A Racialist and a Gentleman: Elitism on the 1990s American Far Right

 

I. 

I have been meaning to compose an article on the American dissident Right for some time, but I have been hesitating, as the old adage 'If you don't have anything positive to say, don't say it' has been lurking in the back of my mind. I have become somewhat alienated from the Americans over the course of the past ten years, and if I were to write anything on them, I would be writing a condemnation, but I am reluctant to do so, as I do not want to appear to be 'negative'. 

Why the alienation? See the recent events in Gaza. We find lamentations for the Palestinians - from white nationalists, race realists, neo-Nazis, immigration restrictionists and so forth; they call the Israeli bombing 'butchery', 'genocide'. But I do not recall any bemoaning the fate of the civilians who were being bombed and shelled by Russia and Syria in Idlib; these relentless and malicious attacks on civilian targets - marketplaces, hospitals, etc. - were not denounced by the dissident Right, which showed little to no awareness that these were taking place. The one or two commentators who were aware dismissed the actions of Putin and Assad as taking care of the 'terrorists' in the region. In the past ten years I have learned, from the dissident Right, that there are good terrorists and bad, good jihadis and bad. Hamas and Hezbollah stand on the 'good terrorist' and 'good jihadi' side of the ledger, the rebels in Idlib on the 'bad'; and also, every Arab civilian death in Gaza is a tragedy, every Arab civilian death in Syria, a non-event. But I myself cannot understand the basis of this evaluation, as it is never been explained to me successfully, and it is one of the reasons why  I stopped comprehending the dissident Right. 

Likewise, events in Ukraine after 2014 added to my confusion and alienation. The question I ask, nearly ten years later, is: what was it, precisely, that made the Ukrainians deserve to lose Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and what made the Russians worthy enough to annex them? The corrupt and incompentent Yanukovych was toppled and fled the country after Maidan - which most on the American dissident Right seem to regard as a crime for the ages - but it has never been explained how Yanukovych's policies differed from his successors; that is, why it was that Yanukovych was so good and Poroshenko and Zelensky so bad. Would Yanukovych's return to power make life better for Ukrainians, and if so, how? Inquiring minds want to know. 

I would sum up the 2010s as the decade in which the movement was taken in by Russian propaganda; the movement made a large investment in it. But that Russian propaganda shall one day be exposed in the same way that Soviet propaganda (on Katyn, for instance) was. Putin will not live forever and eventually the internal Russian documents on Syria and Ukraine will be declassified. And then we shall discover, lo and behold, that Russia knew all along that flight MH17 was shot down by Russians in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, that chemical weapons were used by Assad in Douma in 2017. Will, I wonder, the dissident Right then express its shame over being taken in? The answer is no. I think shame presupposes conscience, and many of today's luminaries on the dissident Right lack it; they are an unprincipled bunch. 

More and more people in the movement are beginning to see through 'based' Putin, but the old attitudes, and the old lies, persist. But I could be here reproached for judging the dissident Right unfairly: why deprecate it for Ukraine and Syria, both of which are peripheral to the cause of white survival? And it is true that Ukraine and Syria should not occupy our attentions overly much. The reason why the dissident Right has taken up Russia's cause is that the Right has navigated off-course; it has waded into unfamiliar territory; it should have stuck to what it was good at. 

As what is the American dissident Right's metier, we have to look at what was a better, purer time - the 1990s. (That decade began on the 1st of January, 1990 and ended (in my view) on the 11th of September, 2001: after the terrorist attack of 9/11, America and the world entered the 2000s, the decade of Bush's War on Terror). 

II. 

I ask: was life for Americans better in the 1990s? That is impossible to judge. So I will rephrase: was life for those on the American dissident Right better? 

The answer is yes. America, in 2021, since the Biden coup, is ruled by three political actors: Big Tech, Hollywood and the Media. The ideology that animates this terrible trio is extreme leftism. In order to understand that ideology, we must recognise that the modern Left can be divided up to six different factions. The past of twenty to thirty years ago was an improvement on the present insofar as that none of the  factions had political power. Someone on the Center or Far Right, were they travel in a time machine back to America in the 1990s would discover that the country was blessedly free of Marxism. 

Here I will go through each of the six and explain where each stood in the 1990s: 

- Old school Marxism / communism: Marxism had been discredited with the fall of the Soviet Union and the backsliding of communist China into capitalism. Communist parties in the Anglosphere (e.g., the United Kingdom and Australia) dissolved themselves. In America, traditional Marxist stalwarts the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) were relegated to obscurity, as were their Trotskyite and New Communist Communist Movement (NCM) offshoots; many of the NCM groups had dissolved themselves by the time of the fall of the Eastern European communist bloc and the scandal of the Tianamen Square massacre. In the 1990s, for the first time in over a hundred years, conservatism did not have contend with Marxism, which had ceased to exist. 

- Antifa and anarchism: these could be found only at the fringes of society - along with the goth, skinhead, 'black' heavy metal subcultures - and did not possess a fraction of the political power that they possess in 2021. 

- Woke capital: corporations paid lip service to liberal causes such as environmentalism, but only lip service. In 2021, companies such as Facebook (which recently prevented its users from posting news articles on race riots in Minneapolis) seek to actively control their customers, which is unprecedented. In the 1990s, or any foregoing decade for that matter, corporations did not behave in this way. The profit motive came first. 

- Social Justice Warriors / SJWs: Popular culture was not as corrupted by the Left in the 1990s; it was bereft of overt demands for 'representation', 'equity', 'social justice' and the like, and it did not engage (for example) in the practice of race-swapping white characters for black. And, furthermore, the infrastructure which supports SJWs - social media, especially Twitter - did not exist in the 1990s. 

- Black Lives Matter (BLM): like SJWism, this did not exist in the 1990s.

- Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Black Studies, Post-colonial Theory, Critical Race Theory: like a serpent in the garden of Eden, this brand of  academic neo-communism marred what would otherwise have been a perfectly post-leftist and post-political decade. Troublesome as it was when it first appeared, postmodernist and post-structuralist academic theory did not involve itself overly much politics, but its children - in particular, Critical Race Theory - did, with consequences we all know too well. Academic neo-Marxism (or Cultural Marxism) was conceived in the 1990s, was born in the 2000s, and grew to maturity (and attained, we hope, what was the full extent of its power) in the 2010s. Every silver lining has its cloud, and in the 1990s, postmodern academic 'pozzedness' was it, and I think that it gradually seeped into the popular culture of the time. This phenomenon explains, for instance, the 'pozzedness' of Kurt Cobain, the first politically correct rock star in history (Cobain, it should be remembered, named his daughter after a runaway negro slave). 

I made mention of the post-political, and this is important. One common argument in political theory is that the Right only defines itself in relation to the Left: conservatism, as we know it, only came into being after the advent of leftism, which was sometime a few hundred years ago, in the 18th century: see Edmund Burke, who wrote the founding text of conservatism in reaction to the French Revolution, which was the culmination of the rationalist, egalitarian, democratic French ideas of that period. If it were not for the Left, the Right would not exist; so what happens when the Left disappears? The answer is, the Right disappears with it. In the 1990s, Thatcherism, Reaganism, and all the 'New Right' ideology became passé: after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was no ideology enemy for the Right to fight against, Russians and Eastern Europeans all agreed with Thatcher and Reagan that capitalism was a good thing, so, what was the point of Thatcherism and Reaganism? But, so the argument goes, with the termination of the Left came the termination of the Right: so, no more politics. And this respite from the political raised serious questions. For the first time in over a hundred years, conservatives lived in a world which was free of Marxism; socialism no longer dangled over their heads like a sword of Damocles. Did that mean that they had ceased to be conservatives? Did that entail the end of politics? The American sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a famous work, The End of Ideology: on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s (1960), on that subject: after 1945, he argued, the appeal of socialism and class war had diminished and both sides of politics in Western life had settled into a consensus. In the 1990s, Bell's ideas were dusted off and revived. As a Swedish academic, Daniel Strand, wrote: 

    

In the 1950s, scholars in Europe and the United States announced the end of political ideology in the West. With the rise of affluent welfare states, they argued, ideological movements which sought to overthrow prevailing liberal democracy would disappear. While these arguments were questioned in the 1960s, similar ideas were presented after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Scholars now claimed that the end of the Cold War meant the end of mankind’s “ideological development,” that globalization would undermine the left/right distinction and that politics would be shaped by cultural affiliations rather than ideological alignments. In the 1950s, scholars in Europe and the United States announced the end of political ideology in the West. With the rise of affluent welfare states, they argued, ideological movements which sought to overthrow prevailing liberal democracy would disappear. While these arguments were questioned in the 1960s, similar ideas were presented after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Scholars now claimed that the end of the Cold War meant the end of mankind’s “ideological development,” that globalization would undermine the left/right distinction and that politics would be shaped by cultural affiliations rather than ideological alignments.

Hence, we saw Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1993), which encapsulated the spirit of the age - or the decade - perfectly; and then Carl Boggs' The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000), which is one of the best books that summed up the political developments - or lack of them - in that decade. 

One might think that in the 1990s, the Far Right would have sunk into oblivion, given that the West, in the post-Cold War, post-political era, had fallen into somnolence, complacency and self-satisfaction. But the end of politics, the end of ideology, the end of history, liberated the Far Right, and for the first time since the end of WWII, it came into its own. In its way, the 1990s were insurrectionist from a political and cultural standpoint; as Boggs documents, the decade saw a proliferation of cults, gangs, militias, terrorists, all with a decidedly apocalyptic and millenarian bent; these were extremist and radical, but not of course left-extremist and left-radical; they were inclined to conspiracy theories and anti-government paranoia (both of which abounded in the great TV series of that time, The X-Files, which like Fukuyama's book, was representative of the zeitgeist). Did anything unite these disparate tendencies? Yes: I would argue it was the desire to retrieve a lost spiritual essence and state of purity. It is this, I feel, that marks the ideology of the groups as reactionary, even right-wing. The Right wants such a retrieval or recovery; the Left, a redistribution of wealth and resources. Given that in the 1990s, the odds were stacked more in favour of the Right than the Left, naturally, 'extremists' of the William Pierce or Richard Butler sort flourished - and the more apocalyptic and millenarian their beliefs were, the larger their audience. 

This leads to the question of how it was that these 'extremists' got their message across. In the 1990s, old-school forms of entertainment (movies, TV shows, comic books, popular music on AM and FM radio) drew audiences numbering in the millions, as did old school forms of media (newspapers and other journals, radio, TV). The American Far Right, at the start of the nineties, used print media - books, magazines, newsletters, journals - to disseminate propaganda, and also other forms of old media. William Pierce read his incendiary polemics on radio, and even, for a time, appeared on his own cable TV channel; we moderns live in a comparatively unfree time, and we find it remarkable that the likes of Pierce were able to make his message heard in forums now unavailable to us.

Pierce saw a great potential in radio. He says: 

And we can do it. Three years ago there was no one willing to say publicly what we are saying now. Everyone was letting himself be intimidated into going along with the controlled media and the government. Then we started broadcasting on one radio station - just one broadcast a week. A year ago we had grown to seven stations. Now we're broadcasting on 15 stations each week. We have been able to grow like that because the people who listened to us on our first station three years ago told other people about us, and they began listening too, and then they told their friends. And our support grew, so that we could add more stations to our network. 

