The Accidental Nationalist

1,935 words

^[1]It’s always painful watching conservatives tie themselves into knots trying to defend Western civilization without resorting to race realism. On one hand, they say, West is best and always has been. On the other, they claim that since we’re all the same under skin, virtually anyone can become a Westerner. I’m sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. If Western civilizations—until recently the product solely of white people of European descent—are as great as they say then it stands to reason that there must be something special about the whites who made it so. By the same token, if race is just an incidental thing, then we have to argue against the data to explain why no nonwhite civilization ever equaled any of the greatest Western civilizations without first emulating them.

To any race realist, such dissonance rings loudly false and requires magical thinking to reconcile. The conservative, however, doesn’t seem to notice . . . or pretends not to. It’s a frustrating and annoying state of affairs when you share so much in common with a person, except those things which are most important.

Sadly, one of my favorite normie bloggers, Kim du Toit, served up a bowl of such atonal mess in his July 19th post entitled “Not Quite Guilty as Charged ^[2].” In it, he attempts to reconcile his American nationalism and his race denialism by claiming that the greatness of the West was only accidentally the result of the efforts of white people. Yes, folks, Western Civilization was nothing more than an accident.

Whoops! Oh, look! There’s The History of the Peloponnesian War. Whoops! There’s the Magna Carta! Whoops! There’s the complete works of Shakespeare. Whoops! There’s the periodic table of the elements! And the airplane! And the automobile! And the internet! Boy, with all these happy accidents, aren’t we just so darn lucky!

Seriously, such mocking doesn’t quite do Mr. du Toit justice—although I do find it amusing. I don’t think this is what he really meant. Here is what the man himself has to say on the matter:

The fact that our culture has its roots in “White” (European) populations is frankly irrelevant. It’s an accident of both history and geography, just like the color of my skin, and I am not going to go into the tangent of why: it just simply is.

“An accident of both history and geography”? If so, then why did scientific revolutions appear not once but twice in Europe and nowhere else? Why did the industrial revolution occur first in Europe? Why did Europeans establish modern fields of science and reach unsurpassed heights in music, art, and literature in the past 100 to 300 years? Why were the Europeans the first to traverse the globe and fly to the Moon? That’s a lot of accidents, don’t you think?

Further, if these were nothing more than Diamond-esque accidents of history and geography, then why didn’t black Africans in their hundreds of thousands of years on that very large and geographically diverse continent of Africa ever once stumble into inventing the wheel? Why didn’t the North American Indian tribes ever trip and fall into the written word? Why didn’t the Arabs ever slip on a banana and invent anything as sophisticated as the telegraph? Why didn’t the East Asians, for all their technical skill and intelligence, ever once step on an upturned rake and produce something as brilliant as Beethoven’s Ninth or Newton’s three laws of motion? (Olympian standards in this last question, true, but my point still stands.)

Of course, some nonwhites have expressed genius and creativity throughout history. For example, the Persians and the Arabs contributed a great deal to algebra. Muslims produced great works of architecture like the Taj Mahal. The Han dynasty in China certainly equaled or surpassed the contemporaneous West in terms of mathematics and astronomy (they were the first to use negative numbers). Yet none of this can really equal the flurry of intellectual and artistic activity which took place in the West since the Renaissance, all things considered.

If such important “accidents” took place consistently and almost exclusively with whites and only a handful of nonwhites throughout history, perhaps it is time to revise your idea that these were accidents to begin with. Perhaps they weren’t accidents at all. Perhaps white people of European descent are for whatever reason blessed with a tolerably-high average IQ and wide standard deviation of intelligence which allows for a greater proportion of geniuses in the general population than any other race of people. Perhaps they are also blessed with a hard-to-quantify creativity and curiosity that you can’t easily find in nonwhite populations, even in the most successful ones.

That certainly would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? That certainly goes a lot farther than your explanation: “I am not going to go into the tangent of why: it just simply is.”

If you want to say that European genotypes and the thousands of years of evolution which produced them were the results of “accidents,” fine. I wasn’t there, and anyway elements of randomness are certainly accounted for in our understanding of both evolution and genetics. But when you leave out genetics and evolution completely and then proclaim that the greatness of Western Civilization is only coincidentally related to the white people that created it and made it great, that’s when you begin to lose me. You don’t explain how or why. Instead you retreat into magical thinking and claim that “it just simply is.”

Since when can one aver something into being? If that’s the case, then I shall aver that I deserve a dinner date with Jennifer Lawrence. It just simply is, dammit. It just simply is.

