Homicide or Suicide?

Hunter Wallace, formerly known as “Prozium,” blogs at Occidental Dissent. Before he picked fights with nationalist intellectuals he had written a series of fairly good articles, which I’ll be republishing in this blog. I read the following article, “Homicide or Suicide?,” at The Occidental Quarterly.



In the Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald engages Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, which is easily the second most important book (aside from The Culture of Critique) about White racial decline in the United States. A shorter review has been posted in VDARE. It doesn’t do justice to the breadth of the subject matter and isn’t worth bothering with.

The thrust of MacDonald’s review is that Kaufmann omits certain facts about the Jewish role in Anglo-American racial decline and glosses over others. Aside from that, MacDonald and Kaufmann are in broad agreement on most points of interest. Kaufmann doesn’t shy away from the fact that Jewish influence was a major cause in the reinterpretation of Americanism along cosmopolitan lines. The major difference from MacDonald’s viewpoint is that Kaufmann (correctly) pays more attention to the indigenous “liberal, cosmopolitan Anglo-Saxon tradition” as a cause of subversion from within.

Having read both books, I came away with the impression that they complemented each other. Each provides certain windows into White racial decline that the other lacks. For example, Kaufmann’s book draws attention to Felix Adler and the Ethical Culture movement, an angle on the Jewish Question and the rise of secular humanism which I don’t recall MacDonald addressing before. Similarly, MacDonald’s account contains a much more in depth treatment of Boasian anthropology and the New York Intellectuals.

It is a sad testament to the decrepit state of American intellectual life that all of two books have been written about the most important subject in American history: the decline of its indigenous White majority. Even taken together, MacDonald and Kaufmann have barely scratched the surface of the subject. In contrast, hundreds (if not thousands) of articles and volumes have been written about the Holocaust and can be easily accessed in any decent college library, an event which didn’t even take place on American soil. This fact alone speaks volumes about ethnic constitution of America’s ruling class and their priorities.

A future scholar will one day have to write a separate book entitled The Fall of the Jim Crow South. There wasn’t a singular Anglo-America or White America that declined on account of Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School. Until the 1970s, Dixie was another country in its racial policies and cultural attitudes. Neither Kaufmann or MacDonald has adequately addressed this.

The cause of the South’s racial decline is plain enough to discern: the federal government forced the national racial consensus on the region through Smith v. Allwright, Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, Shelly v. Kramer, Sweatt, McLaurin, Gayle, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration Act of 1965, Loving v. Virginia, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and direct military intervention in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. There was little popular support for integration in the region. In the South, traditional racial attitudes remained strong from the elites to the common man, and were stoked to new heights during the Civil Rights Movement, whereas they collapsed elsewhere. Integration sparked the massive resistance movement, the citizen’s councils, and a revival of the Klan — why not in Chicago, Boston, and New York City?

In the Senate, Southerners led by Richard Russell filibustered and bitterly resisted the new federal civil rights laws, but were frustrated and defeated time and again by a lopsided coalition of Northern Democrats and Republicans. They deserted Lyndon Johnson at the polls for Barry Goldwater and George Wallace. Beyond the 1960s, Southerners defeated the Equal Rights Amendment and voted against Ronald Reagan’s IRCA amnesty of illegal aliens, the Immigration Act of 1990, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. They also led the opposition to the MLK holiday in Congress and the George W. Bush amnesties.

If the Confederacy had won its independence, there is little reason to believe that cosmopolitanism and anti-racism would have emerged victorious in the American South in the twentieth century. These were not indigenous social movements. Indeed, the only reason that White America held out as long as it did is because the South transformed itself into a one-party state under Jim Crow to defeat integration in Congress. Northern Republicans didn’t stop pushing for civil rights legislation until a Depression overwhelmed the Harrison administration in the 1890’s.