And we can keep growing. The 100,000 of us who now gather each week can grow to a million and then to ten million. All we have to do is keep spreading the word to our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, our co-workers, and to strangers too. We can spread the word by telephone, by letter, by spray-painting the time and frequency of this broadcast on fences and walls, by taking out advertising, by handing out leaflets. We can have 100 stations in our network by the end of this year. 

And we really must do that. Not just because it'll feel good to have a million of us together each week instead of only 100,000. We have to do it because we need to be able to speak with a big enough voice to prevent the enemies of America, the enemies of our people, from silencing us. [From the radio talk, 'Freedom: Use It or Lose It', February 1995.]

Pierce evidently saw himself as a rebel, a resistant, and that is the reason why his radio program was titled American Dissident Voices, his journal Free Speech. He operated outside the accepted American culture, and like the anti-hero of Dostoyevsky's famous novel, he wrote missives which were notes from the underground. Being under ground means being in the dark, and that made up one of the themes of nineties. One could find that theme - of a life lived in darkness and shadow - in the popular culture of the period. Compare the dim lighting and dark colours of the nineties TV show the X-Files to the bright lighting and pastel colours of the eighties TV show Miami Vice. 

The underground man theme was also embodied in the work of Art Bell, the late-night radio host who broadcast to millions of listeners from his studio in the Mojave Desert; Bell was obsessed by UFOs, the paranormal and anti-government conspiracy theories - many of the favourite preoccupations of Americans in that period. It is appropriate that in one of his famous broadcasts Bell clashed with Pierce, another titan of the airwaves; Bell and Pierce could be seen as two competing brothers. 

Wilmot Robertson sums up the feeling of being an underground man, an outsider, in a January 1995 issue of his journal Instauration: 

Instauration is a small journal, known to only a thin number of Americans. It cannot be bought on any newsstand. You will never see it hawked by the corner paperboy. Whenever it is mentioned in the mainstream press, the words are couched in tones of fear and loathing. The handful of public figures who have suggested that the world's most controversial magazine might have some slight merit have been treated as if they were advance agents of the Anti-Christ. 

Despite these rather lethal drawbacks, it is comforting to know that even if we are undersized, underfinanced and furiously ignored, Instauration is more perceptive, perspicacious and prescient than Time, Newsweek, the New Republic, the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

The simple truth is that what has been predicted on Instauration's pages is relentlessly coming true. The political, social, cultural and racial policies the magazine generally espouses are unquestionably coming to the fore. Nothing can stop this process and our enemies know it. Thus their frenzied hatred. The bell tolls for them, not us. ['Things are coming together']

III. 

Robertson gives us an example of an American persona - both a literary and political - I call the gentleman scholar as racialist, the racialist as patrician. The great racialist authors Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard represent the type in the first half of twentieth century, and Wilmot Robertson, Jared Taylor and the anonymous author of the Ron Paul newsletters in the second. They are distinguished from the more crude type of racialist by their learning, culture, refinement, literary skill, and above all, class. As one letter writer to Instauration (February 1995) puts it: 

I never met an Instaurationist and often tried to visualize one. I pictured an older gentleman of Anglo-Saxon background, but not too old, mind you. Are you familiar with the TV show, Magnum PI? If so, the delightful older chap, Higgans or Higgins, fits the bill. He is the fellow with the aristocratic English accent.

At first sight, Pierce - an erudite and cultured man - would belong in this category, but on further examination, he does not; his radicalism precludes it. Even though he finds himself mostly in agreement with Robertson, he presents his ideas in a different manner: his incendiary radio broadcasts recall those Father Coughlin, the Depression-era 'radio priest', and the political strategy of his hero of the Turner Diaries - a book written in the seventies - that of the urban guerrilla left-wing groups of that decade. It is this violent and radical streak which separates him from the genteel Grant and Stoddard. 

Pierce's journal National Vanguard (the official organ of his National Alliance) differs in its tone from three of the patrician-racialist journals of the 1990s: Instauration, the American Renaissance newsletter and the Ron Paul Survival Report: these three sounded conservative, National Vanguard sounded radical. Ron Paul's newsletter - which may or may have not been written by him - spoke of African-Americans, homosexuals, immigrants and Jews in what Pierce would have called euphemistically a 'political incorrect' manner, but all the same, the newsletters were grounded in American conservatism, Paul being a free-market libertarian. Likewise, two of the American Renaissance circle - Joe Sobran and Sam Francis - began their careers as op-ed writers for conservative journals (which they were later blacklisted from). Conceivably, Robertson and the other contributors could have written for conservative journals (providing that they kept well away from 'politically incorrect' subjects). But Pierce, an affiliate of George Lincoln Rockwell and a contributor to National Socialist World in the 1960s, would have never been allowed near a conservative publication; his reputation would have preceded him. The same could be said of other white nationalist luminaries of the decade David Duke, Don Black, Tom Metzger, Ben Klassen. A distinction which I am inclined to call a class distinction existed. 

But what united all these men, patricians and non-patricians? First and foremost, a concentration upon the negro question, which in the 1990s was thrust to the forefront of the American national consciousness by the spectacle of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots - the first race riots (at least, the first which attained prominence) since the 1960s. The Los Angeles riots demonstrated that the negro question could not be ignored, and set the pattern for the race riots to follow, including those that took place in 2020. 

Here is one account of a race riot in Cincinnati - all italics are mine:

Everyone in America knows about Cincinnati. That is, everyone at least has seen the sanitized images of the Cincinnati race riot that have appeared on television screens across the country. In that regard the Cincinnati riot is different from the Seattle race riot of nearly two months ago. News of the Seattle riot was successfully suppressed by the controlled media outside the Seattle area. 

In other ways, however, the riots were very similar. Although the controlled media decided not to try to suppress the news from Cincinnati, it is clear that the sympathies of the media bosses were as much with the Blacks in Cincinnati as they were in Seattle. Here's one small example of that: The 19-year-old Black thug whose shooting by a White policeman was the Blacks' excuse for rioting in Cincinnati had a long arrest record. There were 14 more arrest warrants outstanding for him at the time he was shot. 

The policeman who shot him, in other words, realized that he was dealing with a habitual criminal, and he responded to what he believed was an attempt by the Black to draw a weapon from his waistband by shooting him. 

None of this was mentioned on the television news coverage of events in Cincinnati, of course. The Black who was shot was described by the media as "an unarmed Black youth" - or, in the case of Cincinnati's Channel 9 television news program, as "an unarmed African American teenager." And here's the clincher: Instead of using one of the readily available police mug shots of the Black, the media managed to dig up a photo of him in a formal suit with a big, innocent smile on his face, presumably taken at some high-school dance - and that is the photograph shown repeatedly to Americans on their television screens: not the police mug shots of a hardened, 19-year-old Black criminal, but a photograph of smiling, well-dressed, teenaged Black innocence. You can be sure that some Jewish news director got a bonus from a Jewish network boss for digging up that photograph. 

At the Black's funeral last Saturday the White governor of Ohio and the White mayor of Cincinnati both appeared among the mourners. That's a symbolic thing. You can be certain that they wouldn't have attended the funeral of some White street thug shot by a Black cop. They attended the funeral, alongside Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam people, Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP, and members of the New Black Panther Party, and they looked appropriately contrite and said nice things about the deceased for one reason only: they were frightened to death that the Blacks would continue rioting. 

And why were they afraid of that? They could have stopped the riot dead in its tracks any time they wanted. That is, physically they could have stopped the riot. Even though 43 per cent of the population of Cincinnati is Black, the police could have wound up the riot within half an hour, and the Blacks who survived the gunfire would have been trembling behind closed doors, afraid to show their faces. Militarily it would have been a trivial matter. 

But both Mayor Charles Luken and Governor Bob Taft understood that politically they were at the mercy of the Black rioters. They knew which side the Jewish media were on. They knew that if they took strong measures against the rioters they would be crucified by the media. So just as in Seattle the cops, under orders from the politicians, simply let the riot run its course. They arrested 200 or so Blacks they caught looting stores or setting fires when they could do so without danger of any real conflict, but it was more a matter of picking off stragglers than it was any real attempt at riot control. For the most part the police just watched. They watched while Blacks stopped cars with White drivers, pulled the drivers out of their cars, and stomped and beat them mercilessly. They stood by and watched the Blacks beat a White woman "to a pulp." Those words - "to a pulp" - aren't mine; they came from the April 12 edition of the Cincinnati Post. The rule governing the cops was: don't provoke the Blacks. 

The reader may be surprised to learn that the above excerpt was taken from a May 2001 talk by William Pierce, 'Riot and Revolution', as the riot it describes could have taken place yesterday. African-American riots did not begin with the advent of Black Lives Matter. 

What is significant is that the race riots of 1992 and 2001 could not be blamed on communism - i.e., the African-American rioters, looters and arsonists had not been stirred up by communist agitators; neither could be blamed on economic misery and hardship, as America in the 1990s was the most prosperous it had been since the 1960s. No, any honest commentator, after the riots of 1992, needed to face (and face squarely) certain immutable racial realities and this is what Pierce and Taylor did. What divided the two men was their approach. 

IV.

Patrician racialism is still with us, but it was dealt a blow by the decline of the print media and the rise of the Internet. Instauration, the Ron Paul Survival Report, and the American Renaissance newsletter ceased publication. The Internet became the primary means of disseminating racialist ideas and perspectives, and this development worked against the genteel and literary brand of racialism, as discourse became open to all - democratised. The quality of thought diminished. In the 1990s, readers of Instauration and the American Renaissance journal needed to master the art of composition if they wanted their comments to appear in the letters pages; nowadays, those who post their comments on any white nationalist site do not bother.  

The decline of 'gentleman racialism' helps explains why it is that so much of the American dissident Right has veered into what is not American. Robertson wrote extensively on the Jewish question and Holocaust and WWII revisionism (although you would never know from this recent American Renaissance post); even Taylor looked at these subjects (albeit in passing) in the 1990s newsletters. But articles on these controversies were outweighed by those on the subject of race and the 'colour of crime'. One advantage of writing for a print journal is that you can weight your articles; you can bring articles on the more important subjects close to the front pages and consign the less important to the back; using a website, you cannot direct your reader's attention the same way, as you are forced to give all the articles equal billing. Their format was one of the reasons why the gentlemanly journals stayed focused. In contrast, very little in the way of a unifying American theme can be found in most of today's white nationalist or dissident Right sites. We see posts on Celtic myth; on 19th century Romantic art; on Ukraine and Syria (of course written from a pro-Russian perspective); on Israel and Zionism; on Holocaust Revisionism. Posts of speeches and articles by German National Socialists written over 75 years ago sit incongruously alongside current American news stories. A melange, a chaos, arises as a result of this lack of a theme - the Renegade Tribune being the best example. 

Once a site deviates away from the 'dispossession of the majority' and the 'colour of crime', the quality of its comments deteriorates. Sites which tackle Israel, Zionism and Middle East politics (such as Unz.Org) attract some of the worst people in the comments, and sites which stay grounded (such as American Renaissance and Stuff Black People Don't Like) some of the best. This is because decent, ordinary Americans from all walks of life can relate to the 'colour of crime', for it is omnipresent in their lives; whereas the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, are not. Paul Kersey's Stuff Black People Don't Like only deals with the negro question - nothing else! - and Jared Taylor's American Renaissance only deals with race; neither will touch the Jewish question with a barge pole, as evidently Taylor and Kersey are of the opinion that it will go over the heads of most Americans. There is something to be said for this empiricism and pragmatism. 

