by Greg Johnson
Michael O’Meara seeks in his essays to draw a permanent distinction between the White Nationalist ethnostate on the one side and all attempts at reform, all conservatism, patriotism, and reformism on the other. Tea Party demonstrators, for all their contradictions, can appeal to a specific national identity. The national identity which O’Meara seeks in the USA is one which will have to be created from scratch.
Hitherto, nationalists the world over have appealed to the call of the blood sometimes, of the land always. O’Meara’s nationalism may be a call to the blood, but where is the land? The last Americans to love their land as land went down to defeat in 1865. Since then for Americans “home is where you hang your hat.” No attempt is made in any of these essays to state how a love of land will be created out of nothing.
We come back to the ghosts of the Confederacy and National Socialism. Both movements could draw on a love which already existed. White American separatists will have to create theirs.
O’Meara is very familiar with the theses of the French New Right and refers to two writers which the French New Right examined in order to draw lessons for a strategy for our time. One O’Meara accepts and argues should be “taken on board” in the fermenting of a revolutionary consciousness and approach while the other he flatly rejects.
The example he admires is that of Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist. In an essay entitled “The Myth of Our Rebirth” he stresses the importance which Sorel attached to “myth.” Sorel understood myth as a force which impelled those who fell under its spell to participate in political action. The action itself then reinforced the symbolic and inspirational force of the original myth. As O’Meara succinctly observes, “Myth . . . is not a description of things or a rational alternative to the present, but an expression of a determination to act” (p. 27).
An example which comes to my mind of this kind of “mythical action” is the sacrifice of Bobby Sands and the other Irish republican hunger strikers, who chose death by slow starvation rather than submit to being treated as common criminals. Sands’ sacrifice acquired the status of a myth in the sense which Sorel intended and has been a driving force of Irish republicanism since the day he died.
Unwittingly it seems, O’Meara has put his finger on a fundamental weakness of White Nationalism. This weakness is so fundamental indeed that unless it is mended I believe that white separatism in the United States or anywhere else in the world will continue to be the stuff of fantasy and resentment and not be a serious challenge to prevailing systems.
I share O’Meara’s belief in the force of myth, and, although I have not read much of Georges Sorel, I accept the premise in terms of psychology upon which I suppose it to be based, namely that powerful and terrible acts of sacrifice and defiance may create their own momentum and that the demonstration of political power in the form of symbolic gestures creates its own dynamic and draws people to it like a magnet or the center of a whirlpool.
What can we say, then, of a movement which patently proves itself unable to produce such myth-making figures? Not only does the white racialist movement itself not “create myths” in this way, it pours scorn and bile on those who do. Bobby Sands earned not a crumb of respect from the British nationalist movement (the then leader of the British National Front haughtily dismissed the hunger strikers as “sub-human”) and otherwise competed with the popular press in abusive epithets, among which “coward” featured often.
British nationalists have frequently lauded their own bravery, and I do not wish to belittle the courage it takes to sacrifice career and reputation for one’s beliefs, but putting one’s job on the line, heroic though it is in a way, is not myth-making stuff.
British nationalism did boast one hunger striker as it happens. His name was Robert Relf, a racial nationalist who went on hunger strike in protest against a law which forbad him from publicly putting his house up for sale “to an English family only.” He called off his strike for the obvious and very human reason that going on hunger strike is a terrible step that only the bravest of the brave can carry out to the end. In other words he became hungry, and he failed to carry his plan out. It was human of Relf to have balked; I doubt I would ever have the depth of courage to carry out such an awful act myself.
The fact remains that racial nationalists have so far been very poor in the creation of martyrs. The least they could do is show a little awe if not respect in face of the really terrible sacrifices which others make for their beliefs. It is not right to say that white separatists have no martyrs. True, they seem to be flawed or possibly cranks, but does one examine the creators of a myth with a magnifying glass?
There is one obvious myth creator in the Sorelian sense in the history of White Nationalism. His name is Robert J. Mathews. His actions may be regarded from one perspective as those of a felon, from another perspective as those of a hero. I would expect him to feature frequently in these pages, but it is not so. If Michael O’Meara mentions Bob Mathews more than once I missed it. Here is the only reference I noted:
If you want to build a nationalist movement to ensure the continuity of white America, you appeal to Robert E. Lee and Bob Mathews, to the Battle of the Alamo and Kearney’s Workingmen, to the Stars and Bars and the sustaining voices of those quintessential representatives of America’s white culture, the Carter family. (p. 44)
The writer cited by the French New Right from whom O’Meara emphatically does not wish lessons to be drawn, is Antonio Gramsci. He talks of Gramscism but is obviously so repelled by the thought of using Gramsci’s example that Gramsci is not even cited in the Index at the end of the book.
