by Greg Johnson
Johann Fichte updated peoplehood first as motherland—which entails a sense of shared community and common culture—and then as nation—which combines community and culture with responsibility and trust.179 In contemporary Europe, the normalcy of these peoples, motherlands, and nations is perhaps seeing its last days. Nonetheless, it is this level of organization, cohesion, and production that one is enchanted by there, more often than not in spite of the liberal State.
Platonic citizenship opposes the nation with a form of liberal political inclusiveness that seeks transcendent despotic values with which to judge claims to inclusion. Fichte understood this level of inclusiveness, and the protection it affords, first as fatherland—which prescribes above all a sense of order on the motherland—and then as the State—which combines order with defensive protection.180
Fichte, Deleuze, and Nietzsche point to an organic form of organization and responsibility in much the same way as Yockey (and Evola). And while Fichte ultimately does so in order to justify the State, Yockey turns the logic being presented here into a two-pronged explanation of race itself, as a “spirituo-biological community.”181 And while he explains the Enlightenment notions of biological racial stocks, he is clearly more interested in how these stocks are thought to produce culture through the interaction of sprit with the processes of history.182 In other words, he consistently points to a nomocentric understanding of race.
Yockey’s political abhorrence of liberalism perhaps explains why this is so, especially given the virtual nonexistence of the nomos-peoplehood-motherland-nation line of conceptualization in American history. Given the above explanation of the liberal State, it is easy to see why America—the quintessential lapdog of capitalism—has no need of the forms of primordial codes being discussed here as nomos, but has had a great affinity for the race of the Enlightenment.183
It is in this context that Deleuze applies nomos to modern liberal politics, making it a useful weapon in the fight against standardization and homogenization. What we must understand is how the liberal State is bound up with a form of racial logocentrism that panders to capitalism’s needs for standardized workers capable of being judged by a rationalist common standard of value. In other words, race as it is discussed in biological terms, is bound up with the bourgeois marketization and mobization of man being promoted by liberalism as the contemporary basis of being human.
This is why race does not ring true for many European peoples. In Italy, for example, the subsumption of extreme local particularity by the imposition of a racial, or even national, model makes no sense to communities that are still defined organically. Everything native to Italian life points to extreme heterogeneity and difference. Even criminology, born in the 1880s in northern Italy, was designed to demonstrate the differences between northern and southern Italians.184 And Serie A—the national soccer league—while being created by Fascism to unite the peninsula, was dismissed as a huge mistake because it exacerbated, rather than cooled, regional and civic rivalries.185
Homogeneity, by contrast, is implemented by the liberal State through the teaching of a common language and skills for standardized labor. Public education and mass media homogenize people into citizens and laborers. The local artisan traditions and vernacular order that define the nomocentric organization of the Italian’s local experience have been consistently under assault by the liberal State, enough so that people in Rome—more a large conglomeration of villages than iconic global city—often discuss the State as an occupying force.
Ultimately, I am suggesting that the racial origins and values being sought by many in the North American New Right lie not in Platonic logos—only finding that form in the 17th Century and the dawn of high modernity—but in a form of organization closer to Deleuze’s nomos. American racial thought has been dominated by logocentrism precisely because Americans have never been codified with smaller organic forms of community, but instead with abstract and quantifiable—liberal—notions of race meant only to standardize. This liberal understanding of race must die with modernity.
That being said, the New Right elevation of race in the contemporary revolt against modernity might not belong to the smooth space in which our revolutionary potential will be realized, but—more importantly for today—it does act as a war machine that moves us toward that space. Today, beyond all utopias, white racial consciousness is a break with modernity and the needs of the liberal capitalist State. It is a line of flight beyond what this world needs from us. It makes problems of every element of control. Thus it is better off in the hands of New Right radicals than in the halls of liberal justice. It is better off as nomos than as logos.
WE ARE THE REAL SUBALTERNS, REVISITED
Out the outset I suggested that we need to denude ourselves of notions that we are the rightful heirs of the liberal West, and instead take a minoritarian-revolutionary position against the West that mirrors those taken by other dissident and subjugated groups. America cannot be conserved, for there is nothing here worthy of conservation. Liberalism and the bourgeois form of life must be liquidated. And the State must dissolve into air.
We must understand how much of our freedom and daily autonomy has nothing to do with the State;186 that the State, instead, acts to overcode, direct, and control every impulse and every quantum of puissance that our bodies produce. Remember the foundations of Nietzsche’s naturalism: the State, liberalism, and modernity—in short, the bourgeois form of life—are based in the ressentiment and bad conscience of the Hebraic ascetic denial and persecution of life. Adding the State to the forms of bourgeois weakness we already attack is what will make us a revolution.
