One problem that has interested me for a number of years is the decline of masculinity - aggressive, combative, warrior masculinity - in the West.
A decline in that masculinity is evident when we compare the Far Left of today to that of the 1930s and 1940s. The old communists were hard men, husky types, brawlers - we all know the story of William Joyce, whose face was cut open by communists wielding razors. Today, however, communist men in Australia and elsewhere in the West are sissy types; if they are not homosexual (and the vast majority of Trotskyite males in Australia are homosexual), they are sissies, a bunch of pajama boys.
Outside of politics, we see a similar decline, especially when it comes to the men of Generation X and Generation Y: we see an absence of a warrior ethos.
Part of the warrior ethos was not taking things lying down. Both the Athenians and the Spartans were willing to take up arms to defend their city-states from invasion; in the case of Australia and Britain, however, no men have taken up arms - figuratively and literally - to defend their countries from the invading armies of Africa, India, Islam and China. They don't appear to give a stuff. Passivity is the name of the game, especially among the Generation X and Y men of Australia, who tend to be a soft and flabby bunch, both physically and spiritually.
This flabbiness relates to the growing phenomenon of mainstream nerdism and geekism in the West and the general alienation from the world outside them - including the political sphere and the community - that they exhibit. Alienation can be rudeness and a failure to adhere to society's norms when it comes to the treatment of others. One may think that bad manners, oikishness and rudeness towards women, children and old ladies are 'masculine' and make one a tough guy and thereby aren't nerdish or geekish, but that is not the case. The two - bad manners and geekish introversion - are perfectly compatible. Indeed, paying attention to one's body, hygiene, fitness, nutrition, and to manners, customs and social mores is, in essence, adaptation to the outside world (and the adaptation of it to one). Neglect of politics, community, customs, manners, social mores and neglect of one's appearance go together as a package.
Likewise, political passivity, and a lack of (what the sociobiologists call) reproductive success tend to go together. As a nationalist, I shake my head at the soft young men and feel like saying to them, 'Your country is being invaded by Chinese, and you're not married and you're not having Aussie babies. What are you doing to boost the number of Aussies relative to the Chinese invaders? Nothing. In fact, you're behaving in a way that's repellent to any prospective wife and mother of your children'.
One then has to ask if fascism really is possible in today's West. In the 1920s and 1930s, the nationalists responded to Bolshevist aggression by going out into the streets and walloping commies; they also took up a campaign against Jews and gypsies, both of whom were regarded as being the cause of many social ills. The Golden Dawn is one of the few groups in Europe and the West which shows that same combative and aggressive spirit. That spirit is lacking Australia today, and in America as well. A constant refrain, heard on American Far Right message boards, is that America's young men aren't willing to stand up to criminal African-American predators who assault whites on the streets and in their homes; that white Americans of both sexes have become the Eloi from H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine.
Some conspiracy-minded Americans attribute this docility to the introduction of mind-control drugs in the water supply. I believe that these conspiracy-minded people are half-right: there is a mind-control drug which is consumed by a large proportion of the Generation X and Y male population in the West, and that drug wasn't there seventy to eighty years ago; in my view, it contributes a great deal to the passivity and docility of today's young men.
But before I deal with that topic in more detail, I will respond to a preliminary objection: that the absence of 'fascist masculinity' is due to massive political repression and also to the Western liberal establishment's program - which has been running for forty years now - of social engineering and political indoctrination in Culture Marxism. This objection seems plausible at first sight, but if we look a little closer, we will see flaws. For one thing, despite the police state repression and liberal-democratic authoritarianism in the West - which has only increased in the past ten to fifteen years - more people in the West are being exposed to racialist, neofascist and Far Rightist ideas than ever before because of the Internet. I first became involved in nationalism after discovering Doctor William Pierce's Internet radio broadcasts in 2000, and I estimate that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of young men in the West became exposed to similar ideas the same way. But the phenomenon of increased freedom of speech and increased exposure to nationalist and racialist ideas hasn't stopped the slide of Western men into apathy, docility, passivity and softness.
So what is the cause of this decline? The male characters of Mad Men are, for all their faults, more rugged and assertive than today's Australian or American or British young white males - why is this the case? What did the WWII generation, and the Mad Men generation, have that we didn't? Or rather, is it the case that we have something that they (fortunately) didn't? The answer is, in my opinion, addiction to the Internet - in particular, to Internet pornography.
Up until a few months ago, I viewed Internet pornography as a vice - like smoking, alcohol, gambling, drugs, World of Warcraft - which really was an unavoidable part of life, one that would always be with us, and one which should be discouraged, perhaps, but not one worthy of censure (unless it became 'excessive', whatever 'excessive' in this case means). I didn't think that it had long-term effects on the brain, and one's character, at all. In fact, as a racialist, I believed that pornography had a long-term positive effect: it would increase the ardour of white Western man and motivate them to make babies, thereby increasing the population of white Westerners.
