I.
Over twenty years ago, I read a book on postmodernism by a left-wing author who decried the horrible world of the postmodern age: a world of Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1990) brought to life, a world of 'hyperreal' capitalism (like that depicted in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987)), a world of gangsta rap (a musical genre which encourages African-Americans to shoot each other for the possession of pairs of Adidas sneakers), a world of the hitherto unknown and frightening phenomena of the Information Superhighway, Virtual Reality, Cyberspace, Cybersex, 'Electronic Mail'... The author, a baby boomer, wrung his hands in despair over these cultural and economic developments, but I had the opposite reaction: the postmodern Brave New World sounded exactly like the one I lived in - and exciting and fun to boot.
At the time, had I been indoctrinated with white nationalist and dissident Right ideas, I would have commiserated with this left-winger and lamented white Western Man's lost authenticity; perhaps, had I National Bolshevik tendencies, I would have shaken my fist, too, at the Center Right which in the nineties celebrated the End of History and the downfall of communism. But - and this is no coincidence - at the time I was fairly innocent of any politics. In the nineties, I voted, I was interested in social questions, I felt sympathy for the plight of oppressed brown folk overseas (the Palestinians and the Kurds), I was interested in the important policy debates of the seventies and eighties (monetarism versus Keynesianism, for example); but at the same, I wasn't necessarily a political animal. I myself only became truly politicised after discovering the ideas of the Far Right in the 2000s.
In the 1990s, extremist ideologies flourished: you had survivalists, militias, evangelicals, cults like the Branch Davidians and Heaven's Gate, terrorists of the Left and Right (Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh), skinhead gangs, and for me most important of all, white nationalists, and it was in this decade that the careers of Tom Metzger, William Pierce, Richard Butler, Ben Klassen and Don Black began to take off. But because of the then-novelty of the Internet, the ideas of these men did not spread far and wide, and for the most part, the general public (the 'normies', of which I was one) did not encounter them. My politicisation only commenced after the Internet became available in every home, and it was then that I discovered White Nationalism 1.0 (as Hunter Wallace calls it) - and with it, anti-Semitism and Holocaust Revisionism, Julius Evola and Francis Parker Yockey, Savitri Devi and George Lincoln Rockwell... Before my 'red-pilling' in the early 2000s, I had spent the nineties in a state of (what seems to me now to be) blissful ignorance.
These days, quite a few in the Far Right movement look back on the 1980s and 1990s through rose-coloured glasses - they will see the 1990s, for instance, as the 'last conservative decade'. I feel nostalgia, too, for the decade of my lost youth, but for different reasons. To explain. Becoming 'red-pilled' can liberate you but at the same time it can impose its own peculiar burdens. Obsessions with certain political or social questions can spiral out of control - one only has to see how global warming (which may be real or not) has drawn many white people into what is akin to a cult. At the least, thinking too much about a subject such as the 'white genocide', the 'great replacement', the 'scramble for Europe' can weigh you down; you begin to feel a tremendous sense of duty which can make itself felt in every nook and cranny of your life. Shedding that responsibility, then, becomes attractive, and so does looking backwards to the time when you did not feel that responsibility.
Assuming that 'blue-pilling' is desirable, how does one do it? The answer is: one can't. For instance, once you make the discovery that the mass gassing of Jews in giant gas chambers in WWII probably didn't happen, and that the Jews insisting that it did happen are doing so for mostly for religious reasons, you simply cannot forget it in a hurry. One would need to perform a lobotomy on oneself.
The same applies to that other subject beloved by white nationalists: the 'colour of crime'. Knowledge of that signifies that one has become worldly, streetwise; renunciation of that knowledge means that one has reverted to being a naïf, a simpleton.
One cannot attain a state of forgetfulness and recover lost innocence, but one can change one's perspective, and key to that is the recognition that much of the Far Right lives in the past.