Taking such a position entails an end to our defensive posture against terrorism and immigration—for anything that weakens the State or the people’s faith and confidence in the State is good for us. This means the aforementioned terrorism and immigration, as well as assaults on seemingly normative institutions like marriage—whose codified power vanished with the advent of capitalism—citizenship, and constitutional rights should be championed. Anything that creates disharmony, disillusionment, discouragement, and disgust is our friend.
“The formal order of the liberal State depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create, and which, in fact, it undermines.”187 James C. Scott suggests that we engage in and support massive noninstitutionalized disruptions like riots, attacks on property, unruly demonstrations, arson, theft, and the open defiance of established institutions so as to weaken the local capturing apparatuses of the State.188 Harold Covington says that ultimately it is the accountants who pull the plug on a colonial occupation. But to that we must add that they only do so after the natives force the occupying force to retreat.
As Nietzsche advised us in Beyond Good and Evil, the processes of democratization, mediocratization, and ultimately the destruction of Europe should not be bemoaned or impeded on our part. But instead, these should be accelerated and applauded, for they hold the key to the conception of the types of men and women that will recreate the gore and glory of the pre-liberal world in a new form of life.189
REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES
1. Sidle & Straddle190
The beauty, glory, traditions, and peoples of Europe will not perish with the fall of the West but will instead therewith be liberated. This leitmotif has prompted many European Right radicals to unite with numerous forms of mobilization against globalization. This creates a front against which the State has difficulty strategizing. In these events—seen in Athens, Rome, Genoa, Seattle, Berlin, and Paris—Left and Right no longer have a liberal context. Particularly in the recent upheavals in Athens and Rome, fascist and communist dissidents fought the police and attacked the banks and other symbols of multinational capitalism side by side.
I am proposing that the New Right unite with other revolutionary forms such as Right anarchism and secessionism, but also the illiberal Left, in a similar stratagem.
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nbsp; Within the revolutionary Right we must think revolutionarily about what we are doing—like outsiders. Our war will be fought in many spaces of the neo-liberal State, and thus we need to act in those spaces, thinking more about the battle (the becoming) than the war (the Being). At times logos will be necessary, at others nomos; likewise fascism and anarchism, headlong assault and camouflage.
2. Camouflage
Life in the contemporary neo-liberal West is predicated upon the involvement of each and all in a global marketplace. Just as the Italians use their nomocentric particularity as a break on Statist homogenization, they use the same nomocentrism to protect themselves and their communities from the ravages of global capitalism. This tactic involves people from every age, income, and political demographic uniting against corporate-driven immigration and expansion of control over civic spaces like piazzas, monuments, and parks. While such situations are less readily apparent in America, we must still attempt to make use of such camouflaging by involving more and more types of people in our struggle.
Another more obvious camouflage is related to sidling and straddling. We should continue to support the amorphous nature of Counter-Currents and Attack the System, which publish articles on a wide range of subjects and perspectives. Although the editors of these sites might have strict ideological reasons for selecting content, from the perspective of strategy the variance between my work and that of Matt Parrott, for instance, keeps our enemies off balance and unable to attack and dismiss us with a singular spearhead.
Likewise, it provides our struggle with vitality and various points of contact with those who might join our ranks. Greg Johnson is to be commended for designing Counter-Currents with this strategic initiative in mind.
3. Derelict Spaces
As Deleuze and Guattari say, the State and revolution is a game of interiority and exteriority—about creating zones of exteriority within the State, and using these as a way to mobilize rebellion. Hakim Bey describes these spaces as temporary autonomous zones—or nomadic camps from which to strike the authority of the State, both ontologically and epistemologically—that entail a type of “psychic nomadism,” or culture of disappearance from the sovereignty of the State.191 The New Right is a war machine that will lead us to the smooth space of the revolutionary Right.
Certainly, we have utopian visions of a post-liberal world, but these visions should not cloud our ability to think strategically in the present. Look at what the New Right has already done to liberate whiteness from the liberal understanding of being-bourgeois. This is a strategic victory that has brought whiteness into a nomocentric relationship with the logos of the State, acting as a derelict bulkhead against liberal truth and morality.
Derelict spaces can be words, thoughts, and philosophies (Nietzsche is Deleuze’s favorite derelict space) and the ever-more virtual spaces they inhabit, but they need also be geographic and physical-spatial as well. Homes, social clubs, restaurants, and neighborhoods can act as lines of flight. But as our whiteness example makes clear, we cannot be content to just disconnect from the world but must aspire to transform it. This is the ultimate usefulness of autonomous derelict spaces, and it demands that they be interstitial more so than isolated.
4. Stop the World/Start the World
Jack Donovan’s call to “start the world” is the perfect call to arms for Right revolution, but first we must adequately disconnect “the automatic circuits between regularized stimuli and habitual responses . . . as if a crowbar had been inserted into the interlocking network of standardized actions and trajectories constituting the world as we know it.”192 I am arguing that the revolutionary Right acts as such a crowbar, creating a deterritorialized zone in which the bourgeois form of life ceases to function.