Antonio Gramsci was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party. In his Prison Notebooks he argued that a political revolutionary movement needs to be aware of the institutions that not only wield but also radiate power. A favorite word of Gramsci’s was “hegemony.” By hegemony Gramsci referred to the opinion formers on the one hand and the wielders of power on the other, whose sympathizers could play a decisive role in the fortune of revolutionaries, revolutionary writers, and thinkers.
O’Meara somewhat narrowly interprets this as just a theory of the “long march through the institutions.” “The notion,” writes O’Meara (p. 97), “that racialists follow the Left’s Gramscian ‘march through the institutions’ is . . . unserious. Covington’s Northwest Volunteer Army is a hundred times more realistic than the thought of re-establishing the integrity of white life through elections or an expanded media.” Good pure radical stuff, but I can’t help wondering whether some members Robert Mathews’ Silent Brotherhood, who received stiff jail sentences for their part in money laundering and bank robbery, might be wondering today in prison (where many of them today still languish) if a little more “Gramscian” infiltration among judges and juries and a prior White Nationalist trudge through an institution or two might not have served their turn very nicely.
Gramsci was not writing about restoring anything (nor was the New Left). Gramsci was writing about revolution. Elsewhere, O’Meara is dismissive about those who have any kind of truck with what he calls “the reformist snare” (p. 97). It is, he writes, “the system itself, communicating vessel of the Jews’ lunar spirit, that de-Aryanizes us, contaminates our blood, and seeks our destruction.”
O’Meara also argues that reformism has not worked because it has not succeeded in moving back the tide of color or the decline of Western/Aryan man. One point is that it is impossible to say with certainty what the current state of the world would be like if reformists had not acted at all. Secondly, and more importantly, such a radical position does not admit of compromise, but compromise is not what Gramsci was writing about. He was writing about strategy. One may admire Robert Mathews’ courage while questioning his strategy.
One whose strategy O’Meara does admire is that of Harold Covington. An entire chapter of a book running to only 153 pages is devoted to Covington’s Northwest Trilogy, of which O’Meara is clearly an ardent admirer.
Cov
ington waxes eloquent in his writings on the hopelessness of mere theory and the need for action.
O’Meara’s chapter on Covington is headed with a quotation from Adolf Hitler: “Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.” This is probably taken from Also sprach Zarathustra which is itself a twist to the Book of Job: “The life of man upon earth is warfare and his days are like the days of the hireling.” Militia est vita hominis.
Covington’s trilogy is very similar to William Pierce’s Turner Diaries, which it closely resembles in content, plot, purpose, and ideology. O’Meara describes it as “infinitely more readable and convincing than William Pierce’s Turner Diaries (now one of our classics) but has probably sold only a fraction as many copies.” “Infinitely more readable” strikes me as a trifle exaggerated, but I agree that it makes for more lively reading than Pierce’s plodding text. Apparently unlike O’Meara, I was struck by the similarities in the two works more than by the differences. The differences are ones of style. Simply put, Covington is a born storyteller and colorful writer, and Pierce, a physicist by profession, was not.
If Covington did not propagate the radical political views that he does, he could easily have become a reasonably successful novelist and be living today in some comfort with “wife and two veg” in a leafy New England suburb. He is the typical “malcontent” known to the Elizabethans, who would have been advanced if he were not out of favor with the powers that be. That makes men dangerous. Hitler, the frustrated painter and architect, was another.
Covington has narrative talent and puts it to good use in his lengthy yarn, which at times is a cliffhanger; but in terms of political intent and approach I see no difference between his work and Pierce’s. Covington like Pierce describes a situation in the near future where whites are pushed to the point that they can tolerate ZOG no longer and take up arms.
Both books depict two-dimensional characters parachuted out of the crudest possible military propaganda manual. In both books non-white, especially Jewish, opponents of the heroic movement are painted much as earlier Christian preachers depicted the devils out of hell. Covington waxes lyrical (Pierce is never lyrical) in depicting the sheer fiendishness of everyone fighting the White Nationalists, and gloats over their inevitable fate. In short, this is a sort of Star Wars for White Nationalists.
The book is about action and is a call to arms. Mr. Covington has nothing but scorn for armchair nationalists, and O’Meara quotes him thus: Those among us who continue to emphasize the need to educate or awaken people, he argues, usually end up doing “nothing more than hide behind an email address while playing with the computer in one’s basement rec room, with a bowl of nachos and a cold brewski beside the mouse” (p. 66). Covington’s is a highly entertaining and probably accurate depiction of many an American white racial “activist.”
Arguably, this collection of essays is remarkable less for what it includes as what it so markedly excludes. There is nothing here on economics (other than a projection of forthcoming financial collapse), nothing at all on the degradation of the environment, no examination of real historical martyrs, only a nodding reference to the one person who really carried the dream of white separatism into hard deeds, and most astonishing of all, no analysis and apparently no interest in contemporary separatist movements of our time.