Here an objection may be raised and Pierce pointed to as an example of an activist who, his writing and speaking, shifted between a number of subjects and at the same time stayed coherent. It is true, I will concede, that Pierce achieved this feat; but I will observe that Pierce, who died in 2002, did not write for the new media but for the old - print and radio - in which a certain amount of craft and skill was required. 

V.  

Speaking of Pierce, an examination of his speeches from the nineties show that he would disagree with me that the decade was 'conservative' in any shape or form; Pierce saw the America of the time as a multi-racial dystopia, in which the political system and the culture was hopelessly Judaised, and in which leftism ran amok. I will qualify my earlier remarks by stating that in the nineties liberalism (or leftism) was prevalent, but this was a 'soft' leftism, unconnected to the 'hard' leftism of the Marxist-Leninist variety. The latter has come back into a fashion, in a big way, and its revival can be attributed to increased non-immigration: Third World immigration brings with it Third World Marxism - something 'race-blind' conservatives are unwilling to acknowledge.

As for Judaisation, the 2010s have seen a slight diminution of Jewish power - on the Left, at least. In the 1990s and 2000s, any criticism of Israel by any politician, either of the Left or Right, was equated with anti-Semitism and discouraged - the African-American Democratic Party Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was ousted because of a perceived 'anti-Semitism' - but in the Left today, anti-Semites are more than welcome. During the recent bombing of Gaza, we were treated to headlines (in the conservative media) such as 'Pro-Hamas mobs are hounding Jews coast to coast'; left-wing activists (who more often than not people of colour) were insulting, harassing and attacking Jews in what the pro-Israel conservative media saw as a pogrom. This 'left' anti-Semitism has been furthered by non-white immigration, in particular, immigration from the Islamic world; it does not (as Pierce would have hoped) represent any anti-Semitic 'racial awakening' on the part of whites. 

Pierce, in his radio talks, was always documenting instances of some of the bad behaviour of African-Americans, including some of the grisly black-on-white murders which took place in that period, and he was always pointing out that these had been hushed up by a complaisant media. One development - and this is one he would have approved of - is that since the Black Lives Matter riots, the conservative media, while holding to its usual anti-racist line, is posting pictures and videos of African-American public nuisances and criminals, and is even reporting on some black-on-white murders. It does so in a passive-aggressive manner; it understands that it is still beholden to what Paul Kersey calls 'Black Run America' and it does not want to openly acknowledge the 'colour of crime'. But it is reflecting, I think, the mood of its audience: there is a new impatience on the part of white Americans with African-Americans. Some of the commenters at American Renaissance have declared that they were ordinary Americans who were led on the path to 'race realism' by mainstream news stories chronicling African-American misbehaviour. 

One has to ask what Pierce of the 1990s would have made of today's America. I think it would have been beyond his comprehension; he would not have understood it. And such is the disconnect between his time and ours, if you were to travel back in time and tell him that the 2020s would be much worse by way of comparison to the 1990s, he would have regarded you as insane. 

Letter to a young Neo-Nazi

 

I. 

I see from the news that Neo-Nazism is making a comeback amongst the youth of Australia, especially in the state of Victoria. This development I find interesting, as I know a great deal of the subject of Neo-Nazism and I can share some of that knowledge with these youth. In lieu of a face to face lecture - which is difficult to organise at the moment, given the circumstances - I here present some of my insights in written form. 

II.

Last year I showed an elderly relative of mine the movie Star Wars (1977) (I refuse to call it by its modern name, A New Hope); she had not seen it previously, having led a sheltered life. Interestingly enough, when the first Imperial officer (clad in a black Wehrmacht uniform and donning a WWII-era Japanese army style hat) came into view, she exclaimed that the Imperials were 'Nazis'. And then, at the end credits, when she saw Peter Cushing's name appear - the great Cushing having played the imperial officer Moff Tarkin - she wondered aloud, 'Which character was Peter Cushing? Oh, that's right: he was the creepy-voiced Nazi'. All this was amusing, all right, but as I reflected on it later, a train of thought started which led to some serious philosophical musings. I asked myself what exactly is it that makes a 'Nazi'? Were Moff Tarkin and the other Imperials cast in the mold of a Platonic Ideal of 'Nazidom'? And these questions in turn led to another, one which was more technical than philosophical: how is that Neo-Nazis are to be recruited, trained and deployed - how is it that they are to be mass produced, in the same way that the Marxist Left mass produces commies? 

Oddly enough, I think the second question is more easily answered than the first.

Neo-Nazism, according to the dictionary definition, seeks to revive the theory and practice of German National Socialism. That to my mind is a reasonable working definition. 

Now, no-one in the movement uses the term Neo-Nazism as I do, and do frequently; in our milieu, its usage is frowned upon and the term 'National Socialism' is much preferred. But as Carolyn Yeager points out, those who range themselves as enemies of Hitler, the NSDAP, the Third Reich, can and do borrow the term National Socialism; a much better term to use would be 'Hitlerism', which leaves others in no doubt as to where one stands.  

If an intellectual is to be a student of Hitlerism, he should read, carefully, Hitler's Mein Kampf (1923) (and its sequel, Zweites Buch (1928)); Hitler's collected speeches; and Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century (1931). But a full understanding and appreciation of these requires that one study German and European history, which, I regret to say, is a task that many Hitlerians never undertake - they can tell you nothing of the lives of the men Hitler considered to be the three greatest Germans, Luther, Frederick the Great and Bismarck, nor the history of the unification of Germany, nor the history of WWI... They do not know who or what a Prussian was. It is as though someone declared themselves to be a Maoist and at the same time professed total ignorance of Chinese personages such as Sun Yat Sen. 

If one does not grasp Hitlerism, one will not grasp Neo-Nazism, which is a revival of it. But fortunately, a book does exist that puts a thousand years of German and European history into political context, and that is Yockey's Imperium (1948). Much has changed since Yockey wrote his book, yes, but much has not; his chapter on the American negro and communism still holds true seventy years later, as we can see from recent events. 

The trouble with Imperium is that many in the movement have read it, but few shows signs of understanding it or at least assimilating its ideas. For example, the white nationalist Greg Johnson publishes new editions of Yockey's work, which I think is commendable, but Johnson opposes Hitler and German National Socialism and I find little influence of Imperium in Johnson's thinking. 

Part of the fault lies in Yockey; he is an acquired taste, and I while I find the book easy to read - I have re-read it five or six times - others do not. The study of Imperium demands a preliminary study of Spengler, which is asking a lot, as while Spengler wrote many short books - including the Hour of Decision (1934), a blatantly racialist work which is bound to appeal to many white nationalists - his magnum opus, the Decline of the West (1918-1922) clocks in at half a million words. Reading this work will take time, even though Spengler (for a German philosopher) writes clearly enough. An abridged version of the Decline does exist, but it numbers nearly 500 pages. 

All the same, Spengler's five or six published works, in combination with Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1932) (which Yockey borrowed from liberally), plus Yockey, will convert any reasonably open-minded intellectual into a 'Hitlerian'. These books cannot fail. 

After one has digested all these, the problem becomes one of orientating oneself politically, armed with these ideas, in today's world. Supposing that Yockey were to come back to life in 2021 (he died sixty years ago), would he be surprised, shocked, by recent developments? Yes and no. Both Yockey and Spengler anticipated that, at some point in the future, Russia would abandon the Marxist ideology, so one can guess that the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been no great surprise to Yockey. But he would have been surprised by the massive non-white invasion of the Western world. Yockey narrates how, in his time, American Jewish groups devoted themselves to the spreading pro-immigration propaganda and the breaking down racial barriers; but the idea that America, having fallen under the sway of these groups, would give up its immigration restrictions and allow the importation of some 59 million people (the greatest movement of any peoples in any time in history) would have seemed to Yockey to be only a theoretical, not a practical, possibility. In short, were Yockey to return to today's Los Angeles - a city he once lived in - he would be shocked, appalled, angered and confused. The same would apply were he to return to visit today's Paris, London, Rome, Berlin.

Any return to today's America would lead to some hard choices on Yockey's part, e.g., the choice between Trump and Biden in 2020. In that election, both candidates were fully embedded in the American pro-Jewish, pro-Israel power structure, and both had married their children off to Jews; but one had, during his time in office, cut legal immigration by 49%, and the other had, during the 2020 campaign, vowed to increase it a hundred fold. So should Yockey get behind the immigration-restrictionist candidate or abstain from electoral politics altogether? There are no easy answers and the past gives us no guideposts. And this brings us back to the main shortcoming of Hitler's writing. The collected speeches, which encompass the entirety of Hitler's career, put forth a compelling and tragic narrative of the rise and fall of a great man and a great nation; but the collection comes to an end of April 1945 - there it stops, abruptly, without giving any indication of what came next. This is the problem with old books: the argument could be made that Hitler's writing, and even Yockey's, constitute nothing more than white man's history, a record of a world which has been left behind. 

Having said that, Hitlerism has not been mummified, has not been turned into a dusty, inanimate object; Hitler has not gone the same way of Napoleon; he has not been made safe and respectable. Political possibilities still exist in Hitlerism. The day that a statue of Hitler has been put up in Berlin, the day that a sympathetic nine-hour movie portrayal of the rise and fall of the Third Reich - of the same stamp as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) trilogy - is released, then we know that Hitlerism has become safe, respectable, assimilated. But neither will happen any time soon. The political establishment in Europe and its colonies, including the United States, still lives in fear of a revival of Hitlerism. 

Significantly, that same establishment does not live in fear of a revival of Napoleonism nor Marxism-Leninism nor Islam. And even though the political establishment in America abominates white Americans, particularly Southerners, it does not seriously expect a return of the Confederacy and Southern secessionism; the last time that Southern nationalism and racialism posed anything like a threat to the establishment was sixty years ago. 

III.

At the risk of repeating myself (I have written on this subject in many articles), the essence of 'Nazism' lies in 'Prussianism', or what Spengler calls 'Prussian Socialism'. Spengler calls it an 'Idea', which Yockey defines as a 'Living, breathing, formless reality'. And the best means of comprehending this Idea is to look at it in action - during the course of Germany's war. 

To give a summary of that war... It begins when Germany goes to war with France and England, and invades the Low Countries and northern France; and it invades Russia after a Russo-German peace treaty collapses under the weight of what Germany sees as Russian aggression. 

Russia, in the German ideology, represents Asiatic barbarism and despotism (by warring on Russia, Germany is defending Europe from 'The East'). The war against Russia moves quickly, and Germany is initially successful, conquering the Ukraine, the Baltics, Crimea, White Russia (Belarus) and the Trans-Caucasus. Germany, which is over-populated and demands living or elbow room, states its intention of colonising these annexed territories and populating them with peasant farmers and invalid soldiers. 

Diplomatically and militarily, the situation is in a state of flux. Sweden and Spain stay neutral, but Serbia is invaded by Germany and Hungary; Romania, initially an ally of Germany, turns against it, sides with Russia and England, and invades Hungary to reclaim lost ancestral lands. In the West, Germany is unable to invade England, a mighty sea-faring power, from across the English Channel or the North Sea, but it does wage submarine and aerial warfare against her. England, for the most part, shows itself to be incompetent in the war; its adventures - for example, an expedition sent to Greece to defend it against the Germans - turn out badly. 