Take, for example, race-mixing: who, in the current year, cares about it? And who, in 1989 or 1999, had a problem with it? Only white nationalists opposed race-mixing and were obsessed with it (and punishing it - witness the popularity of the famous passages in the Turner Diaries (1978) concerning the 'Day of the Rope'). This explains why every evening on 4Chan/Pol outsiders will try and spam the board with race-mixing pornography. They know that it 'triggers' the white nationalists, Neo-Nazis and Alt-Rightists, and they experience a transgressive, almost erotic thrill in this 'triggering'. But the 'normie', looking at it all from the outside, would see it as ridiculous, and rightfully so. Race-mixing, and pornography depicting it, would have transgressed social mores in 1930 or 1830, but not in the current year.
The posting of German National Socialist material from the 1930s and 1940s constitutes another example of being out of sync with the current year. The NSDAP speeches, articles, book chapters seems particularly incongruous when they appear on websites which are not German, and furthermore, the old German material does not seem to gel with the other content, which mostly concerns breaking American and European news. But, on closer examination, it becomes apparent that the old German speeches and writings represent, to the editors of Radio Aryan, Renegade Tribune and CarolynYeager.Net, an authenticity, a truth, which has been lost in the modern era; they serve the same purpose as Rick Deckard's photographs (taken in the 19th century?) strewn across the top of Deckard's piano in Blade Runner. They are intended to evoke a past which is more pure, more beautiful, than the present.
Hunter Wallace's Occidental Dissent recently featured some footage (entitled 'Paradise Lost') of St Louis in 1965 - and indeed, that footage does manage to capture a Paradise Lost, a lost world of handsome men and beautiful women, white men and women, all of whom deported themselves in the best Mad Men style (and Mad Men was another exercise in nostalgia, conveying a longing for the lost white past). Meditations on the decline of the white West, a decline which dates from the post-war era, form a staple of dissident Right polemics, and without a doubt, these touch upon a truth - the cleavage between the old world and the new. Sometime around 1990, it was as though a segment of our familiar white, Western world was teleported and joined into the world of Blade Runner, postmodernism and cyberpunk.
The cyberpunk genre of science fiction was conceived in the 1980s by authors William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), but as old as it is now, it still manages to capture the essence of modernity - much more so than German National Socialism or Southern nationalism - and it remains popular enough to the extent that a much-hyped upcoming XBox game, Cyberpunk 2077, promises to deliver to gamer fans a return to the good old eighties cyberpunk / Blade Runner experience (see 'Neon and corporate dystopias: why does cyberpunk refuse to move on?'). It is true that the trailers for Cyberpunk 2077 depict a locale ('Night City') which is bereft of children, families, the elderly - all of whom we would expect to see in the everyday life. But even so, 'Night City' stands closer to our world than the world of Berlin in 1940 or St Louis in 1965.
Fragmentation, a sense of loss, and the sundering of wholes - whether they be ethnic, religious, national, class - accompanies the postmodern and makes up one of postmodernism's most persistent themes. That subject is tackled by the author of the article, 'California is a Real Life Cyberpunk Dystopia', but when he comes to how it relates to race and immigration, multiculturalism and 'diversity', he takes the politically correct line. But no matter, he has done us a service by making an important fact evident, and that is: the Los Angeles of Blade Runner of the future year of 2019 lacks the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of the Los Angeles of the 1940s. (The latter era, the era of film noir, numbers among the inspirations for Ridley Scott's film). In Blade Runner, only one to two dozen whites seem to live in Los Angeles; all the rest have moved away - perhaps to another planet, 'Off World'. (Interestingly, the much-maligned sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017), boasts more white characters than the original).
The white characters of Blade Runner look at this state of affairs as a fait accompli - nothing much can be done about it. But a white nationalist / dissident Rightist would say otherwise. He knows (or claims to know) the precise point at which the old, authentic world of yesteryear transformed into a cyberpunk dystopia; he knows who is responsible for that change (Jews, globalist elites, liberals, baby boomers, Cultural Marxists, Illuminati Satanists, corporations, et al.); and he opines that present conditions will worsen unless his advice is followed.
