by Greg Johnson
As a Jew, Strauss felt threatened by this form of nationalism (when practiced by gentiles), and having settled in the United States, he was determined to ensure that it did not take root there as well. Thus Strauss’s mature philosophical, political, and educational project came into focus. For the rest of his career, he worked to turn the American Right away from all forms of historicism and toward classical political philosophy, which is characterized by the rational pursuit of universal, objective truths. (For more details on this project, see my review of Paul Gottfried’s Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America.84)
Yet the question remains: was Strauss’s conversion from historicism to a kind of absolutism sincere or merely feigned? Did Strauss remain a historicist and, by his own account, a nihilist? If so, then his critique of historicism is merely an expression of his own historical situatedness, i.e., that of a diaspora Jew who sought to promote the safety and success of his people by teaching a form of moral universalism that guaranteed their citizenship and social mobility. One cannot answer this question without a careful analysis of Strauss’s critiques of historicism. But the fact that Strauss maintained a lifelong commitment to his own Jewish identity leads one to suspect that it was not reason but his own historical situatedness that had the final word.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
January 28, 2013, March 13, 2013, & August 8, 2014
WHITE NATIONALIST ANSWERS TO POSTCOLONIALIST QUESTIONS
DONALD THORESEN
Do you feel that your own people and country are somehow positioned outside the mainstream? Have you ever felt that the moment you said the word ‘I’, that ‘I’ was someone else, not you? That in some obscure way, you were not the subject of your own sentence? Do you ever feel that whenever you speak, you have already in some sense been spoken for? Or that when you hear others speaking, that you are only ever going to be the object of their speech? Do you sense that those speaking would never think of trying to find out how things seem to you, from where you are? That you live in a world of others, a world that exists for others?85
The above quote, from a short introductory book on postcolonialism, published by Oxford University Press and geared towards undergraduates, is the bulk of the second paragraph of the first page. The paragraph that precedes it makes it very clear that these questions are directed primarily at non-white readers and, to a lesser extent, white readers (probably because, despite all efforts, it just cannot be helped) but only with the intent of making them uncomfortable as whites, of problematizing whiteness, of inculcating white guilt.86 It is fair to say that this is in large measure the objective of postcolonialism. It freely borrows from such disparate sources as Maoism and postmodernism in order to create a web of critical responses to cultural and political imperialism, which are invariably linked to the white Western world. The politics and philosophy that provide its critical parameters are subjective and reflexively anti-white. If postcolonial critique could be demonstrated to be applicable to whites in the contemporary world, there would doubtless come myriad excuses from postcolonialists for why this could only be an impossibility. Academics, despite the wealth of evidence otherwise, still tend to espouse the notion of white hegemony, either as a ruse or through ignorance. But, for our purposes, such objections can be discarded, as indeed can the anti-white thrust of postcolonial scholarship itself. What we intend to do is to take some of the very basic questions within the field and apply them to contemporary White Nationalism.
What is postcolonialism exactly? Robert J. C. Young, author of the above cited passage, provides a very broad but useful definition:
Postcolonialism begins from its own knowledges, many of them more recently elaborated during the long course of anti-colonial movements, and starts from the premise that those in the west, both inside and outside the academy, should take other knowledges, other perspectives, as seriously as those of the west. Postcolonialism . . . is a general name for these insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms and values under which we all live. You can learn about it anywhere if you want to. The only qualification you need to start is to make sure that you are looking at the world not from above, but from below.87
We can easily see that postcolonialism is intended to destabilize what it views as white/western hegemony and that to do this requires the acceptance not only of non-white “knowledges” but of the fundamental equality of all “knowledges.” And, beyond this, to view non-white knowledges as having an inherent quality of subalternity, of being fundamentally insurrectionary. It is important to note that this “insurgent knowledge” is designed to “change the terms and values under which we all live.” We will leave it to the author to figure out how multiple (and presumably equal) knowledges can acquire the character of universality, but this is an otherwise decent definitional basis from which to begin. Postcolonialism is, in practice, just another academic weapon in the arsenal of professional anti-whites, but it taps into a style of thought, a type of emotional response, and a language of radical resistance that is relevant to White Nationalism.
Following the end of the colonial era, the non-white former colonies of the world tried to reassess their historical role, to examine their strengths and weaknesses, and to attempt to chart a path to the future by analyzing the ways in which European colonizers had shaped their cultures, their economies, their politics, their very minds. One would expect nothing less from newly independent peoples. The story of the various nationalist movements across the non-white world is a long and complicated one and need not concern us here. But it must be said that the peoples of these former colonies were entirely justified in wanting independence and in desiring an authentic culture free from foreign influence. Whether the attainment of this freedom has left them better off or not is, depending on one’s standards, debatable, but the impulse is surely one to which most White Nationalists can relate.88 The idea of authentic cultural reproduction, of moving into the future untainted by competing political visions or handicapped by a culture controlled by foreign elites, is one that any consistent nationalist must accept as worthwhile and good.