As I have stressed elsewhere, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s wasn’t the first time America had flirted with racial egalitarianism. The same laws were proposed and ratified during Reconstruction. They were supported in the North; opposed in the South. The bloodiest war in American history was fought to liberate the negro and impose racial equality on the country. An insurrection was carried on for three decades in the South to reverse the verdict of the Civil War. In the North, it was never reversed, and de jure integration became the order of the day from the 1880’s forward.

If the South was assassinated, the North committed suicide.

From the earliest days of the Revolution, racialism established only a tenuous hold in North. Pennsylvania was saturated in Quaker egalitarianism and repealed its anti-miscegenation law before the Constitution was signed. In the North, Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories were met with fierce opposition by the first abolitionist movement; denial of racial differences were commonplace in anti-slavery circles. Benjamin Franklin thought that negroes were “not deficient in natural understanding.” Alexander Hamilton remarked that “their natural faculties are perhaps probably as good as ours.” Samuel Stanhope Smith, the president of Princeton University, wrote several influential environmentalist tracts; anti-racism only went into eclipse after 1805.

Several Northern states never adopted Southern-style anti-miscegenation laws (Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey) or Jim Crow-style segregation. In New York, an anti-miscegenation law was rejected by the state senate on libertarian grounds. In Massachusetts, the capital of “natural rights” rhetoric, the state anti-miscegenation law was repealed in the 1830’s for similar reasons. National Expansion and Indian Removal were never popular causes in New England and the Jackson administration was widely criticized for both. James Fenimore Cooper lionized the Noble Savage in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). The annexation of Texas was delayed for years by Northern Whig opposition. The Mexican War was deeply unpopular in New England.

In the North, the Amistad case was a cause célèbre, and starred former president John Quincy Adams who was an inveterate foe of the so-called “Slave Power.” In the 1830s, the second abolitionist movement was born and was even more committed to anti-racism and human rights than the first. William Lloyd Garrison and his followers denounced the Constitution as a pact with the Devil and burned it in the streets. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin went on to become the all time bestseller of the nineteenth century. John Brown was lauded as a martyr after his murderous invasion of Virginia. Frederick Douglass was a respected intellectual. The Northern states passed personal liberty laws that violated the Constitution in order to harbor runaway negro slaves. The Dred Scott decision, which affirmed that only Whites could be U.S. citizens, was widely denounced in the North.

The trajectory of the North could not have been more different from the South. In the Antebellum era, a new generation of Southerners came of age and explicitly rejected the egalitarian heritage of the American Revolution. George Fitzhugh attacked capitalism, democracy, and the pernicious egalitarianism of Thomas Jefferson. Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz pioneered new theories of racial differences. Sir Walter Scott novels were all the rage; the Middle Ages and aristocratic ideals came roaring back in style. In his famous cornerstone speech, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stated that the Confederacy was the first nation in the world to be founded on the principle of racial inequality. The Civil War was fought over these ideals: aristocratic republicanism or egalitarian democracy, slave-based feudalism or free market capitalism, federalism or national consolidation, racialism or anti-racism. The victory of the North in that conflict determined the future disastrous course of America.

During Reconstruction, fanatics like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner wrote anti-racism into the Constitution in the form of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Over the next fifty years, as the South retreated into Jim Crow, the North would steadily move towards full blown integration. Fatally, the churning of the Northern capitalist economy would bring wave after wave of European immigrants into the the Midwest and New England, eventually swamping the indigenous Yankee population in most Northern states. After thirty years of struggle, the damage was finally mitigated by the Immigration Act of 1924, but not before millions of indigestible German and Eastern European Jews had settled in the United States.

These Jews quickly established ethnic defense organizations, penetrated Ivy League universities, founded the motion picture industry, bought up newspapers, inserted themselves into the national political debate, and amassed huge fortunes by beating the indigenous Yankees at their own capitalist game. Their “freedom” and “equality” gave them every right to do so. As Kaufmann persuasively argues, Jews found receptive allies in the treacherous Northern Anglo-Protestant cosmopolitan milieu, which was the lineal descendant of the pre-Civil War abolitionist Left. If the Jewish nationwreckers succeeded at propagating Boasian anthropology, Freudianism, multiculturalism, and modernist cosmopolitanism, it was only because they found in the American North a region which by history, tradition, and inclination was already ripe for a fall and receptive to idealistic social engineering crusades. They travelled down the same road to fame and fortune that Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Carnegie had blazed before them.