Then I happened upon this cross-post at the Vikingbitch blog: '10 Reasons to Stop Using Porn'. I scoffed at first, but was intrigued by the testimonials of the men who had stopped using Internet pornography and masturbating and had experienced a real turnaround in their lives. From there I went to Gary Wilson's site on Internet pornography addiction . There's a lot of material there; probably the best place to start is his six-part YouTube clip slide show. The refreshing thing about Gary Wilson's approach is that he views Internet pornography addiction in terms of neurochemicals and neuropsychology - he is bereft of any religious, Christian-fundamentalist moralising on the topic.
The best way to explain it would be to use the following analogy. Suppose you have some marvellous computer program, called World of Ecstason, which allows you to plug electrodes into your brain and induce states of pleasure similar to what one gets from drugs such as Ecstasy, crack-cocaine, heroin and crystal meth. World of Ecstason has different settings: one can increase the intensity of the pleasure and other emotions by turning a dial. After repeated use of the program, the 'low' settings which were once so pleasurable and exciting become less so; fortunately, one can increase the setting from 'low' to 'medium', 'medium-high' and beyond.
If you try World of Ecstason and like it, after a while a few things will happen. You will end up using it more and more, devote more time, money and energy to it, and withdraw a corresponding amount of time and energy from your normal pursuits (including socialising with friends and family); you may become withdrawn, irritable, moody and less responsive and adaptive to the real world; you may pay less and less attention to friends, family, one's hygiene, one's appearance, one's job, one's duties (e.g., housework). Your life, and your character, may end up changing - albeit in a subtle way.
One can predict the results of all this: addiction, which makes one decadent and also a little bit crazy.
In an arc in The Flash comic book in 1979, a convict called Clive Yorkin is experimented upon using a device similar to World of Ecstason (or the pain / pleasure conditioner in A Clockwork Orange (1971)):
The homicidal Clive Yorkin learns to manipulate the pleasure-inducing function of the device and becomes a kind of masturbating, gibbering maniac:
There is also a beautifully-illustrated story in Marvel Comics' adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Kull. An evil wizard gives the barbarian Kull a magic mirror which allows Kull to see magical visions of other worlds. He ends up becoming transfixed by the mirror and neglecting his kingdom, which falls into chaos.
I'm not saying, of course, that Internet addicts will end up like Clive Yorkin or Kull of Atlantis: only that we have to see what these stories are - metaphors for Internet addiction (written long before the invention of high-speed broadband).
So, what does all this have to do with politics? The men in the testimonials mentioned before report that they saw increases in energy, enthusiasm, motivation, optimism, sociability,
assertiveness and confidence. They also became more masculine in physical ways: i.e., their voices became deeper, their facial hair started regrowing more quickly, and more thickly (and even thinning of the hair on one's head stopped altogether). In some cases, the men had suffered from erectile dysfunction - which is completely abnormal for healthy men in their twenties and thirties - and their normal sexual functioning returned after giving up pornography. They experienced a newfound appreciation for women in the real world outside of the Internet; some of them began relationships, while others saw improvements in their existing relationships and marriages.
In other words, they recovered their masculinity and became assertive and adaptive to the outside world. Adaptability and assertiveness - these some of the qualities, I believe, that are necessary for a successful activist for neofascist and nationalist politics.
One may object that 'addiction' here is too strong a word. Surely one can't be addicted to Internet pornography, in the way that one can be addicted cocaine or alcohol? Wilson's definition of addiction is a broad one and I imagine that the vast majority of habitual pornography users are addicted by his criteria. What's more, the number of addicts is growing, given that the number of users in the male population is very large (especially in Generation X and Y (the baby boomer male population is, in my experience, not very confident with computers)) and the increasing availability of high-speed broadband.
Wilson argues that pornography stimulates the same parts of the brain as drugs. What's more, the relationship between pornography and drug addiction is evident in the fact that severe and repeated use of pornography leads to desensitisation, an inability to be aroused by 'normal' pornography. One can only be turned on by harder stuff, by more and more perverse pornography: i.e., white women copulating with BDSM practitioners, negroes, midgets, transsexuals, whatever. Long-term addicts who are otherwise heterosexual admit they have developed a taste for gay and transsexual pornography (Wilson even has a jargon word for this - Homosexual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), which of course leads them to question their heterosexuality. It's a long slide into perversion, and the end point is (fake) snuff pornography and, of course, child pornography.
