“I tend toward tolerance, but in this area I have a moralistic streak, and I am quite a bastard when I sense cowardice and dishonesty in people. Really, what I despise is dishonesty out of cowardice.” - G.J.
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Excerpted from a longer piece I read in Counter-Currents Publishing (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs:
I first became aware of you following your appointment as editor of The Occidental Quarterly [TOQ]. However, I understand you had already been active as a dissident writer for a number of years, during which you wrote under various pen names. What, in your particular case, made you opt in favor of pen names? And why did you decide eventually to do away with them?
When I wrote under pen names, I was working for people who would fire me if they knew my real views.
When I took the
TOQ job, I was told I would have to use my own name. At the time, I was explained that since
TOQ is the would-be flagship of the intellectual wing of the Anglophone movement, it would not be suitable to edit it under a pen name. I accepted that argument at face value and took the plunge. At that point, I crossed the Rubicon. After about a year, all my old professional “friends” and contacts simply melted away.
Your tenure as TOQ editor saw a number of innovations: an active online presence was developed and articles and reviews appeared that covered a much wider spectrum of cultural spaces than ever before. What were your aims for the TOQ during this period?
My aim was to make
TOQ a metapolitical journal for a North American New Right, the goal of which was to lay the foundations of the White Republic. There were, however, limitations built into
TOQ from the beginning that made that difficult.
A problem was that the journal did not have clearly articulated goals. There were basic topics and parameters in the founding documents, which were drawn up by Sam Francis, Louis Andrew, William Regnery, and Kevin Lamb:
TOQ was to deal with biological race differences as well as the Jewish Question.
TOQ was not to bash homosexuals.
TOQ was to be neutral on religion.
The
de facto editorial line, however, can be divined from the interview published with Alain de Benoist. Only about half the actual interview was published. Everything critical of scientific materialism and Christianity was dropped. Benoist, I imagine, was quite disgusted. I certainly was when I learned about it. (I plan to publish the discarded portions in the first volume of
North American New Right.)
Now, to his credit, the original Editor Kevin Lamb frequently crossed these boundaries. When I took over as Editor, I quickly learned that I had to edit as if I had a scientific materialist over one shoulder and a religious fundamentalist over the other. I too went beyond those strictures. I made some improvements in the design and editing of the journal, but ultimately I did not do anything radically different than Lamb.
The term “metapolitics” is often used within the intellectual class, and no doubt there are some who think it is all pretentious nonsense. Please explain this term for the layman, and why metapolitics is important. Why not just straight politics?
Metapolitics deals with foundational questions connected to politics, questions from history, philosophy, religious studies, the arts, and the human sciences.
One way of understanding the distinction between metapolitics and politics is in terms of values.
A political leader has to appeal to the existing values and attitudes of his constituency. The reason why White Nationalist politics is premature is that it offends the values of the electorate. (David Duke’s one win was a fluke. It won’t be allowed to happen again.) We can’t get what we want, because our people don’t want what we want. They think our goals are immoral. They also think they are incoherent and impractical.
They think these things, because our enemies have carefully laid the metapolitical foundations for the power they enjoy. They control academia, the school system, publishing, the arts, the news and entertainment media, and they have remade the American mind to their liking. My aim is to change people’s sense of what is politically desirable and right, and their sense of what is politically conceivable and possible.
That means that we have to explore ideas that would offend the majority of people.
So metapolitics is not the province of impractical bookworms, then. How does it relate to politics?
Metapolitics is about laying the foundations for political change. There are three levels to our struggle. (1) The metapolitical struggle to change values, culture, worldviews. (2) The metapolitical struggle to create a white community, and not just a virtual community, but an actual, real world, face-to-face community. A counter-culture needs to be embodied in a counter-community. (3) The political struggle for actual political power. In the end, we want political power, because we want to make the survival and flourishing of our people the law of the land, a matter of explicit policy, indeed the fundamental law and policy.
But metapolitics is not compatible with political activity
within the present system and
at the present time. Why? Because the prevailing metapolitical consensus rejects White Nationalism as immoral and impossible. This means that pushing our agenda in the present system is ultimately futile. Any gains will be at tremendous cost and will be easily reversed. You can swim against the current, but it is exhausting, and as soon as you run out of energy, the current will sweep you back to where you started. You can’t build the political superstructure before you lay the metapolitical foundations.