It is in the field of propaganda that England proves to achieve its greatest success. It accuses Germany of unprovoked aggression. The German nation is to be condemned in the court of world opinion for its authoritarianism and militarism;  Germany is said to be an autocracy, led by a histrionic, mentally unstable despot of a leader, and Germans as a people are guilty of moral failings. Germany lusts for power and worships the use of force. And indeed, Germany's conduct in the war shocks the world. Germany adopts brutal counter-insurgency tactics; builds concentration camps; takes hostages; deports citizens (of territories it occupies) back to Germany for use as forced labour; practises scorched earth warfare... Such is the outrage that England and America demand that the German leadership be put on trial for 'war crimes'. 

America becomes embroiled in the war on the English side, thanks to America's president, a Democrat with a solid electoral base in the South and who has some sympathies with what we would today call white nationalism. Through suasion, he overcomes America's inhibitions against foreign entanglements - America's 'Isolationism' - and wages an internal war against a perceived German fifth column in America; and this takes place after he wins re-election on a promise to keep America out of the 'European War'. 

American involvement in the war leads to the decline of Germany's military fortunes: once millions of American soldiers had landed in Europe, it was all up for Germany (as Hitler later acknowledged) and Germany is forced to pull out of the conquered Eastern territories in great haste. It is at this late point that Germany's anti-Russian rhetoric intensifies; it makes an appeal to the West to aid it in a struggle against 'Asiatic Bolshevism'. But Germany's pleas fall on deaf ears. It is defeated and partitioned, and the Germans living in the territories amputated from Germany are ethnically cleansed. The German currency becomes worthless and an Allied blockade on food to Germany leads to the death of many Germans. America, however, shows signs of coming around to the German way of thinking and commences the first of many military interventions against communism. Meanwhile, in what we would today call the Third World, European's reputation among the 'coloured peoples' has diminished as a result of the fratricidal war. The natives become restless; a 'coloured' revolt stirs against Western imperialism, colonialism, racialism, the repercussions of which are still being felt today. 

IV. 

Yockey portrays the war as a conflict between two nations, two ideas: Germany and England, Socialism and Capitalism. On deeper examination of the Allied propaganda written at the time of the war, it becomes clear that it is the bellicose - and painfully forthright and frank - German political thought which was instrumental in inciting 'Capitalist' England and America against 'Socialist' Germany. I will reproduce here, at length, some quotations from some of Germany's leading nationalist intellectuals. These were compiled by a pair of American scholars in a wartime anti-German propaganda work and grouped under the heading 'Dispossessing the Conquered'. 

[In the occupied territories] Germans alone will govern... They alone will exercise political rights; they alone will serve in the army and in the navy; they alone will have the right to become landowners; thus they will acquire the conviction that, as in the Middle Ages, the Germans are a people of rulers. However, they will condescend so far as to delegate inferior tasks to foreign subjects who live among them. 

[...]

If we take, we must also keep. A foreign territory is not incorporated until the day when the rights of property of Germans are rooted in its soil. With all necessary prudence, but also with inflexible determination, a process of expropriation should he inaugurated, by which the Poles and the Alsatians and Lorrainers would he gradually transported to the interior of the Empire, while Germans would replace them on the frontiers.

We wish to commence in a new empire a new life of which the supreme aim shall be: Greater Germany whose task shall be the well-being of Germans. All other laws are dependent on this great one... Those only may become complete citizens whose mother tongue is German, whose education corresponds to that of the common school (Volksschule), who are of pure German blood, and who take the oath of allegiance. Rights of citizenship may be canceled by the courts for any word or act contrary to German interests... No foreigner shall acquire house or land in Greater Germany.

[...]

When we have won, and obtained territorial concessions, we shall receive lands inhabited by French or Russians, consequently by enemies. One wonders if such an increase of territory will improve our situation... Those who have learned to think according to the historical school will be horrified when we demand the 'evacuation' of land inhabited by Europeans; for that signifies the violent interruption of an historical development centuries old. Besides, the idea wounds the sensibilities of civilized man and is contrary to the modern law of nations which protects individual property. But if we consider seriously the peculiar position of the German people, squeezed into the middle of Europe and running the risk of being suffocated for want of air, it must he agreed that we might he compelled to demand from a vanquished enemy, either in the East or in the West, that he should hand over the unpopulated territory.

[...]

We may depend upon the re-Germanizing of Alsace, but not of Livonia and Kurland. There no other course is open to us but to keep the subject race in as uncivilized a condition as possible, and thus prevent them from becoming a danger to the handful of their conquerors.

[...]

[In case of war with Russia:] We shall demand the cession of such territory as we need for the straightening of our frontiers and for colonization. Evacuation of it will be required. 

[...]

War will unify the strong nation that is capable of a future and make it free, and will establish the people on a healthy substantial basis. Those are the two chief purposes of war. A third can, however, be suggested, that a nation even when her national and fundamental interests do not coincide with those of another nation, still must rudely destroy this people's highest interests, must indeed remorselessly cut off from this foreign people the means of living for the future. It is a great, powerful nation which, overturns a less courageous and frequently degenerate people and takes its territory from it. For a great, strong people finds its house too narrow, it cannot stir and move about, cannot work and build up, cannot thrive and grow. The great nation needs new territory. Therefore it must spread out over foreign soil, and must displace strangers with the power of the sword.

[...]

Slowly, not too hastily, we people of Germanic blood must proceed in the settlement of the lands which are to be ours in the future.  

The lands which we need to-day and in the future for colonizing, we must thoroughly cleanse of foreign elements.

[...]

The historical view as to the biological evolution of races tells us that there are dominant races and subordinate races. Political history is nothing more than the history of the struggles between the dominant races. Conquest in particular is always a function of the dominant races. Where now in all the world does it stand written that conquering races are under obligations to grant after an interval political rights to the conquered? Is not the practice of political rights an advantage which biologically belongs to the dominant races?

In like manner there is the school question. The man with political rights sets up schools, and the speech used in the instruction is his speech... The purpose must be to crush the [individuality of the] conquered people and its political and lingual existence...

The conquerors are acting only according to biological principles if they suppress alien languages and undertake to destroy strange popular customs... Only the conquering race must be populous, so that it can overrun the territory it has won. Nations that are populous are, moreover, the only nations which have a moral claim to conquest, for it is wrong that in one country there should be overpopulation while close at hand — and at the same time on better soil — a less numerous population stretches its limbs at ease. 

[As to the inferior races:] From political life they are to be excluded. They are eligible only to positions of a non- political character, to commercial commissions, chambers of commerce, etc.,...The principal thing for the conqueror is the outspoken will to rule and the will to destroy the political and national life of the conquered.

V. 

The above passages sound as though they were taken from Hitler's Table Talk (1953), a work which has become notorious on the dissident Right for its brutal and somewhat coarse frankness; but they were in fact taken from WWI-era German nationalist publications. They are reproduced in the anti-German propaganda work, Conquest and Kultur: Aims of the Germans in their own words (1918), compiled by the Americans Wallace Notestein and Elmer Edgar Stoll. 

Likewise, my account of 'the war' does not summarise WWII but WWI. My intention here has been to show that Hitler and German National Socialism are of a piece with German history - they did not come out of the blue - and further, that Hitler's ideas were in keeping with mainstream German political thought of the time, that they were not an aberration and certainly did not stem from some bizarre set of occult, even Satanic, beliefs. 

In addition, greater clarity can be gained from studying 'Prussianism' in the context of WWI rather than WWII; the preoccupations of today's historians - among them the Holocaust - do not obscure our view of the subject. The attitudes of Germany's enemies, Russia, France, England, America, stand in sharp relief and are not overshadowed by the question of what Germany did nor did not do to the Jews. Viewed from this perspective, then, we can sum up WWI as: WWII without the Jews. 

Looking at the above quotations from the perspective of today, it is remarkable that they could be found in the opinion columns of respectable newspapers and the books of respectable publishers of the time: to our surprise, 'Prussianism' was mainstream in Germany in the late 19th century and early 20th. But, to the anti-German type on the dissident Right, all this proves only that the Germans were 'bad' long before Hitler, indeed, the Germans have been 'bad' for at least a 150 years. For these quotations offend modern sensibilities, and the sensibilities of many of those on the white nationalist side of politics who take umbrage to the Hitler of Table Talk, that is, the type of white nationalist who writes for Greg Johnson's Counter-Currents and Ron Unz' Unz.Org. 

When considering this brand of German nationalism, one can understand the frustration of those on the dissident Right who wish to turn wayward youth away from National Socialism, Nazism, all forms of 'Prussian Socialism'. 'Haven't these youngsters read Table Talk? Don't they understand that National Socialism is for Germans only, and that it counsels the most brutal, barbaric treatment of the Poles, Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians? And aren't the Poles and the Russians most "based"? Isn't their nationalism is better than German nationalism...'. 

I do not here seek to rebut the arguments of those anti-Hitlerians; I merely observe that they are rehearsing the same line as the Anglo (that is, English and American) war polemicists of a hundred years ago; today they call it National Socialism, yesterday they called it Pan-Germanism. And whatever form it takes, German nationalism touches a raw nerve. Tell an American white nationalist that a fundamental inequality exists between black and white, and you will meet with approval; tell him that the same inequality exists between a German and a Pole, or a German and a Russian, and you will meet with disapproval. But then, Americans, unlike the Germans, do not have to live next door to millions of Poles and Russians. (And as for the French, Hitler was fond of quoting Schopenhauer: 'Africa has its monkeys, Europe its French'). 

The difference between an American white nationalist and a German National Socialist can be expressed thus: the American puts race first, politics second; the German, politics first, race second. Upon interrogating the American as to his ideology, you will quickly discover that he has no theory of the State, of politics (this is true of William Pierce, George Lincoln Rockwell, Harold Covington); he seems to think that once the non-whites, in particular the negroes, are removed, the politics will take care of itself; constitutional structures which are amenable to the white man in America will spontaneously appear. This explains why the Confederacy was unable to move beyond the strictures laid down by the Founding Fathers; upon the secession, they drew up a constitution and elected a president, and by doing both, they did not depart overly much from the America of the 18th century. The founders of the new Confederate State did not crown Jefferson Davis as emperor. But, in all fairness, American white nationalists are obsessed (as their Southern forebears were) by the negro question to the exclusion of all others because it has been paramount in America for 400 years, whereas it has only made itself felt on the Continent in the past 20 or so. Even to Yockey, who favours Europe over America, the negro question hovers in the forefront of his consciousness; Yockey hailed from Chicago, Illinois, which is now a negro city, and while he wrung his hands in despair over the demographic decline of America's founding stock (which came about, in his view, because of an excess of Eastern European immigration at the turn of the century), he would be the first to admit that a Pole or Czech or Greek or Italian immigrant is  preferable to a native-born negro. It is interesting to speculate what political choices he would have made in the 1970s, when whites were being ethnically cleansed from north-eastern cities such as Detroit and a de facto anti-negro alliance sprung up between three classes of Americans: founding stock Americans, Americans who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, and Jews (see Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (2012) by Dominic Sandbrook). Politics makes for strange bedfellows. 

But to return to Pan-Germanism: the above quotations, I think, contain some of the essence of 'Nazism', and furthermore, they illustrate the gulf that exists between German thought and English thought, or German and American. A work such as Modern Germany in relation to the great war (1916), which is an anthology of pro-German propaganda essays by German professors, contains more genuine 'Nazism' than all the works of William Pierce, Harold Covington, George Lincoln Rockwell, James Mason. The professors there express themselves in a more genteel fashion than the authors quoted in Conquest and Kultur, as after all, they are striving to put Germany in the best possible light; but the undercurrents of 'Prussianism' still move beneath the surface. (In that connection, it should be noted that the Anglo propaganda of the war did not spare the members of the German academic class who espoused nationalism: it called them 'hate professors'). 