What of masturbation without pornography? We are all taught today that masturbation is healthy and that no harm comes of it. In truth, however, it can cause harm. There is a splendid quotation from C.S. Lewis which appears on a thread at the Reddit No-Fap message board, which I will reproduce here:
By C.S. Lewis:
Masturbation
“For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.
And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.
For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival.
Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.
In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself…After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.”
(Bold emphasis: mine)
Remember Lewis passed in 1963, long before the Internet age gave way to easily accessible pornography and our own harem of imaginary brides (those "special" videos we save to watch especially with that certain "bride"). I suppose timeless truths never die.
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1v12n0/cs_lewis_on_pornography/
So what is to be done? Politically, nothing should be done. I believe that pornography, and masturbating to pornography (or PMOing, in the jargon - Pornography Masturbation Orgasming) is really a problem for the individual. No government can stamp out vice entirely - whether it be pornography, prostitution, gambling, smoking, drinking, drugs - and it's a matter of individual choice as to whether one does anything about one's vice and what steps one takes to combat it and thereby improve one's life.
There are a number of obstacles standing in the way of a person who wants to beat his pornography addiction. It is tremendously difficult to give up pornography - some claim that it is even more addictive than nicotine or alcohol. A person who sets out to drive pornography, and all the temptations and lusts it brings, out of one's head can end up putting too much pressure on himself and developing unrealistic expectations. As a result, he will eventually snap and revert to his old ways.
Another obstacle is the fact that the anti-pornography movement (including the forums at Reddit) can really be off-putting. Christian evangelism had strong ties to the temperance movement of a hundred years ago and helped bring about, and sustain, the Prohibition in the US. Many in the anti-porn movement are fundamentalist Christians, and even the ones who claim to be secular are reminiscent of temperance evangelicals. That religious side of it is fine for some, but not for all.
On top of all that, the struggle against addiction is just that - a struggle. What's often not mentioned in the message boards is the physical and psychological strain placed on one by abstention. One will experience, after a period of time, swollen testicles (which can be extremely uncomfortable - as though one has just had a vasectomy operation), knotted muscles in one's back and neck... Also, one feels increasingly aggressive. One poster at Reddit wrote:
http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1v93bj/talked_to_a_psychotherapist_about_my_porn_escort/
My argument here has been that increased male aggressiveness and self-assertion in the West is a good thing - and a necessary thing if the Western civilisation is to survive. But there is a trade-off here. Does one really want to become a monster with an excess of testosterone?
I recently saw a documentary on the history of slavery in Brazil. Slavery in South America was especially brutal, and the documentary makers attributed the cruelty of the Brazilian slave-owners to the fact that the newly arrived colonial settlers were single, male and young - not many women from Europe came to live in Brazil and South America. (The European men in the Caribbean and the American South were smart enough to bring plenty of white women with them). The explanation of these documentary makers is somewhat reductionist, but I tend to agree with it; only that I contend that cruelty and aggressiveness of the European adventurers who founded Brazil is what is needed today - in small doses. A fraction of it, combined with a nationalist ideology, would lead to a surging tide among our young men - and the Culture Bolsheviks, and the immigrants they have brought to Western lands - would be swept away.
So, to get down to brass tacks: how does one give up the pornography vice? From reading the observations of others, the first thing one should do is regain control over the content of one's computer. Some people can't bear to delete their precious collection of pornographic links, saved images and videos, so the best thing to do is to save it all on a USB or external hard drive and then store it in a safe place outside of one's home (e.g., in a locker or a desk drawer at one's workplace). The next step is to put up a blocker on one's computer which will prevent the viewing of pornography - K9 is free and probably the best. K9 does have an override password, but again, one can keep that password in a safe place outside one's home which is not easy to access. Once temptation is removed, one's masturbatory urges tend to recede, and the less one masturbates, the faster one gets the 'porn monkey' (the pornography vice) off one's back. One shouldn't look at pornography, or masturbate, at all - well, maybe only a few times a year.
The goal is to drastically reduce one's pornography usage, but one shouldn't have unrealistic expectations. The main thing is: prepare to fail. One will fall off the wagon now and then, but what's important is that one makes progress towards moderation and not towards the continence of a monk or saint.
Initially, one may think that putting a blocker on one's computer and storing one's pornography collection away is a sign of weakness: the afflicted person simply doesn't have the willpower not to look at pornography and give in. But supposing that one wants to quit smoking - one wouldn't associate with smokers, at home or at work, and one would want to avoid passive smoking; certainly, one wouldn't keep cigarette cartons and ashtray filled with cigarette stubs around one's house. It's the same with pornography. Cleaning up one's computer and putting safeguards on it is the first step towards gaining a sense of control.