By the 1930s, white racial attitudes in the American North were so fragile that they were shaken to pieces by the wartime propaganda against the Third Reich. In stark contrast, Southerners emerged from the Second World War even more committed to segregation and white supremacy than they had been before. Northern WASPs were so crippled by their own effete liberalism that they allowed Jews to take over institution after institution rather than be impolite and “make a fuss” about their own precipitous dispossession. A revolution was effected without so much as a shot being fired.

In the end, Northern WASPs didn’t put up a fight. Unlike Germans under the Third Reich, they rolled over and died. It wasn’t exactly suicide, but it might as well have been. Like generations of Yankees before them, they were so used to worshiping money and conforming to public opinion that they allowed their culture to be stolen right out from under them once a new elite was thrown up by capitalism. Their tragic unraveling is an understudied subject. It is full of lessons for those of us who don’t want to see history repeat itself.

The origins of racial nationalism in America (excerpts)

Excerpted from a longer piece by Michael O’Meara from The Occidental Quarterly Online, originally published on May 4, 2009: “Klansmen, Irishmen, & Nativists: The Origins of Racial Nationalism in America”.

As European immigrants, native Americans, and the first Chinese made their way to California in this period [middle 1880s], so too did racial conflict—though conflict here would not be between natives and immigrants, but between Occidentals and Orientals, White against Yellow.

Standing together against the first Chinese arrivals—and to the swarming millions threatening to follow in their wake—native Americans and Irish Catholics discovered their common racial identity. In such a situation, white solidarity was paramount—which meant that, in face of the Yellow Hordes, religious differences dividing Protestant natives and Catholic immigrants in the antebellum period had to be superseded.

Accused of cheapening labor and introducing foreign elements in the East, the Irish were now welcomed into California nativist ranks—as whites facing a common threat.

Then, in the late 1870s, in a period of economic crisis, a Workingmen’s Party, led by an Irish demagogue, Denis Kearney, was formed in San Francisco. Its principal slogan was “The Chinese must go.”

The movement’s achievements were momentous.
For the first time in modern history, national legislation (to supplant the less effective immigration law of 1790) was passed to prevent non-whites from entering the United States and preventing those already within its borders from setting down roots.

Racially consciousness, populist, and at times anti-capitalist, the anti-Chinese movement of the 1870s (whose spirit, incidentally, lived on in the national-socialist novels of Jack London) succeeded in preserving the American West as a white Lebensraum. As I see it (and I see it from both from an Irish and American perspective), it represents the single greatest movement of White America.

***
The third great formative influence affecting the shape of American racial nationalism—though a step back from the anti-Chinese movement—came during the First World War. The Ku Klux Klan, which had emerged after Appomattox to defend Southern whites from Negro aggression and the Yankee military occupation, was re-organized in 1915 to address certain changes in American life. Like the European fascist movements of the interwar period, this “Second Klan” constituted a mass populist reaction to the war’s radical cultural/social dislocations. In the same period, the middle-class family came under attack. Suffragettes carried the day with the 19th Amendment, a “new women,” promoted by advertisers and by Hollywood, questioned conventional “gender” relations, divorce rates suddenly shot up, and children were increasingly exposed to anti-traditionalist influences.

On every front, then, it seemed as if small-town, rural, and middle-class White America was in retreat. But not before making a last—and, for a generation, successful—stand in its defense, for within a decade of its founding, the Klan had rallied 5 million members to its ranks, penetrating local and national power-structures as few other anti-liberal movements in US history.