You see, in this wartime literature, the national virtues of Germany on display, one of them being a frankness, a forthrightness, that borders on rudeness - there are times when virtue of honesty becomes a vice. Here is a quotation from Conquest and Kultur: 

Within Europe... we must be exceedingly careful, and must acquire new territory only after the most mature deliberation, especially where it will take years of unremitting labor to convert our antagonists to the view that the under the German scepter — 'War state' though we proclaim ourselves — is well worth living. True, our foreign policy must not be too tender-hearted — hard times need stout fists. In the coming diplomatic convention, if the glib foreign hucksters present cooked-up objections to our taking our rights, our fist, like Bismarck, must pound the green table till the ink bottles dance, if they refuse to give us our due — what we think necessary for permanent peace. This is self-evident, and must remain so.

Now, this Pan German author - who made the above statement in a book published in 1915 - could be accused, perhaps by a white nationalist of the Greg Johnson type, of fomenting divisiveness between the European nations. But I think extenuating circumstances exist for the ideologists of both the Second and Third Reich. If we are to watch these two excellent animated map videos, on the fall out from the Trianon and St Germain Treaties, we will be confronted with the tawdry spectacle of the post-WWI white nations of Eastern and Central Europe waging war against one another (wars which continued long after the end of WWI); partitioning and annexing one another's territories; carrying out pogroms of the Jews; and practising 'ethnic transfers'. Eastern and Central Europe are a byword for ethnic mayhem, and literal imperialism (German and Austro-Hungarian) was all that held Eastern and Central Europe together. Each nation could only make gains at the expense of the other in what was a classic example of a zero-sum game. It is no surprise, then, that F.A. von Hayek, an Austrian, makes reference (in a work published some thirty years after the war) to the 'poison of nationalism'. 

All this is moot, perhaps, given that now Europe is being colonised by the Third World - by its former colonial subjects in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia, in fact - and so the feeling today is that whites in Europe ought to be uniting in racial solidarity against the common foe. Accounts of WWI tell us that disputes in 1905 and 1911 over which European country should own Morocco - France or Germany - helped cause WWI, but the disputes between the European Great Powers over colonial possessions seem to we moderns to be quaint, and unbearably so: we want to say to the Europe of a hundred years ago, 'Worry not about going to Morocco, for Morocco will come to you - especially you, France'; for as we know, hundreds of thousands of North Africans migrated to France after WWII, the result being that the Muslim population of France now numbers in the millions. 

But this state of affairs has come about precisely because of colonialism, or rather lack of it, and the lack of Prussian-style forcefulness and vigour. It is no coincidence that almost immediately after the breakdown of European colonial and imperialist rule in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, millions of the former colonial subjects began to invade Europe. This causal link between the invasion of Europe and the decline of colonialism has become more and more evident with the passing of years, so much so that Europeans can now say to themselves of the non-white world that 'We fought over there to prevent them from coming here'. Sadly, Europe could not maintain its empire 'Over there' because Europe had become weak - weak because of two fratricidal wars or as part of a natural biological decline or both. Today's Europe presents a striking contrast with the Europe of a hundred years ago, when whites ruled most of the world, and inwardly believed that they had the right to do.  

A measure of cant and hypocrisy prevented those Europeans from openly declaring that they had that right, and that they were good rulers, and that they were engaged in colonial enterprises for purely selfish reasons. But the German habit of a rather coarse and brutal honesty expunged any trace of English-style cant and liberalism from German discourse. It is this German trait that helped earn the enmity of the Anglos before the outbreak of WWI - that and the German argument that the British Empire was fading, and that of all the Western European nations, Germany alone possessed the vitality which was a requisite for leadership. As honesty carried to excess can become rudeness, self-confidence can become arrogance: 

Mere force or calculation gives mastery; for leadership more is required — superior culture, superior morality, respect for distinctive national characteristics, an intelligence capable of comprehending and assimilating foreign elements. These qualities insure to the people which possesses them all the world power of the future, and we Germans are that people. [Conquest and Kultur-]

The reader can see for himself that a continuity exists between the self-confidence of the German in WWI and WWII; a direct line can be traced from the Pan-German of WWI and the German soldier of WWII, who, as we know from a thousand war movies and TV shows, wears a resplendent uniform, is full of an insufferable cockiness, and whenever he comes across a female character in occupied France or Holland, addresses her as 'My good woman' with a supercilious smile - Moff Tarkin, when he addresses Princess Leia, smiles in exactly the same way. As to whether or not one likes this type, well, that is a matter of taste. I myself enjoy reading the WWI books written a hundred years ago, as in that time, the white man -  and especially the German - embodied strength, power, self-confidence; furthermore, the primary concern of the white nations of that time - which of them should rule the non-white world - makes a piquant contrast with those of the present. And many others come away with the same impression. It is this modern-day nostalgia for the old European imperialism that explains, to my mind, the appeal of the representations of that imperialism in popular culture - e.g., the Steampunk genre of alternative history fiction and the Kaiserreich modifications of the computer game Hearts of Iron IV. 

VI.

I think that the above goes some way to explaining what a 'Nazi' is. But much of it concerns external policy, that is, Germany's relation to other nations; what of the internal? 

Much has been written in dissident Right circles on the German jurist Carl Schmitt and his famous Friend / Enemy distinction. The anti-Nazi American academic, William Ebenstein, gives an excellent summary of Schmitt's theory in the wartime book, The Nazi State (1943) under the heading 'The Nazi Theory of Politics'. He includes a lengthy quotation from Goebbels so as to prove his thesis that the National Socialists were Schmittians: 

In an editorial on “Politics and Warfare,” in Das Ketch of May II, 1941, Dr. Goebbels, member of the German Government, states that “it is frequently not easy to distinguish, in the existential struggle of people, whether the means employed belong to the realm of politics or warfare. . . . The western democracies do not have the slightest notion of the working of National Socialist politics. They measure them with categories typical of these democracies, and then inevitably arrive at catastrophical blunders. With us, politics is as soldierly as the waging of war is political. Both pursue the same aims.” Dr. Goebbels at the same time thanked providence that the enemies of National Socialism, both inside Germany and outside, failed or refused to understand this Nazi conception of politics as perpetual total war aiming at the total destruction of the enemy. This failure of understanding the nature of Nazi politics. Dr. Goebbels concluded in the quoted editorial, “is one of the most puzzling characteristics of the forces which have opposed Nazism from its evolution from a small group of men to a great world power.”

To we moderns, who lived our entire lives in what is supposedly a 'liberal democracy', Goebbels' way of thinking sounds strange, if not foreign. But I think when it is applied to three of our modern shibboleths - democracy, the multi-party system, and press freedom - it produces some interesting results. 

Before WWI, the German political system - which was a constitutional monarchy, not unlike England's - could be classified as democratic. I here define democracy as an equal and fair contest between two or more candidates: for there to be a democracy, there must be what Schmitt calls the 'equal chance'. In 1914, Germans were allowed to choose between competing political parties, and it mattered not that suffrage was not universal; women were not allowed not to vote in England and America, the two most exalted 'democracies', until WWI was over. But Germany's enemies England and America considered the German and 'Prussian' system to be authoritarian and the Kaiser a tyrant. In the hundreds of anti-German polemics published during the war, Germany's critics demanded reform, and these demands were packaged as helpful suggestions and recommendations. But Germany was not fooled. In response, Germany asked the question why it was that Germany should accept the recommendations of two of its worst enemies, England and America? Furthermore, was the exchange intended to flow both ways: would America and England accept it if the suggestions for reform were made by Germany? That question answers itself, and in the negative. During WWI, France, England, America had ranged themselves against Germany as the Enemy in Schmittian terms; a conflict existed, and this conflict was existential, that is to say, it concerned the matter of Germany's very existence as a political unit. The best argument for the German political system in WWI - and by extension, WWII - was that the Enemy opposed it. One could write sophisticated political treatises, of the order of Plato's Republic, defending the German system, but after a certain point the conflict ceases to be intellectual and becomes political, which is to say existential. Intellectual disputation and discussion crosses over into warfare, in this case, psychological warfare. 

Schmitt's theory and Goebbels' practice applies to the second institution we in the West today value: the multi-party electoral system. In the ideal democratic system, ideologically-differing candidates and parties compete against one another in a free and fair contest, and nowhere is it presupposed that the losing contestants are to be annihilated; instead, the rule is that they are to sit on the back bench until a short number of years pass, and it is then that they will get their chance to mount a serious bid for office. The tradition in American politics is that a candidate who is elected to the presidency for one term shall get a second; that is a matter of mutual agreement - unspoken agreement - between Republicans and Democrats. The opposition party will get their shot at the presidency once the incumbent party has served two terms: then the two parties will compete in what is called a 'change election', and usually the opposition party will win. The incumbent party, having lost the presidency, is then demoted to the opposition party, but in the mid-terms it will almost always win House of Representatives. And so it goes, in a circle. But the 'totalitarian' ideology is, by its nature, bound to reject such this rather neat and well-functioning system; it views politics not as a friendly and fair contest but as a war. This is what the quotation from Goebbels tells us. In keeping with this Schmittian thesis, the NSDAP saw electoral campaigns as military campaigns, and it demanded - and got - what Roosevelt later called the 'unconditional surrender' of its opponents, the rival political parties. (But the NSDAP did not quite obtain unconditional surrender from its opponents the Centre Party, the Social Democrat Party, the German People's Party,the Bavarian People's Party; politicians of the rival parties were granted some leeway by the NSDAP after it achieved complete dominance in March 1933; candidates from the parties, which had been dissolved, were allowed to run as independents, or 'guests', in the November 1933 elections, and the elections of 1936 and 1938). But to the modern reader, all this sounds somewhat archaic, it smacks of the politics of the 1930s; do these formulas of war and 'unconditional surrender' hold true in modern times? Well, they do: we saw it in the 2020 US Presidential election. The Democrats stole the election from Trump through fraud, and possibly won the run-off campaign in Georgia for the two Senate seats using the same fraudulent methods. The Democrats won in 2020 a monopoly of state power (by cheating) with the consequence that after January the 6th - the day of the Democrat coup against Trump - that monopoly is being exploited by the Democrats, who want to use the offices of state to eliminate their opponents. They are attempting to achieve this elimination by declaring all voters and followers of Trump to be the 'Internal Enemy'. (Such declarations do not happen often in American political life; according to Yockey, the designation of the 'Internal Enemy' has been used only three times in American history; the first during the aftermath of the War of Independence, the second during the Civil War, the third during WWII (when American sympathisers with Germany were treated as hostiles)). And what the Democrats demand from conservatives and pro-Trump Republicans is unconditional surrender. 

From this, we can say that democracy in 2021 is finished in America. It may be that democracy will be restored, but prospects look bleak. The pessimistic conclusion to be drawn that if the Right is ever to regain State power, it can only do so if it avails itself of the same 'totalitarian' methods of the Left. And that means it must go down the 'Nazi' path. 

And this leads us to the subject of the third valued institution, and that is the free press. 