Despite decades of efforts to convince whites otherwise, historically white countries have indeed been colonized. From the Jews who dictate the cultural narrative and have tremendous influence on governmental policy to territories overrun with rapidly-breeding immigrants from the Third World, whites are no longer in control of their own homelands. This much is, of course, not news. But it seems that most whites have not fully internalized the fact that we are fighting a battle against a colonial power—an international, Jewish-led, supranational “state.” As such, we tend not to use the language of the victim, of the oppressed. But there is no shame in doing so because we are victims, we are oppressed, and we are, as a member of the Italian rightist group CasaPound said to Mark Dyal, “the real subalterns.”89 Though, as a currently colonized people, our fight is, strictly speaking, one of anti-colonialism, the “soft” methods used by our overlords make postcolonial critiques of cultural imperialism highly relevant. Let us begin to think in these terms by answering the questions in the introductory quote above.
“Do you feel that your people and country are somehow positioned outside the mainstream?” This is a complicated question to answer. One’s initial gut response, however committed one is to the cause, is no. Whites still tend to live in areas in which they are a majority, tend to be the most common characters on television, in the movies, advertisements and in other media (even though often played by Jewish actors in “whiteface” performances). When one thinks of a German, a Briton, a Canadian, a Texan, or even a Californian, the image is of a white person. It is easy to observe the prevalence—albeit dwindling—of white faces and to be lulled into a sense of complacency. In raw numbers, whites are still the majority in most of our countries, so we are still the mainstream in a purely demographic sense.
But in a postcolonial context this does not matt
er so much. India, for example, was a tremendously populous country while under the boots of a relatively small number of British, but there is no question that Indians were a subjugated people. Numbers do not always equal power. Such is the case with whites in the West. Mainstream culture is what emerges after any particular narrative has enough power behind it to be able to drown out its competitors, regardless of how numerous they may be. Whether that power is concentrated in the hands of ten people or ten million people is largely irrelevant. Jews, for example, make up less than 2% of the population of the United States but have succeeded in strategically seizing our culture-producing institutions and making their twisted sociopolitical revenge fantasies all too real.
If we discount the notion of the “mainstream” as being strictly one of demography, we are left with the question of what exactly constitutes mainstream culture. The definition can vary, but one that covers most of the sociological nitpicking is “possessing the quality of normality.” Is white culture considered the norm, the standard by which things are judged? Not really. Though white social norms still inform the daily lives of individual whites, the Jewish elite has succeeded in portraying white culture as somehow aberrant, undesirable, and pathological. According to Jews and the collaborator class, whites are unique in their role as an historical evil and as a people standing in the way of “progress.” Even among those whites who value highly the products of white culture there is a tremendous resistance to recognizing any of these things as originating from the qualities of whiteness, as being the unique achievements of their own people. One of the goals of postcolonialism is to highlight the ways in which the ruling class of any particular former colony diverted the cultural narrative of the colonized people away from self-respect and an authentic indigineity and towards respect for—and submission to—the culture of the foreign elites.
For whites, this submission involves intellectual self-flagellation, the reluctant acceptance of radical cultural shifts, the financial burden of propping up hostile governments and supporting hostile populations, of living in abject fear of speaking up for our own race. Whites are allowed no pride whatsoever in themselves and certainly no territorial sovereignty. White achievements, unlike those of other groups, are considered “human achievements” thereby devaluing the foundational quality of whiteness. White countries have been opened to the world, resulting in the very idea of white autochthony being incomprehensible. Whites are relegated to the role of blank slates upon which the world draws and erases, experiments, exploits, plots, and fantasizes. The attack from the colonizers is two-pronged: first, whiteness as an identity is problematized; second, whites are not allowed to maintain the integrity of their homelands. White Nationalists are thus in an interesting historical position in that we are engaged primarily—at least for now—in what could be considered postcolonial action (i.e., metapolitics and cultural critique) despite for all intents and purposes existing under colonial rule.