To the degree the Klan was more sectarian than racial, favoring the conformist, materialist, and philistine elements in American life, it was a step back from the white consciousness of the anti-Chinese movement. In this capacity, it forced the government to close the border to immigration, it beat back the black assault on white hegemony, it let the wheeler-dealers in Washington and New York know that their “progressive policies” would not go unchallenged in the Heartland, and it acted as a moral bulwark against the permissive forces of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Above all, it upheld a racial standard for American existence.

***
The history of American racial nationalism, as exemplified by the Second Klan, the Chinese exclusion movement, and the early nativists, is a history whose legacy has, in the last half century, been squandered and suppressed by the elites now controlling American destinies.

Yet this is the legacy that the heirs of European-America today, if they are to survive, need to reclaim. For this history confirms them in their belief that the popular classes in America have always rejected the creedal definition of the nation; that they refused to allow their society and territory to be overrun by non-whites; and that divisive sectarian issues (between Protestants and Catholics, leftists and rightists, modernists and traditionalists, etc.) served only the interest of their enemies.

Most of all, this heritage of American ethnonationalism calls on whites today, in this era of their dispossession, to defend the racial-cultural-civilizational “nation” to which they once belonged and which, if regained, might again distinguish them from the world’s less favored races.

A City upon a Hill

The hypothesis that I am trying to develop elsewhere is that today’s “group fantasy” among many westerners is but a suicidal monster from the Id. Yes: Jewish ethnic interests may have played a major role in this thoroughgoing suicidal fantasy. But at the same time I believe that Kevin MacDonald’s model cannot explain everything.

That anti-white racism among whites, our Id monster, is widespread in most of present-day westerners is all too evident when reading a history of the original Euro-Americans. Franklin for one was such a Cassandra that he manifested serious concerns that the English character of the new America could dilute in the future because of non-Caucasian immigration. This explains his opposition to importing slaves. Franklin even asked the rhetorical question of why, having so fair an opportunity, not exclude blacks and tawnys to increase the lovely white? “I could wish their Numbers were increased.” Obviously, neither Indians nor blacks had the right to vote in Franklin’s day.

After the war that tore America apart Lincoln said that blacks were out of place in America. The Occidental Quarterly Online (TOQ)—one of the few sites which appears in my blog list—is publishing a series of articles on the need of secession, where deep motivation is paramount. It is worth noting that in the chapter about 1815-1850 of A History of the American People Paul Johnson claims that only because the peoples who moved to Utah were religiously motivated could the construction of the new nation in the West became possible. Nonetheless, it was precisely during those years when the Christian morality rebelled against slavery, just as the First Great Awakening had meant the death sentence for British colonialism. Since the Jews were involved in neither, this little piece of info gives plausibility to my view that something escapes MacDonald’s model.

On a lesser note, a passage I liked of A History of the American People is a Kendall communication to Andrew Jackson telling him that someday Anglo-Saxons will be majority in Mexico, and that this would improve that country. (Long before reading it I dared to say something very similar here in Mexico!) Another gracious vignette are General Scott’s words after the marines raised the American flag in 1847 for the first time “from the Halls of Montezuma.”

Johnson’s book is far from perfect. In his final chapter, after writing about the feminist revolution of the 1960s Johnson doesn’t seem to see the weapon of mass destruction that feminism—a typical Id monster—turned out to be for our civilization. Nor did he say a word about the need for a complete reversal of feminism if we are to escape the extinction that fell upon the Krell.


A City upon a Hill

“Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” —Richard McCulloch quoting a foe

It is incredible how I have changed since I first read Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People in 2004. At that time I was still a liberal; got dismayed that Bush was reelected, and purchased a translation of Johnson’s book to understand the United States better. Now that I am rereading it I am dismayed at how the wealthiest and, in many ways, greatest nation in history could have elected not Bush, but a black who personifies the anti-white ideology that westerners suffer. Barely on page 24 of Johnson’s book I was amazed to realize that it is as if another person was reading it after these six years. (Only that explains that in 2006-2007 I made friends with online liberals whom I am no longer on speaking terms.)