Schmitt, in more than one of his works, defines the intellectuals as the discussing class. Parliament, in the liberal world view, should act as a forum for free and untrammeled discussion between distinguished gentlemen who, by disputing, and disputing freely and openly, will arrive at the truth, much like the philosophers in the agoras of ancient Greece. Politics is to be reduced to debate, and the precondition of the liberal political order or system is that this debate be free and untrammeled, and furthermore, open to all - it must be transparent. Liberalism, as Schmitt points out, believes in the redeeming value of publicity. 

The ideal of the free press fits in with all this; the free press is to function as a journalistic parliament. It allows the free and frank exchange of opinions - and perhaps it did in 1980 or 1990 or 2000, but does it do so in 2021? The answer is no. Since 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, the press in America and everywhere else in the West, has arrogated to itself political powers. It has become a political force. One consequence of this was that the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, AP, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, et al., waged war every day on the Trump administration. After the stolen election of 2020, that almost military-campaign concluded in a victory for the media and the two other institutions with which the media shares power: Big Tech and Hollywood. It is this - a triumvirate - that now reigns, not the Democratic Party (and as for Biden, he is an empty vessel). 

The triumvirate does not allow ideological competitors: it seeks to destroy them - as is becoming painfully apparent, day by day. The left-wing ideology that animates the triumvirate counsels the crippling, decapitation, extermination of the triumvirate's political opponents. Such a Leninist mentality could not be further removed from the liberal ideal. 

Complete freedom of the press, and intellectual discussion, does not exist in its entirety in the West - try and publish an op-ed denying the Holocaust in an American or European newspaper and see what happens to you - and it never has. But one could say, up until recent times, that the media approached the liberal ideal, at least to a reasonable degree. Now all that has changed. The repressiveness, the deplatforming, the progandising, the vilification, the twisting of the truth, has reached such proportions that even the most dimwitted conservative (the type of conservative always insisting that the commies, SJWs, antifa are the 'Real Nazis') is beginning to see. 

Once we have identified a certain class - in this case, journalists - as a political actor, we should be asking: does that class use its political power in ways which are beneficial? Clearly the answer in this case is no. In 2020, the Western media (and not only the US media) aided and abetted the Black Lives Matter (BLM) rioters, and through these actions sought to trigger a race war; it incited violence against Trump and his supporters, and is still continuing to do so; and it induced a state of hysteria regarding Covid-19, which has led to consequences we are all too familiar with. 2020 would have looked very different had the media shown some more of the objectivity and neutrality it had displayed thirty to forty years ago - and the willingness to do actual journalism. And in the present year, the media is committing the worst crime of all from our point of view: the media, along with the Far Left, is fostering a climate of race-hatred - race-hatred against white people. All this goes some way to explaining why it is that so many in the West hold the journalistic profession in contempt - why so many believe that there is no lower form of human life than a journalist. 

In 2021, we are faced with two possibilities. The first is that future conservative governments intervene to restore a measure of freedom of discussion, debate and enquiry. The second is that a civil war of sorts gets underway as it did in Weimar Germany or Salvador Allende's Chile or Isabel Peron's Argentina; this war is to take place between the Far Right and the Far Left, and in the event of a victory for the Far Right, press freedoms are to be suspended. (But from the perspective of we moderns, that suspension would be purely formal and no great loss, as freedom of the press, freedom of discussion and freedom of expression today have already disappeared).

It seems unlikely that the old liberal order in journalism can be restored. Suppose that Trump had attempted to do that, he would have been accused of 'assaulting press freedom' and 'endangering democracy', the media having become adept at borrowing liberal rhetoric in order to camouflage itself. The journalist has made himself a political actor, and he will, upon coming under attack, do what all politicians do, and that is, fight for his survival as a political unit. Enoch Powell frequently quoted Thucydides' maxim that political power, once gained, is never relinquished - at least not voluntarily. It is unlikely that, now that the Left - which is the media, Big Tech, Hollywood, the SJW Twitter mob, the Antifa, the Critical Race Theorists - has attained near-absolute power that it will give it up. The Left will not experience a sudden religious conversion and then decide to behave in keeping with the ideals of classical liberalism. And so, the present state of affairs could continue indefinitely; the example of Venezuela shows that once the Left get in power, they cannot be gotten out. To this, the Friend / Enemy distinction provides the only redress. But once we begin to talk this way, we are speaking the language of Schmitt and Goebbels. 

VII. 

At the beginning of this article, I posed the question, 'What is a "Nazi"?' and I challenged myself to come up with an answer which was not something along the lines of, 'Go read a book on 20th century German history'. 

The screenwriters of the science fiction TV and movie franchises Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica were faced with a similar challenge. They had to create characters - who were to be the bad guys, naturally - who were to be distinctly 'Nazi' and at the same time not German, for these stories were set in galaxies far, far away. And some subtlety was required (and was achieved): the Empire in Star Wars, for example, were not to merely serve as a stand-in for the Nazis, the Rebels not as a stand-in for the resistance fighters in German-occupied Europe: no, George Lucas made the story a metaphor for (among other things) the American war in Vietnam. 

Dissecting the political philosophy of Star Wars and other science-fiction franchises is a difficult and onerous task, but one that must be done, for a political philosophy does animate the more overtly 'Nazi' science-fiction characters, and the purpose of my article has been to divine what that philosophy was. And my answer? Take some of the 'Prussian Militarism' of the first half of the 20th century and add Schmitt's concept of the political: we then arrive at something which is not the last word on the subject, but a point of departure. 

It should be noted that 'Prussianism', 'Prussian Militarism', need not be grounded in the actual and historical Prussia - the Prussia of Frederick the Great and the House of Hohenzollern. The writers of the science-fiction franchises took 'Prussianism' out of its historical context and transported it to a place as far removed from Prussia as possible. In much the same way, George R. Martin, who wrote the fantasy novels which were adapted in the TV series Game of Thrones (2011-2019), modeled his world on Europe of the feudal era - comparisons have been drawn between his story and the history of the War of the Roses - but at the same time, his characters are not English (even though they speak (in the TV adaptation) with English accents). 

Here I have only attempted to define 'Nazism'; I have left open the question of its value - that is, whether it is good or not - and also the question of whether or not Hitlerism can stage a comeback, in Germany and Europe, some time in the future. Spengler and Yockey made predictions of a resurgence of 'Socialism' some time in the 21st century, but as I lack their prophetic vision, I will not be as bold. My current thinking is that the effective political activist must position himself with a view to the immediate and not the distant, to the present and not the future. 

Yesterday's Hero: on post-war prosperity, postmodern apathy, pop Nazism and punks (cyber)

 

I.

Politically speaking, nothing matters more at the time of writing than the electoral fraud of the 2020 American presidential election - that and what those on the Far Left will do to us on the Far Right if they assume absolute power. So my writing on what is a purely theoretical question will appear to some to be an evasion. But in my own defence, in the last analysis one has to let the Americans - and Trump - fight their own battles. The Western nationalism that exists outside of America will survive 2020, albeit under straitened circumstances, and  it will after 2020 face an uphill battle no matter who becomes US president, as it must contend with a Left which is in near-complete control of the media, popular culture, the Internet... 

So let us look at a subject close to home. In my article, 'The Aussies and the Nazis', I defended the NSN (National Socialist Network) against that the charge that their National Socialism was un-Australian; my argument was that in fact the most prominent Australian nationalist group of the 1930s and 1940s (the Australia First Movement) did have close ties with the German National Socialists, as did most other nationalist groups (the ones that mattered anyway) in Europe. Today a Slovenian or Belgian or Swedish or Portugese anti-Nazi and anti-fascist may take the gambit of declaring German National Socialism to be un-Slovenian, un-Belgian, un-Swedish, etc., but that will not pay off, and we can see why from looking at the historical record, which is one of Nazi sympathising and even collaboration. 

A charge which is far more difficult to refute is that the ideas of German National Socialism do not bear upon the present era, that they are not pertinent to it; they have no relevance. They are a finished historical product, bound to their particular place and time; their importance, their meaning, does not extend past the 1930s and 1940s. 

The line of attack does hit home, and it is all the more powerful because any discussion resulting from it will bring up some thorny and profound philosophical disputes, one of them being the following: the Russian philosopher Kojève, when examining various Western philosophical world-views (or Weltanschauungen, as Hitler would call them), asks the important question, are these world-views ever-lasting or are they ephemeral? Are they are grounded in eternal truths or the fleeting notions of the day? Those who take the latter view argue that ideas, like popular music, are subject to fashion; they can be in one day, out the next. In this they follow the same course as any cultural fad. (Take the Emo subculture, for example, which was popular in the 2000s and then vanished without a trace in the 2010s, having went the way of the platform shoes and disco music of the 1970s). 

Kojève regards this historical relativism as false, and furthermore, pernicious, and he compares it to the doctrine of the

Sophists.  Nevertheless, my view is that its charges must be answered, especially when they are raised against a political ideology. 

It is a fact that the passage of time, which leads to a distance in time, does bring with it a certain objectivity. We recognise, at once upon encountering them, what exactly the fashions of the 1970s and 1980s were, but we do not recognise, at least with as much precision, the distinctive attributes of the fashion of 2010s or even the 2000s; in the former case, much time has passed (hence the instant recognition) since those decades, in the latter, too little. Historical distance and the flow of time make the past a finished product, a closed book, and thereby give us an understanding of what a thing essentially is. This is what Hegel meant when he said that the 'Owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'. 

Was there a point in time after the war when we in the West understood what National Socialism was and viewed it with a degree of objectivity? Yes: in the 1960s. Given that politics is a visual medium - a thesis Hitler would surely agree with - my argument is that one means of getting to grips with a political idea is to see it. In the 1930s and 1940s, we grasped politics through newsreels and newspaper photographs; in the 1960s and 1970s and after, through popular culture - that is, movies, TV shows, comic books. Put that way, we see that a great deal of change in the popular depictions of National Socialism occurred over the past six decades. For one, by the time of Schindler's List (1993), the National Socialists (and the German people themselves) in popular culture had been transmogrified into a race of demons. A cynic would remark that such extreme ugliness in the portraiture of National Socialism always could be expected, but my contention is that it was not always so. Ernst Zündel remarked (in the 1990s) that whereas once the hero of the American war movie once raced against time to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima, he now races to liberate the concentration camps; popular culture, in portraying the war, had by the 1990s begun to favour the European theater at the expense of the Pacific and show signs of an obsession with the Holocaust. A shift had occurred, and I identify the turning point as the 1960s. In Rat Patrol (1966-68), Twelve O'Clock High (1964-1967), Combat! (1962-67) (the TV action shows devoted to the Western theater) the Germans are portrayed with (as Zündel observes) grudging respect, and in The Producers (1967) and Hogan's Heroes (1965-71), the subject of comedy. Undoubtedly the writers, directors and actors who served up this fare were attuned to the desires of the audience, a large proportion of which was made up of ex-servicemen, and this segment of the audience knew, from first-hand experience, that the Germans were not the monsters Allied wartime propaganda made them out to be. And so, perhaps, there was a pending reconciliation of sorts between the Germans and the Anglos? Whatever the case, the point is moot, because as Zündel remarks, by the 1970s the Holocaust had stepped in and nipped any rapprochement in the bud. 