Deckard and the other white denizens of Los Angeles in 2019 (and not to mention the protagonists of Neuromancer and Cyberpunk 2077) would disagree with the last of these propositions, one can imagine; they would retort, 'How can things get any worse?'. And they would deem the other two theses - who is responsible for the transition and when it happened - as largely irrelevant.
But otherwise, they would agree with our fringe rightist (or leftist) in that the cyberpunk / postmodernist world is bad. As the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan notes, postmodernism imagines 'a world without nature'. At the end of the original version of Blade Runner (the version which was released in cinemas in 1982), Deckard and Rachael flee Los Angeles (and all its neon, rain, smog, darkness and Asians) and return to nature; in the closing scene before the end credits, Deckard pilots his flying car, Rachael by his side, over the sunlit rollicking hills of regional California.
II.
After first coming across William Pierce's famous Dissident American Voices Internet radio broadcasts, I treated them as entertainment. But after listening to a dozen broadcasts in a row, Pierce's sermons had their desired effect, and I began to ask myself if there was something to what Pierce was saying. The question bothered me enough to prompt an exploration, and I soon discovered Stormfront and Michael Hoffman II's writings on the Talmud. From that point on, there was no looking back. I abandoned my 'normie' political position (or absence of a political position) and with it, my 'normie' commonsensicality.
It took me some time to recognise that the Far Right (as well as the Far Left) upholds certain morals and values which would strike the 'normie' as being quite strange. The strictures of white nationalism and dissident rightism command one to forgo certain activities which the 'normie' regards as innocuous - for example, the watching of anime (see this rather bizarre article from the Renegade Tribune, 'Anime is unhealthy - here's why you need to stop watching it').
Robert Stark's radio show features a wide variety of guests, many of whom stand at the fringes of the Far Right movement or even outside the Far Right altogether. Stark, a bohemian, prefers the novel and the unusual, and at first sight his guests seem to be an odd bunch of characters - but in comparison to many white nationalists (like the author of the aforementioned article) they really are not. In Stark World, you are allowed to like anime. This explains why, to me at least, so many of his guests seem comfortable and familiar: they remind of the people I went to university with.
Both the Far Right and Left share a puritanical distaste for consumerism - and shopping malls. In contrast, Stark likes shopping malls, and did a broadcast with Matthew Pegas and David Cole in which the three share fond reminisces of the malls of their youth. Compare this to passages from the leftist Carl Boggs' book, The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000), which offer a rather sour Marxist denunciation of nineties shopping mall culture:
In such a transformed American political culture lies another powerful element of post-Fordism: an unprecedented resort to personal consumption, which finds ready expression through the countless images circulated in the spheres of advertising, mass media, popular culture, sports, and fashion... The shopping mall perhaps best embodies this post-Fordist reality... The consumer mall functions in an altogether different way to induce privatism and passivity, constituting a main linkage between corporate agendas and everyday life... [By the 1970s] soon even people who made up the urban poor could partake of a consumer world made more seductive by a wide array of glittery images, media spectacles, and material inducements of all sorts. As part of the revitalized American dream, sprawling malls and shopping centers became virtual universes unto themselves, escapes from the demanding regimen of work and everyday life - all fueled by advertising, the credit economy, increased physical mobility, and of course the wonders of sophisticated technology.
In his program on shopping malls, Stark observes that malls created a sense of community. Boggs differs, and sees that community as false, artificial:
Reflecting on how commodification sustains an ethos of privatised withdrawal, Lauren Langman argues that mall culture offers a type of pseudodemocratic experience that gives people a sense of public engagement while also discouraging in myriad ways any genuine civic participation... Here the mall phenomenon serves as yet another conduit of corporate colonisation in that the commodification of social (and political) life can easily generate a false sense of empowerment that works its magic across class, regional, ethnic, gender and age divisions... For adults the mall constitutes a ubiquitous outlet for selfhood through the acquisition of clothes, electronics, cosmetics, videos, music CDs, and the like.