However, there is a subject about which I have not changed my mind since 2004. Johnson’s A History showed me that during an ethnic conflict, as was the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians, Jackson’s campaigns were much healthier to the preservation of our civilization than the Spaniards’ miscegenation: the basic etiology of Mestizo America’s backwardness (“Latin America” is a term that should be restricted to some neighborhoods in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, or to the white families at the south of the U.S. border).

While it is refreshing that Johnson states in the preface that, unlike other historians, he will not abstain from advancing value judgments, he fails miserably when he claims he is beyond the politically correct. On the very first page of the section titled “A City upon a Hill (1580-1750)”, Johnson talks about the dispossession of the indigenous population and asks if the United States has atoned for its sins. Taking into account how Amerindians behaved before the European conquest (cf. my latest entry) I don’t see anything serious to atone for. So-called conservative Johnson is playing the liberal card of Western (false) guilt here.

Most important about that first section of Johnson’s book is the Anglo-Saxon myth that in the 16th century the English had replaced the Jews as the chosen nation: an important factor in American history which also helped Elizabethan England in their fight against Catholic Spain. Michael O’Meara has published powerful articles in TOQ demonstrating that what moves societies is not scientific fact, e.g. IQ studies of blacks versus whites, but myths. Only myths can galvanize the collective unconscious of a nation. Homer’s epic hypnotized the minds of the ancient Greeks, not the geometric discoveries of the Ionia scientists and philosophers.


In my very first post in the commenters section of TOQ (an O’Meara article, “The Sword”) I wrote:

O’Meara is basically right. Myth is certainly what moves the soul. That’s why, inspired in Nordic culture, J.R.R. Tolkien strove to create a myth to the point of inventing euphonically aesthetic languages. Women like Éowyn, the blond we all saw in the film The Two Towers, with Edoras the capital of Rohan in the background, is the crown of evolution. To think that the very crown is now in danger of extinction because of self-hate among whites is too intolerable a thought to contemplate. A few months ago a former U.S. president celebrated that whites will be a minority in his nation. I was extremely dismayed when learning what he said and can only thank the authors of this website, which I have discovered just today…

According to Mario Bunge, whom I know personally, Hitler wanted to re-mythologize Europe. Yesterday I ordered through Amazon the revisionist book by Buchanan where he states that Americans should have left the Germans to expand toward the East. I look forward to reading it. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Johnson informs us that for John Winthrop the previous colonies had failed because they were carnal and irreligious. Winthrop believed that only an enterprise founded on religion had a chance to thrive.

He was right. In 1630 he gathered a float that parted toward what he and his enthusiastic company perceived as an escape from Egypt for the Promised Land. For Johnson it is beyond doubt that the spirit that animated all of these men and women was not economic but an impulse of a religious order. A “City upon a Hill” watched by the world was the myth that galvanized the community. Once on American soil, and in sharp contrast to present-day Americans’ aid after the 2010 Haiti quake, Winthrop was delighted when receiving the news that North American Indians were being decimated as a result of smallpox. It was clear to them that God had accepted their right to occupy the land.

Winthrop’s success resolved a mystery about which Johnson had written ten pages before. Why were the English so reluctant to establish themselves in America even a century after Columbus’ discovery while the relatively more primitive Spanish and the Portuguese had already created vast empires? The answer is patently clear: they lacked a truly galvanizing story that conferred them a definite self-image and consequent self-esteem.

Something similar could be said of the Great Awakening in America’s 1730s. An awakening is indeed what we now need, albeit one based upon a different kind of myth. TOQ is publishing printed, journal articles considering secession from today’s rotten America (see, e.g., here) plus online articles (e.g., here). But a very specific scene in the LOTR film and its music of “a City upon a Hill” in with Éowyn at the top of the capital of Rohan with a Scandinavian violin as sountrack might be enough, for the moment, to make my point.