This is not to say that it is impossible for a deep-cover White Nationalist to pursue political power. I hope a lot of them are.
Nor is it impossible for system politicians to support initiatives that White Nationalists can support. For me, the only political issue in the United States that I care about is immigration, and there is reason for hope on that front. Politicians who are close to the right bank of the mainstream are pushing initiatives that might slow or halt the onslaught of illegal immigration. It is far short of what White Nationalists want—namely, a race-based immigration policy—but it would give us time by putting back the date when Whites become a minority in the United States. Given how disorganized and kook-infested the White Nationalist movement is in the United States, we need all the time we can get. Thus if it is possible for a White Nationalist to push immigration policy in the right direction, I say do it, so long as you do not divert our community’s resources into the political mainstream.
What I reject utterly is the idea that White Nationalists—a tiny, despised, poorly funded, poorly led minority—should divert any of our scare political capital into the mainstream at the cost of building up our own institutions and community.
[Chechar’s note: This seems to refer to the blogsite Occidental Dissent — see also below] The mainstream is capable of taking care of itself. We need to take care of ourselves. If we don’t articulate our message and build our community, nobody else will.
We can’t buy mainstream politicians. They would flee from and denounce us if they knew who we are. Thus spending our political capital on people like that and expecting White Nationalist results is analogous to taking one’s capital to Las Vegas and playing craps as opposed to building one’s own business that will provide long-term steady income. Gambling, of course, is more fun than hard work, and the political system, like Las Vegas, is full of people who will be your friend and stroke your ego as long as you have money to blow. But the house always wins in the end, so White Nationalists who put their capital behind system politicians end up cleaned out, burned out, and useless to our cause.
Does not the inherent need for dissimulation in politics make it incompatible with free enquiry and open intellectual debate?
Yes, I will grant that. And if I thought that the time for political struggle were at hand, and if I thought that someone had come up with the perfect “Noble Lie,” I would fall right in line.
But White Nationalist politics is premature. Yet the main impediment I encounter is giddy people thinking that the time for political struggle is at hand
[Ibid: This seems to refer to the blogsite Occidental Dissent administered by Hunter Wallace], and the only thing standing in the way of that are people like me who insist on talking about things like the problems of Christianity, European ideas like fascism and (horrors!) National Socialism, etc. After all, these ideas won’t play in Peoria! They tell us that we need to shut down such discussions so our enemies don’t use them to scare away the voters.
Well, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see where this is going. The first thing we need to do is stop publishing articles that might offend mainstream Republican types. So we can’t publish articles about Black Metal, because that is “Satanic,” or Traditionalism because it is “occult,” or paganism because it is pagan. And we can’t be critical of capitalism either.
But you can’t stop there. Nothing offends Christian fundamentalists more than Darwinism, so scientific race studies and evolutionary psychological studies of the Jews are out too. Why talk about race and Jews at all, for that matter? Isn’t that divisive? Why not just get people riled up about “unfairness” and “double standards” against “European Americans” based on our “skin color”? Maybe we should just talk about restoring the Constitution.
In short, why not just close up shop? That is the ultimate end of this lemming-like stampede into the safe, respectable oblivion of mainstream conservatism.
The trouble with the mainstream, though, is that our enemies have done the metapolitical engineering work necessary to divert the conservative mainstream away from the turbines of political power and into the irrigation ditches of irrelevance.
So until the time is ripe for political struggle, I think that it is best to have the most open and free-wheeling intellectual debate possible. That is the only way we will create an intellectually exciting and morally credible metapolitical movement.
Besides, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle or the toothpaste back in the tube. For instance, even if I shut up tomorrow about the damaging effects Christianity has had on our racial survival, our enemies could still use that to scare Christians about Godless or Satanic racists. So we might as well keep the conversation going.
Besides, racially-conscious Christians will never reform their churches unless we constantly scourge them to do it. Otherwise, they tend to be far more interested in shutting down criticism in our camp than in confronting anti-White hatred in their churches.
Maybe metapolitical debate is folly from the point of view of political expediency. But as William Blake put it, the fool, if he persists in his folly, becomes wise. So we will persist.
We aren’t going to shut up and blend in, so people in the mainstream had better figure out ways of making us work to their advantage, if only by using us as boogey men to make them seem moderate by comparison.
After editing TOQ, you founded a publishing house, Counter-Currents. What are your aims with this new enterprise? What can we expect from, and what would you like to make happen with, Counter-Currents in the next five to ten years?