Time heals all wounds, and by the 1960s, enough distance had been gained from the war for it to be represented with a reasonable degree of objectivity, or near enough to objectivity - as close as Hollywood could be expected to get. But that brought with it its own dangers. When you turn National Socialism into a not-so-serious TV show or movie or board game, you are showing a high level of detachment from it - you are not feeling a sense of involvement, politically, emotionally, spiritually or otherwise. This is what happens when National Socialism, and the war, become part of the past: the pages written on them have become closed in the book of history. For you, a member of the audience of Hogan's Heroes and Dad's Army (1968-77) and who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, the realities of that time are unpleasant to recall, especially when you compare them to those of the present, the present being distinguished by its peace and prosperity; but the fact that you enjoy these comedies reveals that you do not feel much in the way of trauma regarding the recent past, as it is water under the bridge. You have achieved closure. In this state of mind, one can look at the battles of WWII with nearly as much detachment as one would at the battles of the Napoleonic Wars or the Wars of the Austrian Succession. But that means you are approaching postmodernism, and with it, postmodern apathy and irony. 

What does that entail? In the past year, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been engaged in a war over a disputed territory called Nagorno-Karabakh. The Far Right, the Western nationalist movement, does not have a stake in the war; it has not pronounced, by and large, that one side is more 'based' than the other (as it did in two of the wars of the last decade - the Syrian Civil War and the Russo-Ukrainian War). If members of the Far Right were called on to play a wargame based on conflict, or role-play as soldiers in re-enactments of key battles, they would feel a sense of non-involvement; they would feel detachment. And no doubt they would utter witticisms while role-playing as the Armenian or Azerbaijani soldiers, witticisms which would express their ironic detachment. This is one of the key themes of postmodernism: a feeling of irony when one is re-enacting or repeating a past which one cares nothing about. 

Perhaps the first person on the Far Right to act as a postmodernist was George Lincoln Rockwell. His politics exhibited a dual nature: on the one hand, he took his brand of racialist conservatism extremely seriously; on the other, he treated National Socialism as a prank, a joke (that was the subtext of his actions - had he been confronted about it, he would have denied it furiously and declared that he was a sincere and committed 'Nazi'). Fifty years later, we come to Rockwell's spiritual successors - the pranksters of 4Chan who ironically espouse National Socialism and fascism. 

In a way, it was Jewish activism in the 1970s that saved National Socialism from descending into postmodern irony. As stated before, in the previous decade, the National Socialists were treated as objects of gentle ridicule in TV comedies such as Dad's Army and Hogan's Heroes, worthy opponents in action movies such as Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Anzio (1968). They were depicted as bad, but not evil. But then Jewish activists thrust the Holocaust story to the forefront of the public consciousness. No doubt the movie and TV audiences of the 1970s began to feel pangs of guilt at laughing at the antics of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. By the time of the 1980s - the time of Sophie's Choice (1982) and Shoah (1985) - audiences had stopped laughing altogether. The Holocaust onslaught was well and truly underway, and audiences were being deluged by hundreds - no thousands - of Holocaust novels, movies, comic books, plays, ballets, education classes, documentaries, museum exhibits... National Socialists were no longer to be laughed at, they were to be taken seriously, extremely seriously: the war was painted as a primordial clash between good and evil. (It is no coincidence that at this time the governments of Europe began to introduce serious penalties for denying the Holocaust, penalties which included fines and imprisonment, whereas only ten years before, the same governments did not actively seek to punish Holocaust denial - one could then write a Revisionist work and travel through Europe a free man). 

Oddly enough, Holocaustism reached a fever pitch in the 1990s, the decade which represented the high-water mark of postmodernism. The postmodern-themed TV show, Seinfeld (1989-98), poked fun at Schindler's List, but that was the exception; 1990s popular culture for the most part treated the Holocaust with the utmost gravity. And the postmodernist, post-structuralist French intellectuals, who espoused a sturdy scepticism towards all 'grand narratives' (and the Holocaust, being part of Judaism and Zionism, is nothing if not a grand narrative), were taken in by the Holocaust like everyone else; hence their rote denunciations of the French  Revisionist Robert Faurisson. I must confess that I was taken in at the time as well - not having access to any of the Revisionist works on the Internet - and I, too, viewed the Germans as a race of monsters. But then, when all your intellectual peers are declaiming with absolute certainty that a certain event actually did happen and that an ideology (and the country that gave to birth to it) responsible for it are evil to the core, you tend to believe them - it is human nature.

By turning the National Socialists into creatures of evil - akin to vampires, warlocks, witches, werewolves - the Jewish activists reanimated National Socialism; they gave the corpse new life - a strange, unnatural life, but a life nonetheless. In order to kill National Socialism, to deprive it of life, they would have been better advised to mummify it, to make it a thing of the past, something which could be handled as a relic, a curio. The 1990s was the ideal decade to accomplish this. In a 1992 work which was perfectly in accord with the times, Francis Fukuyama, inspired by Kojève, pronounced the End of History. What Fukuyama and Kojève meant by the idea was that history could be conceived up as an epic with a beginning, middle and end; and once the epic had come to an end, there was nothing left for the protagonists to do - no great feats to accomplish, no high ideals to die for. At the conclusion of the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-83), the Empire is defeated and the heroes Han, Luke and Leia resume their normal lives - lives which to us in the audience would have seemed dull and listless had they been put up on the big screen, as they would have been bereft of heroic exploits. Kojève's contention was that Man had arrived at the same point: the end of the story. Henceforth, Man would live an uninspired, base, even animal existence; he would be what Nietzsche called a Last Man, Spengler a Fellahin. And being situated at the end of history, he would look at the great and significant preceding events - for example the 30 Years War, or the War of Austrian Succession, or the Napoleonic Wars, or even the First and Second World Wars - with detachment. And with detachment, comes irony... One can see how this sense of historical distance lends itself to the anti-Nazi argument 'It's not the 1930s any more' - that is, while German National Socialism and Italian Fascism suited the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps, they do not the current year. And as it so turns out, Jewry in the 1990s could made effective use of that Kojèvean argument but instead it promulgated the Holocaust tale for what was mostly a religious purpose. 

But I must emphasise, again, how damaging the 'It's not the 1930s any more' line of argument can be. Leon Degrelle writes in his memoirs how terrible it was in his post-war exile in Spain to read through the morning newspapers every day and not see his name mentioned; as a man accustomed to notoriety, this was a cross to bear. In the same memoirs, he makes the passing remark, with a sniffing condescension, that anti-tank weapons in WWII did not work the same way as they they are shown in the movies today. One can speculate that it must have been an alienating experience for Degrelle, once a soldier, now a spectator, to watch the war movies of the 1950s and 1960s in a Spanish cinema. Degrelle would no doubt have felt that he had been left behind by history. Which raises the question, what would he have thought of today's cultural developments? Only a few weeks ago, the bestselling computer game Cyberpunk 2077 was released. The game pays tribute to the Cyberpunk movie genre and hacking subculture of the 1980s and 1990s, and boomers (the children of Degrelle's generation) have a hard time making sense of these. Given that, what would Degrelle and his fellow post-war fascists Otto Remer and Otto Skorzeny, have made of them? They would have no doubt felt consternation and confusion. And this lends weight to the accusation that Degrelle was an old fuddy-duddy and that his wartime fascism today smells rather musty. 

II. 

Before anti-Nazi readers start congratulating themselves, I will make the point that, at some juncture in our lives, we all grow old; and for those of us who have political careers, at some juncture, we all become yesterday's hero. The aged and declining despot Ghaddafi of 2011 (the year he was overthrown) presents a sad contrast with the young and exuberant reformer Ghaddafi of 1969 (the year he came to power). 

As a man goes, so does a civilisation: this thesis underlay Spengler's monumental work, The Decline of the West (1918-22). Kojève took much from Spengler, who anticipated his idea of the 'historyless man' (a phrase Spengler uses repeatedly), that is, the man left over after the end of the history of a civilisation; but Kojève's borrowing has never been acknowledged by scholars. 

But Spengler contradicts Kojève on when it is that history, at least history in the West, comes to an end. Kojève says it was in the year 1806, when Hegel saw Napoleon on horseback in the town of Jena and subsequently conceived The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), an ambitious work which aimed to encapsulate all of philosophy, all of thought ('Spirit') up that time. Hegel therein concluded that, after Napoleon, Man had reached the last stage in his progress, the terminus of his historical evolution. Spengler differed in that he believed that there was no history of Man as such, only the history of the eight High Cultures, seven of which had died long ago - today only the Western Culture is left standing. And that Culture would not reach the end of its natural life until three hundred years (or thereabouts) after the writing of the Decline. For Spengler's prediction was that by the 23rd century, Western Man will enter the last stage in the West's historical cycle and will become 'historyless', a Fellahin, a Last Man. He will look back on all that has gone before in the history of his race without any emotional connection, without any emotional involvement, and he will devote himself to animal pleasures. His vast empire - which he had built in the preceding centuries - will go to rot and ruin, and he will become the prey of newer, younger, more 'barbarian' races. In other words, the West will suffer the same fate as ancient Rome, India and China. 

Unlikely as it seems, it is here that Spengler rides to the rescue of the National Socialist (or as Spengler would call it, 'Prussian Socialist') idea. 

Spengler's maudlin and frightening vision of a fading West, if it is to come true, will only come true hundreds of years in the future. According to Spengler's prediction, the 21st century shall see no Fellahin and no pacifism, only dangerous political struggle. Politics in that time will be taken extremely seriously, as it was in the time of Caesar and Augustus. And after the time of struggle is a time of peace - a peace imposed by the new Imperium. As to whether or not in this period the German Idea (which Spengler called 'Socialist') would ultimately triumph, Spengler hedged his bets; suffice to say, he did not foresee a liberal future, and indeed, he prophesied that in the 21st century the system of ballot-box electoralism would come crashing down. (And I would argue of that of this the events of 2020 give us a portent). (In order to avoid misunderstanding Spengler on this point, it should be made clear that is not the case that such political systems simply stop functioning; it is that they fail to maintain the confidence in them that they had enjoyed before). Taking all of Spengler's predictions into account, then, one can infer from them, as Spengler's disciple Yockey did, that in the new century Spengler's 'Socialism' does indeed stand a chance. 

III.

My intention here has been to make vivid a contrast that exists between two different historical periods and their accompanying Weltanschauungen. 

Spengler and Yockey published their work in what was undeniably a most dangerous and unpleasant time in Western history; Fukuyama revived Kojève's ideas in a time which was not dangerous and not unpleasant. Given the choice, any Western European (or North American or Australian) would prefer to live in the latter period over the former. And he would prefer, one over the other, one of the two ethics that accompanied each of the two periods. What are these ethics? We find them in our four authors. Spengler and Yockey praise the martial virtues (self-sacrifice, renunciation, discipline, courage, sternness...) whereas Kojève and Fukuyama reject them - in the world view of the latter pair, Man is to become a contented cow or sheep, a creature which poses no threat to anyone, a 'herbivore'. It goes without saying Western Man, c. 2020, prefers the latter ethos over the former. And it is this preference which has placed an obstacle in the path of all Western nationalism for the past seventy-five years. The nationalist believes that the West, and the entire white race, are in danger of extinction, but upon becoming a political activist and commencing a crusade to defend the West, he quickly discovers, to his frustration, that Western Man, because of complacency or stupidity, will not fight to save himself. 

Discussions of this subject in nationalist polemics often lead to speculations as to what the breaking point, the last straw, for Western Man will be. And such a breaking point exists, for every nationality; September 1939 and December 1941 showed that even the most stoic and patient of peoples, once goaded beyond endurance, can snap. 