One of the things about which White Nationalists frequently complain is how the media leads whites into cultural illiteracy, psychological distortions, and a general social devolution through the use of mainstream pop culture. The Indian sociologist Arjun Appadurai, a mostly reprehensible anti-white postcolonialist, wrote a piece in his book Modernity at Large, however, that is worth discussing briefly.90 In it he analyzes the continuing importance of cricket in India and connects it to the lingering effects of colonization. He derides it for its nationalist sentiment (he refers to matches between India and Pakistan as “thinly disguised national wars”) and argues that cricket had originally simply been a way of “socializing black and brown men into the public etiquette of empire.”91 He sees behind its popularity numerous collective pathologies, but much of his critique rings true even if, ultimately, his moral judgments, from a nationalist point of view, are incorrect. There is, of course, nothing wrong with nationalist sentiment, and one would think that cricket as a point of unification (regardless of its origins) would be welcomed in a postcolonial state. Regardless, he is correct to point out that the continuing Indian passion for cricket feeds off the “pleasure of agency”—something which is necessary in order for mainstream culture to continually reproduce itself without resistance from those it harms.92
We see this “pleasure of agency” quite clearly in the European soccer hooligan phenomenon. Coming from largely working-class and marginalized backgrounds, these men defend their various teams passionately and violently. This cannot be understood as a commitment to the “idea” of any particular team. It is instead a commitment to the only form of community to be had—that of a brotherhood of violence, an apolitical insurrectionary force. Bill Buford, in his classic study of British hooligans, writes of their motives: “The violence . . . was a rebellion of some kind—social rebellion, class rebellion, something. [The hooligans] were determined to break or destroy the things that were in their way.”93
In white countries, there is little ability to find fulfillment in anything mainstream because, even though it is rarely consciously recognized, there is little meaningful in it and even less that is explicitly white. The benefits of racial brotherhood, which are encouraged and celebrated in the case of non-whites, are both formally and informally denied to whites by the Judaized mainstream culture. The pleasure of agency can only be felt through hollow diversions like sports and consumerism. Even our violence, rare as it is, is directed at empty targets. The white public, just barely coasting on the trajectory of past success and thoroughly conditioned to accept its downfall, is a part of the mainstream only to the extent that it denies its own value. From fights between sports fans to wars for Israel, the insurrectionary vitality of whites is suppressed and misdirected.
“Have you ever felt that the moment you said the word ‘I’, that ‘I’ was someone else, not you? That in some obscure way, you were not the subject of your own sentence?” Whites have been so thoroughly deracinated that it is extremely rare for the “I” conceived by any given white to refer to his own kind. The white “I” has been contorted so that its meaning is universal, equally applicable to all. Unlike the non-white “I,” it is supposed to be inclusive of all human variants; those whites who insist otherwise are deemed to be malevolent, gravely misguided, or ignorant. Between the fetishization of individualism and the blind denial of race, the average white tries desperately to present himself as beyond race, as having transcended the reality of and need for biological community. The dominant narrative of the past century has been the complete interchangeability of the races, but few other than whites honestly believe this, let alone live by it. For whites, there is nothing obscure about not being the subject of our own sentences. The white self is only granted legitimacy if it sheds all conscious traces of whiteness.
“Do you ever feel that whenever you speak, you have already in some sense been spoken for? Or that when you hear others speaking, that you are only ever going to be the object of their speech?” Any racially-conscious white person is keenly aware of this phenomenon. The amount of anti-white sentiment thriving within historically white nations is monumental. It is virtually impossible to engage with mainstream culture without being barraged by messages designed to pathologize white history, to deny the value of whiteness, to hypocritically celebrate the identities of non-whites while labeling white identity fraudulent, wicked, or both. Whites are told who we are by others.
Those who speak out against this—who seek to define themselves, who refuse to let their marginalization continue unchallenged—risk becoming social outcasts and the targets of fear, loathing, and revenge. It is, for example, impossible to attend a university in which open displays of anti-white sentiment are not a daily occurrence. It is likewise impossible to work for a corporation in which whites are explicitly valued for their whiteness. Whites are just mere individuals while everyone else is a valuable collective with obvious and valid interests. Everywhere whites are deemed a problem to be solved, whiteness a thing to be overcome. The future, whites are told
by Jews and their non-white grunts, is one in which we will be a minority in our own lands so we had better get used to it. “Resistance is futile. Shut up and accept the fate we have in store for you,” they say.
“Do you sense that those speaking would never think of trying to find out how things seem to you, from where you are?” In his famous work Orientalism, Edward Said bemoaned the objectification of the Orient by Westerners.94 He wrote: “A certain freedom of intercourse was always the Westerner’s privilege; because his was the stronger culture, he could penetrate, he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery . . .”95
Despite being a highly problematic statement from the point of view of the modern Left, there are some truths in it. Those truths are, in part, simply a result of very basic human psychology. Humans do indeed group people into “us and them,” and, psychic powers being an impossibility, all an observer can do is observe to the best of his ability. No one can divine the motives of others but anyone can make rational conclusions based on empirical observation. White intellectual curiosity, the sense of adventure and the drive for exploration inevitably brought the Western gaze upon the Orient.
It is easy to understand how an Oriental would come to resent what he felt to be inaccurate portrayals of his culture and his identity. From an academic standpoint, input from those being studied can only aid in greater understanding. Efforts to dig deeper into world cultures and take a generally open and relativistic approach to non-whites and their cultures have been valuable methodological tools.