all the major works of the European New Right. Well, we just didn’t have the capital or the staff to do that, and Arktos came in and got Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye to sign contracts with them.

Well, there are two ways you could look at that. One is you could feel all hurt and jealous and everything like that. The other way is to say, “Well, there’s no shortage of work that needs to be done, and everything that they’re doing means that there’s something else that I’m free to do.” And that’s how I look at it. I look at this as an opportunity. It’s certainly not a zero sum game. I’m on very friendly terms with John Morgan at Arktos and on cordial terms with other people at Arktos. I wish them all the best, and what their coup has done is force me to reconfigure, reconceive what I am going to do. That’s good.

Now, Alternative Right is a very attractive looking webzine. We have a slightly different editorial focus than them. I do look around and think, “You know, there are very few websites that are putting out good material in English that really excite me.” In some ways, we are slightly duplicating one another’s efforts.

What I think is necessary is this: we need to get together, Richard Spencer and John Morgan and I and a few other people, Kevin MacDonald who runs The Occidental Observer, and we need to do some colluding. Alex Kurtagić is another person I would definitely like to get in on this conversation. We need to sit down and we need to collude so that we do not duplicate one another’s efforts but rather we compliment one another’s efforts. I think that is very important, because there are very few of us, and we have a lot of work to do if we’re going to change the world. So yeah, this is an important thing, and I’ve been taking steps in the direction of trying to get people together so we can engage in some of that collusion.

I think that in the years down the road we are going to work together more harmoniously because there’s a little behind the scenes coordination going on. So, that’s a very good point, Tom. I appreciate it.

TS: By all means. Like I said, we all have a little bit of egocentrism, we all have vanities, which is quite natural and normal. But at this stage in our history, and again I don’t want to sound too pathetic. I certainly appreciate your noble effort, because I know you personally. You’re not a guy who likes quarreling. We’re not going to discuss about that. But I certainly like insisting among my friends and foes, folks, let’s just unite our efforts. You have certain things where you really excel, where you’re the best and I’ve probably got certain things where I might be good. So, we certainly have to pull our efforts together. That’s a good point.

Greg, let me ask you. What are your next projects now? I’m sure you’ve got some secrets now. Are you going to be publishing some more books? Are you translating something? And tell us a little more about your project. Are there any conferences that you might be setting up or something? Just feel free to tell a little bit, but try to intrigue a little bit, especially for my listeners here in Sweden and Norway. I did not even realize the other day that I got quite a few people listening to me here in Scandinavia.

GJ: Well, we’ve been looking at the countries from which we get the most traffic and the Scandinavian countries are always in the top ten or top twenty countries from which we have readers, which I think is very interesting. The number one country is the United States. After that is Great Britain, Germany, Canada, but Sweden, which is a much smaller country than Great Britain or Germany, usually comes in around 5^th or 6^th in terms of readership. So, I think that’s very interesting.

What are the projects that I’m working on now? I am working on the first volume of North American New Right, which is our annual journal. The idea of North American New Right is basically based on Tyr, which is this neo-pagan publication edited by friends of mine, and the idea is to bring out an annual volume that’s basically a book that contains interviews, essays, reviews and translations. The goal is to have a thing that showcases the best work being done by the North American New Right and also brings in exemplary work from the European New Right in translation. The goal is basically to advance, year by year, this intellectual movement. The first volume has a lot of really good material in it. I’m really very pleased that we have something so good to begin with. Every year we are going to bring out a new one.

After that, I’m going to bring out Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right, which I think is a wonderful book, and then down the road we’re going to bring out . . . a collection of Trevor Lynch’s reviews. . . . There is a collection of essays by Julius Evola called East and West, which are East – West comparative philosophy essays. That’s something we will bring out. And I’m searching for other things. Derek Hawthorne, who has been writing on the German mountain films, is going to publish a little monograph, a thin volume on the German mountain films with us and also a thicker book on D. H. Lawrence. A lot of the chapters of that have already been published on the Counter-Currents website. . . . There’s no shortage of material for us. We’re going to publish another novel by Andy Nowicki in the fall called Under the Nihil. So, that is something that if you liked The Columbine Pilgrim, you’ll enjoy it.

That’s basically an outline of where we’re going from here.

TS: I’m glad you mentioned D. H. Lawrence. My wife is a great fan of his. She knows every book of his. She knows all of his poems by heart.

But anyway, I’m glad indeed by what you are doing and I’m sure we’ll catch up shortly when I’m over there.

Thank you, Greg, and thank you, folks! Until next time, this is Tom Sunić from VoR. Bye for now!