This is O’Meara on Dmitry Orlov and the likely or inevitable collapse of the current capitalist financial system: “Society as a whole will be forced back to a less complex mode of operation: centralized forms of control will wane; things will suddenly become ‘smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated’; regions and communities will assume a greater centrality of tasks. Whether there will ensue a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ is anybody’s guess” (p. 134). It could be from a Millenarian tract of any number of religious sects.
Michael O’Meara is hardly the exception among White Mationalists in treating economics with scant interest, but this lack of interest, so typical and so prevalent among White Nationalists, is a serious flaw.
The whites in whose name Michael O’Meara wishes to see his republic, who are they? One other subject not mentioned in this book, although in this case perhaps understandably, is eugenics. Will the White Republic have any selection process for whites? From a book entitled “Toward the White Republic” I would hope for at least a few pointers regarding this difficult question. There is nothing.
Another gap in these essays is ecology and the deterioration of the natural environment, on which subject O’Meara, who can spare several pages for Covington’s trilogy, finds here nothing whatsoever to say. Nationalists generally tend to pay lip service to this subject but never seem to get very serious about it. The world is in many ways divided between those who want continued change and innovation in the capitalist sense and those who, for whatever reason, want to cry halt. As the desecration of the planet continues, particularly under the weight of the so-called “emerging markets” demanding the living standards of the West, a refusal to draw a clear line on the issue looks increasingly like another demonstration of provincialism, isolationism, and historical irrelevance.
When White Nationalists are silent on this subject of environmental degradation (and here I mean not lip service but concrete workable solutions) they make themselves even more irrelevant on the battlefield of world politics than they already are. “Toward the White Republic” does not pay lip service to ecological protest, for the simple reason that it does not cover the subject at all. In an essay entitled “Why I Write,” where the reader might expect a listing of O’Meara’s chief concerns, all that is offered is a critique of reformist racial movements and misguided nationalism. It is difficult not to conclude from this that ecology and economics belong to the many issues for and about which Dr. O’Meara would not and does not care to write.
Covington does have something to say about environmentalism. He explicitly dismisses environmentalist concerns in his writing. Saving a small species of bird at the expense of loggers’ jobs is, he writes, insane and in his novel, The Brigade, zoning orders are condemned as a kind of yuppie plot. (Plenty of Jewish writers could heartily endorse such robust anti-green views and several have indeed expressed themselves in almost identical language to Covington's—Ayn Rand and Charles Krauthammer come to mind.)
To my mind the most remarkable omission of all, and the most inexplicable, is that regarding separatist movements long past, recent, and present throughout the world. In the last thirty years up to the present day, the world has been convulsed by separatist movements. Some have been successful, some have not, some have been armed, some have been peaceful, some have been Marxist, some socialist, some nationalist. One would expect that anyone who is serious in seeking the separation of white ethnics from the main body of the United States to create a new ethnostate, would avidly study the many examples around the world in order to gain inspiration from others’ successes and to learn from others’ mistakes. The success of Bangladesh and the failure of the Tamil Tigers, the success of Southern Sudan and the failure of Quebec, must all contain their lessons. How can it be that these are not cited and studied? I cannot avoid the suspicion that there is both a complacency and provincialism at work here. This lack of reference to real separatist movements coupled with a discussion of a fantasy separatist movement in a novel, proves, if proof were needed, that white separatists still believe that their aims can be achieved in a vacuum and that the rest of the world can go hang.
There may be the occasional nod in the direction of each ethnic group having the right to pursue its own destiny, but when push comes to shove, there seems to be no concern for any group but whites. This is a fatal error. I am convinced that whites will only achieve the kind of autonomy spoken of in this book when a substantial number of non-whites share their views and their desire to separate. “We alone” in this context is a recipe for continued desolation and disaster.
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I reject wholeheartedly the “all or nothing approach” of Harold Covington, the man who despises those who isolate themselves in the computer rec room, the man whom O’Meara obviously admires. This all or nothing approach leads to abject failure and will continue to do so as long as it is proposed and practiced. If people studied separatist movements around the world, they would see that success is usually if not always linked to outside and inside support and sympathy. Insurgents who rely only on themselves have never to my knowledge been successful.
To be honest, however, I am not as dedicated as Dr. O’Meara because I am not inspired by the alternative on offer. I do not like the system under which I labor, and in principle I would not be unhappy to see it disappear, but to be replaced by what? Mr. Covington’s racialist Utopia, the healthy dictatorship of square jawed Aryan lookalikes? I wonder if I cannot even find it in my heart to still prefer the devil I do know than Covington’s dubious Utopia. Anyway, the radicalization of white working people will not take place as the result of reading novels, however inspirational. It can take place through the failure of the system on the one hand and myth building sacrifice on the other coupled with realistic political acumen.
I am far from hostile to the notion of separatism, but it is time that someone came to grips with the issues at stake, namely overpopulation, the environment, cross-border alliances, social incoherence, modern genetics, and new media technology, and examine white racial survival in terms of these and the other developments, which matter and must matter not only to a future White Republic but also to any fledgling White Nationalist movement.