To Boggs, we can't have that. We can't have this either:
It should be noted, as well, that other places where people gather - restaurants, cafes, bars, theaters - are also frequently located in or near shopping malls. For young people, in particular, this prime outpost of consumerism offers glitzy alternatives and a constant stream of seductive images and spectacles that provide temporary tangible relief from the mundane world of job insecurity, career anxieties, school, family and personal problems, or simply boredom. Hence, the mall phenomenon, deeply rooted in everyday life, far transcends in its impact the historic presence of the downtown Chamber of Commerce in most American cities.
Boggs should be happy, as for a multitude of reasons, shopping malls in America seem to be entering a stage of terminal decline. (Amusingly enough, the Wiki article on the phenomenon of the 'Dead Mall' makes a connection between the decline of the mall and one of Robert Stark's favourite themes: 'Due to their often retro and outdated aesthetic, dead malls as a cultural phenomenon are often loosely associated with vaporwave aesthetics and music'). The point is that the American leftist Boggs here sounds uncannily like a Southern nationalist or white nationalist. Both the American Far Right and Left regard capitalist consumerism as sinful, evil, perhaps irredeemably so, and their sermonising on the subject recalls Protestant evangelising, so much so that the possibility exists that the attitudes of both the American Far Left and Right are rooted in the faith of their holders' upbringing. The fervor of William Pierce always reminded me of that of a hell and brimstone evangelical, and perhaps Pierce was influenced, unconsciously, by the Southern Protestantism of his childhood...
A reaction against this moralism accounts in part for the success in the 2010s of 4Chan/Pol and Chan culture. In true postmodernist fashion, the 'based irony bros' of 4Chan did not take politics seriously, at least not as Pierce, Duke, Metzger, Black and Butler did, and secondly, they condoned (and did not condemn) some of the most serious vices of contemporary Western man: marijuana, pornography, 'vidya' games and Mountain Dew. As a matter of fact, 4Chan gives free rein to almost every form of licence. This stands in contrast to the moralism of the old Far Right. In my experience, the nationalist movement founded in the seventies and eighties disapproved of every vice with the exception of alcohol. 'Old nationalism', then, seems more serious, more out of touch with modernity, and less fun than the 'new nationalism' which, through the medium of 4Chan, denounces modern 'degeneracy' while simultaneously reveling in it.
On coming across Pierce's radio broadcasts for the first time, I saw Pierce as an entertainer. From this I gained the false impression that, as I delved further into it, 'the movement' would prove to be as equally as fun and entertaining. How wrong I was! 'The movement' as such should be characterised as filled with negativity. Given that, how are 'normies' to be attracted to it? In contrast, the postmodernist, 'End of History' culture of the nineties did show some negativity, but overall this was leavened by postmodern superficiality and lightness.
III.
To sum up. To paraphrase Sadiq Khan, the Pakistani mayor of London, 'white genocide', the 'great replacement', 'demographic engineering' forms part and parcel of living in the big city - the Neuromancer or Blade Runner big city. (Of course one could leave the city, and thereby escape being confronted by 'demographic engineering' that way, but the fact is that most of the white population of any Western country chooses to live in cities). As to whether this existing order can be overturned remains to be seen. It is possible: stranger things have happened in politics.
In the ideology of the Far Right, the Western city is seen as a prison from which there is no escape, a prison in which one is forced to share with non-whites, Jews, communists, degenerates... Postmodernism takes a somewhat more positive view. It sees man as a spectator who encounters a multiplicity of shifting, divergent perspectives. The implication of this doctrine is that one can escape the obsession with 'white genocide' by changing one's perspective: as the saying goes, if you don't like the conversation, change the channel. Having said that, one could end up in the same predicament as Bruce Springsteen - there may be '57 channels and nothing on'.
No comments:
Post a Comment