Counter-Currents publishes
North American New Right, which is a metapolitical journal that aims at laying the foundations for a white ethnostate in North America.
North American New Right has two formats.
First, there is our webzine, at the Counter-Currents website,
www.counter-currents.com, which publishes something new every day. The reason we publish online is because it increases the availability and thus the impact of an article, and it makes it immediately available to the public. Our goal is to save the world, after all. If something contributes to that end, it is worth publishing right away.
Second, we will publish an annual print volume, which contains the best of the website and additional articles, reviews, interviews, etc. This will be a handsome book along the lines of the journals
Tyr or
Alexandria: The Journal of Western Cosmological Traditions. The first volume, for 2010, will go to press in March 2011.
We also plan to publish around six books a year. Our format is to publish short books that can be read in a day, say in the range of 120 to 160 pages, with 200 being the upper limit. All our books will be published in limited numbered, hardcover editions of 100 copies plus standard hardcover and paperback editions.
Our first two volumes are Michael O’Meara’s
Toward the White Republic and Michael Polignano’s
Taking Our Own Side. Forthcoming volumes include works by Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Kerry Bolton, and Edmund Connelly.
Counter-Currents/
North American New Right focuses on philosophy, political theory, religion, history, the arts, and popular culture with a White Nationalist metapolitical slant, and a special emphasis on whites in North America, since this is where we are located. We do not focus on science, policy studies, or the daily news cycle. We are not a political activist group, but a politically aware publishing house.
During the summer you wrote “Learning from the Left,” to which I responded with an article of my own, “Learning from the Right,” both on The Occidental Observer. In my article, I enumerated what I considered to be the failed strategies of the right. What are, in your opinion, the failed strategies of the right? And, having learnt from them, what do you propose should be the Right’s focus/approach in the coming decade?
I will speak specifically of the American scene.
I think the greatest failure of the post-WW II racial right is not dealing with the Jewish Question, whether through ignorance or cowardice. Instead, the tendency has been to use euphemisms, circumlocutions, and proxies to speak about the enemy: liberals, socialists, cultural Marxists, etc. But you cannot fight an enemy whom you refuse to name and understand. Is it any surprise that people have not been eager to follow leaders who reek of cowardice and moral confusion?
Next is the failure to identify what we are fighting
for, again whether through ignorance or cowardice. We are fighting for the survival of white people in North America. Again, the tendency has been to use euphemisms, circumlocutions, or proxies: the Constitution, free enterprise, Christianity. The most preposterous one that I have heard is the claim that we are “the descendants of non-duophysite Christians as of 1492.” Of course this is not a definition of anything, just a euphemism for white Europeans, not Arabs or Jews. But why not just come out and say that? Is it any surprise that a movement where this passes for cleverness has gotten nowhere?
The third great failure is ceding the whole realm of culture and ideas to the Jews and trying to fight a merely political battle, which leads inevitably to the buffoonery of cornpone populism as an attempt to make an end run around the establishment’s lock on thinking people. But it just hasn’t worked. It might have worked 60 years ago, but it didn’t. But today Jews control the whole realm of explicit culture, for the thinking and unthinking alike.
Whites in North America will not be able to regain control of our destiny until we (1) openly avow and defend our racial identity and interests, (2) openly identify the leading role of the organized Jewish community in setting our race on the path to degradation and death, and (3) lay the metapolitical foundations for political power, which includes (a) spreading our message through the whole realm of culture and ideas and (b) fostering a concrete, real-world, racially-conscious white community.
Surely the future must not simply be a futile (and impossible) return to the 1930s. The Left, on the other hand, has always had a utopian vision. Describe a future society where Savitri Devi’s texts are canonical university textbooks, read without controversy.
This is why I think we need to cultivate artists. Artists project worlds. Harold Covington’s Northwest Quartet novels, for example, are enormously effective at communicating ideas. His novel
The Hill of the Ravens is set in a future Northwest Republic, as are parts of
A Distant Thunder.
Of course film is even more effective at communicating ideas than books. Film really is the realization of Wagner’s idea of the
Gesamtkunstwerk.
Savitri Devi was politically to the right of Hitler. I guess the best image of a world where she is read without controversy is the final chapter of her
Impeachment of Man: “Race, Economic, and Kindness: An Ideal World.”
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Listen also to James Edwards’ audio interview of Dr. Johnson.