Sorry for the snark, Kim, but race and nationalism make up much of our wheelhouse here at Counter-Currents. And if you’re going to be opining on these topics you better have something a little more persuasive than ‘it just simply is’ up your sleeve, or I am going to ding you every single time.

I’m doing this not to be a pain (and if you have read this far, thank you). I am doing it because the stakes are too high for me not to. The continued survival of the West and, yes, of white people in the West, hangs in the balance. If you’re wrong, Kim, it’s a big freaking deal, because you are opening the door for nonwhites to enter the West and eventually exert political control over it. Over time, as they settle in and grow as a sub-population, they will see to it that that door gets opened wider and wider and wider. It’s only natural, since all people are tribal at heart and want to see more of their own kind in their neighborhoods, schools, offices, and places of worship. At some point, there will be no closing that door at all, and whites like you and me will be making up only thirty or thirty-five percent of a population we once dominated. Is this really what you want?

Here are your words:

I’m immensely proud of the fact that so many immigrants of different skin colors have assimilated into the dominant American culture and ditched most of their deficient home cultures for the greater American one. Like I did.

Again, I have to ask, “Really?” I’m reminded of a Steve Sailer article ^[3] about how the assimilation of Mexicans into the dominant Anglo-American culture has lost quite a bit of steam since the heyday of Lee Trevino. If you don’t believe him, here is an AEI study ^[4] saying basically the same thing. I am also reminded of the recent Vox Day post ^[5] which featured a family of Hispanics posing for pictures while proudly flipping off Mount Rushmore. Where is the assimilation there? Do you also see a desire to assimilate when Representative Luis Gutierrez tells his followers in Spanish to punish Americans who wish to enforce border security ^[6]? Do you also see assimilation when Hispanic lawmakers in your home state start fist fights ^[7] with Representative Matthew Rinaldi for simply trying to enforce immigration laws?

As nonwhite populations surge in America, the pressure for them to assimilate with the dominant white culture will only decrease over time. Further, as they sense weakness in the dominant culture, they will start to vie for dominance. This is what the evidence shows. This is what history shows. This is also what Derbyshirean pessimism ^[8] predicts. And the apparent optimism of civic nationalists like yourself in the face of all this is worrisome.

If you’re right, then okay. But if you’re wrong, then there is no going back except with massive amounts of bloodshed. That is a hell of a risk you seem to be bent on taking, Kim. On the other hand, if white nationalists like myself are correct, then forming a white ethnostate is our way of dodging a demographic bullet. And if we’re wrong, well, then we will still have our ethnostate, which, judging from 1965 America, would be a pretty damn good thing in its own right. Better than what we have now, for sure. So it’s in-win, baby. The only people who lose out in this case would the nonwhites who have something to offer current-day America but get turned away. But you know what? That is not our problem, nor is it incumbent upon us to make it our problem. Better for such people to improve their own civilizations rather than demographically disintegrate ours.

Does that seem harsh? Well, envisioning an America in which whites make up only a quarter or third of the population seems a tad harsher, in my opinion.

Make no mistake, I appreciate your staunch American nationalism and Western chauvinism. I also understand that you have common sense and that you’re not arguing for open borders. I see you as an invaluable ally in the broader culture war against the Left. Truly, you are sui generis in today’s political landscape. Tell me if this Venn diagram doesn’t express this rather nicely:

Not too many people in that center section other than you, are there?

I just believe that white nationalists and civic nationalists could be better allies if we better appreciate our differences on what we stand for and why we fight. You seem to buy into the idea of America as a “proposition nation,” and I don’t. This seems to be based on the idea that Western greatness is only incidentally connected to the race of its creators, an unproven idea, which you, obviously, embrace.

I don’t. You do. And if the factual arguments above won’t sway you, perhaps the following one will.

You know else embraces your theory of racial incidentalism? Antifa. Yes, that Antifa, the left-wing, terrorist organization itself.

Please take a look at this video ^[10]. It was taken during the recent American Renaissance conference near Nashville, Tennessee. At about the 1:50 mark, a protestor among the Antifa presence there harangues an AmRen attendee by saying the following:

How can you look around at some people of color or people that are disadvantaged and think that you’re better because of some goddamned accidental qualities that you’ve got?

Sound familiar, does it? Yes, accidental qualities, like your white skin or the fact that you are descended from white people. You’ve said so yourself. So tell me then, how can we resist the enemy, let alone beat him, if we yield to his strongest argument before the fight even begins? Racial equality is the bread and butter of the Left. Concede that, and it will only be a matter of time before we’re swept off the field.