Western Man has for the last hundred years been forced to shoulder a number of  burdens. These are political and are in effect taxes which have been imposed upon him. They could be thought of as the price he pays for participating in normal society; if he does not pay them, he will be punished. A comparison could be drawn between them and the protection money paid to a gangster. 

The rate and number of these taxes has been steadily mounting since the end of WWII. Taking America as an example, Americans, by the 1960s, had laboured under what I call the negro tax for hundreds of years, and the rate of that tax was dramatically increased at the time of the race riots and the new desegregation laws; by the 1970s, whites had been ethnically cleansed from some of the great cities of the North-East - for example, Detroit. Around the same time came a new tax, a new levy - the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which abolished the whites-only immigration system which had been in place for forty years. Hart-Celler led to a massive immigrant invasion, the largest in history. Following this tax - which should be called the Great Replacement tax - Americans had to put up with an additional one, the mandatory Holocaust education and indoctrination tax, which took effect in the 1970s and 1980s. Forty years later, new taxes were introduced: the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) tax, the transsexual tax, the 'Woke Capital' tax, the Greta Thunberg tax, the '#MeToo' tax, the deplatforming tax, the cancel culture tax... The year 2020 saw a Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa riot tax, and one of the most devastating taxes of all - the Great Reset tax, which has led to the vexations of social distancing, mask mandates, contact tracing, lockdowns, house arrests, curfews, forced unemployment, forced closure of businesses and perhaps, in the future, the introduction of a compulsory (and potentially lethal) vaccine. The Great Reset has engendered, as we know, pathological social phenomena on a stupendous scale. And in case one thought that things could not get any worse, the year 2020 concluded with the Joe Biden electoral fraud tax, which will exacerbate tensions between the Left and Right to an alarming degree and could eventually lead to a sundering of the American republic.

Economic theory posits the hypothesis of what is called the Laffer Curve: this is the proposition that past a certain point additional tax hikes will see a diminution, not an increase, in revenue. Diminishing returns apply to tax collection. The same holds true to the burdens, impositions, outlined above. Past a certain point, the last straw will have been reached for American (and Western) Man; he will refuse to pay these levies.  

The Western nationalist's tolerance for these impositions is low, the normie's is high. The British nationalist, for instance, finds the Great Replacement tax (which was first levied in England seventy years ago) outrageous, and thinks that the British normie should be outraged by it too; he cannot understand why the normie is not outraged and was not even outraged after the Pakistani grooming gang scandal came to light. But the truth is that when it comes tolerance and endurance of burdens and impositions, different sections of the populace have different thresholds. We activists are all familiar with the somnolent type of normie who feels nothing but complete indifference towards politics and indeed any of the higher fields of human endeavour; prior to 2020, none of the taxes mentioned made the slightest impression on him. One is inclined to suspect that the political establishment, being aware of his notoriously high tolerance, imposed the Great Reset in order to test his limits; and in doing so, that establishment was possessed of a certain impishness and malice - like a child who teases an animal so as to make it bite. 

Looking past the somnolent and insensate type of normie, we come to others who are more promising. There is the conservative boomer, who was accepting of all the taxes levied up to 2000 or so, but has been baffled and confused - and angered - by the new SJW, transsexual, Greta Thunberg, etc., taxes, and wants things to go back to where they were. Another nostalgic is the popular culture-obsessed normie, who often belongs to either the boomer generation or Generation X. He lives in a dream world, a bubble, which is filled with popular culture - computer games, anime, comic books, movies, TV shows, action figures, role-playing games... Unfortunately for him, the late 2010s saw the infiltration by the extreme Left into popular culture, and as a result, his beloved franchises (among them Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Marvel and DC, James Bond) have been ruined by SJW politicisation. Like the conservative boomer, he instinctively holds to reactionary views and wants life to return to where it was in 1990 or 2000 or even 2010 - when the impositions were not as pronounced. He is prepared to pay some taxes, but not others. The negro tax and the Great Replacement tax do not bother him, as he is not a white nationalist by any description; the Holocaust indoctrination tax does not bother him, as he has been trained to hate all Germans, 'Nazis', by Hollywood; but 'SJW Star Wars' - that he will not abide. One consequence of his displeasure is that he has produced literally thousands of YouTube videos containing hundreds of hours of intricate analyses of Lucasfilm, Disney, Kathleen Kennedy, The Mandalorian (2019-), etc. 

Now, he can be chided for not spending his time on more worthy, serious subjects; but he could counter this attack with the question: after he comes home tired at the end of the working day, what is there for him but escapism? In his judgment, he feels he has the right to lose himself in the world of heroic myth. It means something spiritually higher to him, something he needs - man does not live by bread alone. 

IV.

The pop-culture obsessed normie is closely related to the bug man, who is in turn related to Nietzsche's Last Man and Spengler's Fellahin. The bug man, a conformist by nature, accepts nearly all of the aforementioned taxes, much like the somnolent, insensate and bulletproof type of normie. 

The Western nationalist will castigate the bug man: the bug man does not engage in a revolt against the modern world (Evola), lament the passing of the great race (Grant), hanker after the Imperium (Yockey); he is politically inactive and perfectly content with the way things are. But I envy him to a certain extent. To be obsessed by nothing but computer gaming, for example - that would be a life (I imagine) of uninterrupted bliss. 

This is where Cyberpunk 2077 comes in. 

The computer game was based on a pen and paper role playing game, Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future which was published in 1988 and set (amusingly enough) in the far-flung future of 2013. The original game portended, as one could expect, a dark, dystopian future for the West, like all the works in the cyberpunk genre; but paradoxically, the genre makes urban dystopias look exciting, glamourous, seductive. It prettifies the urban science-fiction hellscape and turns it into something beautiful. And this has real world implications. The Los Angeles of the movie Blade Runner (1982), the Chiba City of the novel Neuromancer (1984) and the Night City of the game Cyberpunk 2077 seem strangely familiar to us, as they resemble cities in which we live - Sydney and Melbourne, for example - and because of this, Cyberpunk 2077, an aesthetically pleasing game which beautifies the modern city, makes us appreciate our cities all the more. 

It is no exaggeration to say that for some, the game made 2020 worth living. The game had been in development for eight years (!) and the release date for 2020 had been slated for April, and then it was pushed back to November, and then December. The delay only increased the anticipation. The release of Cyberpunk 2077 was eagerly awaited by gaming fandom, and even those on the Far Right were swept up by the enthusiasm. On 4Chan, a common slogan was, 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077': that is to say, despite all the negative political developments of the year 2020, I am still looking forward to playing this game which, I have been assured, will be a masterpiece. 

All this has an unlikely sequel, but before I detail it, I should be point out that the audience for cyberpunk is meant to react with revulsion, and not pleasure, at the prospect of the West turning into a dystopia filled with cyborgs, low-lifes, and servants of evil corporations ('corpos';); and it goes without saying that the white nationalist or National Socialist is meant to react negatively as well. (Read what Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), has to say on the evils of city life). On that, the cyberpunk dystopia presents a reverse mirror image of what Far Rightists, traditionalists, fascists of all stripes value. Peasants, cosy cottages, clean and healthy country living, beautiful landscapes, 'Aryan women standing in wheatfields': these occupy the most prominent place in white nationalist iconography, not corpos, low-lifes, urban squalor, smog, neon signs and cyborgs. You can find these typical white nationalist icons on display at the Renegade Tribune website; Renegade travels down the Rosenberg route, and goes even further, endorsing homeopathy and veganism. 

But all this raises the question: which of the two - the cyberpunk urban dystopia or the National Socialist eco-utopia - is the more modern and the more real? Reluctantly, I have to say, the former; perhaps we could have lived more close to nature, as Rosenberg wanted, over a hundred years ago, but not now. 

Another difficult question. The video for the song 'Yesterday's Hero' by John Paul Young is set in the all-white city of Melbourne of 1975. Supposing that you could go forward or back in time, would you travel to the Melbourne of that year or to the Melbourne of some hundred years after (say, the year 2077)? The pop culture-obsessed normie would choose the future: he operates under the assumption that the future will not only be more technologically advanced, but more exciting, which is one of the reasons why he likes Star Trek, Star Wars, so much. 

That type of normie accepts much of the existing political order, and modern technology, and modern urban living, as does the bug man. The underlying philosophy of these types of normie was first outlined in Fukuyama's essay 'The End of History?' (which appeared in the summer of 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall). Fukuyama here expounded upon two propositions which many commentators found objectionable: the first was that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the second, that our existing political arrangements could scarcely be improved upon. Many on the Far Left took umbrage with Fukuyama, as could be expected, but so did many on the Far Right who are forever denouncing capitalism and consumerism. When I am in one of my less charitable moods, I am inclined to say that those the Far Right who adopted this position did so only because they are (like their counterparts on the Far Left) killjoys and moreover, people who are stuck in a distant past. The bugman, and the pop-culture obsessed normie, would agree. And they would venture that Fukuyama could have been right. Perhaps it is the case that a society which produces a work of beauty such as Cyberpunk 2077 cannot be all that bad. Why not, then, kick back and enjoy this marvellous world of supermarkets, shopping centers, and computer games - the world which our forefathers shed their blood, sweat and tears to build? Throw out your dusty volumes of Spengler, Yockey, Evola, and stop obsessing over race, immigration and Holocaust Revisionism. Become a postmodernist. 'It's not the 1930s any more'...

But there is a twist in the tale when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077. The game sold millions on the day of its release, but after playing it, gamers discovered that it suffered from glitches and other shortcomings; the sad truth was that it had been released before it was ready. The most hyped and anticipated game of the year - if not the century - had turned into a failure. The producers of the game, CD Projekt Red, took the unprecedented step of offering refunds to Playstation and XBox users. Disappointment was followed by fury; CD Projekt Red, are now facing a class action law suit from disgruntled investors. 

One moral of the story is, perhaps, that those wanting a more authentic cyberpunk experience would have been better advised to stick to the pen and paper games. But more than that, the story illustrates the ultimate failure of bugman-ism and normie-ism. The bugman could only justify Western liberal society and its economic system throughout 2020 with the following argument: despite the collapse brought about by the Great Reset, despite the scandal brought about by the Biden fraud, we in the West still live in a time which is unparalleled for its prosperity, luxury, technological advancement - and what better proof of this is Cyberpunk 2077? Even those on dissident Right, says the bugman, must acknowledge the truth of this argument, and they did acknowledge the truth of it, through their actions (but not their words), as the excitement the game caused led the 'Alt-Rightist' to drop his anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist pose. Anticipation for the Cyberpunk 2077 masterwork broke down all social and political barriers. Both Mark Zuckerberg - the king of the bugmen - and the anonymous 4Chan poster who coined the 'Still buying Cyberpunk 2077' phrase stood side by side in the queue outside the game store on the morning of December the 10th, the day of the game's release. And to paraphrase the Bible, Zuckerberg saw this, and behold, it was very good. For Zuckerberg wants nothing more for a member of the 'Alt-Right' than to become like him; he wants that 'Alt-Rightist' to buy a computer game, adopt postmodernist views, be content with the existing social order and take an Asian wife. 

But, as we know, things did not work out that way. 'Truth will have its revenge', as Carl Schmitt used to say, and perhaps, in 2020, 'Alt-Right' politics, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, Far Right Populism were in accordance with the times after all, and were the truth.