Becoming-revolutionary involves different speeds. Sometimes a snail’s pace will serve our needs, while at other times we will be best served by the speed of sound. But the point is to keep moving toward the restarting of the world on our own terms.
CONCLUSION
“Deleuze, Guattari, and the New Right” was written to introduce Deleuze and Guattari’s thought to the audience best suited for revolution in the West. But as their work is predicated upon decentering the liberal human in each of us, it is hoped that each of us feels terribly violated and infuriated by what I have represented of their thought. Anyone seeking his own relationship with the duo will undoubtedly find their Leftist orientation problematic. But if one reads them revolutionarily, that is, with what their concepts mean to us right now, then their Leftism becomes as irrelevant as someone’s Rightism. The only thing that matters in our war is whether or not it helps us achieve victory.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
March 22, & April 5, 25, & 30, 2013
SELECTION BY LOT &
WHITE NATIONALISM
SIMON LOTE
General Elections deliver politicians beholden to special interests rather than politicians who serve common interests of the electorate as a whole. The methods of manipulation by special interests are many and varied, and there is no space to catalogue them here, except to point out that such manipulation would not be possible without the apathy of the voting public. Furthermore, the demands of the electoral cycle create a political class with such high time-preferences that they regularly allow problems to fester and grow over decades, as there is often no political reward in taking decisive action in the short-term.
In systems of mass voting, the individual’s vote is one vote amongst millions, meaning that its value in influencing the outcome of elections is practically non-existent. Since the individual vote has no decisive power, the individual voter has no incentive to engage in careful scrutiny of the range of candidates presented to him. The apathy of the average voter is perfectly rational. If he votes at all, which is hardly a given, it will be informed by fleeting impressions taken from the most convenient source of information available, namely the mass media.
White Nationalists should not give up on the idea or virtues of democratic representation but should seek alternative ways of achieving this through sortition—the selection of representatives through a randomized process like a national lottery. The political potential of sortition is virtually unknown in White Nationalist circles. Edgar Steele mentioned it briefly in his book Defensive Racism arguing that juries, which are selected by sortition, should not only decide questions of fact, i.e., whether the accused has broken the law, but also importantly that they also be allowed to rule on the legitimacy of the law in question.193 This essay goes far beyond Steele’s proposals and argues that sortition should play a decisive role in the political process itself, so much so that bad laws never see the light of day and are killed in their drafting stage.
Sortition or selection by lot is the antithesis of preference voting as it is an a-rational selection process. This “blind break,” as Oliver Dowlen refers to in The Political Potential of Sortition, means that the selection of representatives cannot be manipulated by any human agency once the size and entry qualification into the lottery pool has been determined. Selection by lottery is completely impartial and will not favor one individual over another. Those represented through this process will not be aristocrats (unless the pre-lottery pool is actually weighted to favor them). However, they will also not be an oligarchy, as this selection process prevents special interests from using their power to influence the outcome in their favor.194
Sortition is capable of delivering a legislature similar to what founding father John Adams advocated: namely that it “should be an exact portrait, in miniature of the people at large.” This is not an alien concept, as professional pollsters and focus groups daily use the principle of random selection to gauge public opinion through polling only a tiny fraction of the total population.195 The numbers of allotted representatives needed for accurate representation would certainly be no more than the number of representatives that are today elected to legislatures.
Would the average man selected in
such a manner be competent in statecraft if by the very law of averages he could not possess expert knowledge in economics, law, foreign affairs, and public services? This is a fair challenge to make and one which is best answered by reference to a discovery made in 1906 by Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics. That year Galton visited a Fat Stock and Poultry exhibition as part of his research into the science of breeding. At one stall there was an open competition to bet on the weight of a slaughtered ox. The majority of the bets were cast by the general public and not by butchers or farmers who might have drawn on specialist knowledge in judging the size and weight of the ox carcass. Galton saw the judgment of the general public in the ox competition as comparable to their votes in a general election, and he predicted that they would fail to judge the correct weight of the ox, just as he believed that the general public exercises poor judgment when they cast their ballots at general elections. A total of 787 bets in the ox competition were cast, and Galton calculated the average using statistical methods and was surprised to find that the average of the bets was 1,197 pounds—whereas the actual weight of the ox carcass was 1,198 pounds. The crowd’s judgment was essentially perfect.196
This crowd wisdom is highly dependent on several variables, namely diversity of information sources, independence of thought, and aggregation, e.g., tabulating up votes made under a secret ballot. Unlike betting on the weight of an ox carcass, the crowd is rendered ignorant and dumb by the modern political process. Information is filtered through the lenses of the mainstream media, and here the political discourse is largely controlled by anti-whites who own the media. White Nationalist sentiment is demonized, where not censored altogether, and anti-white propaganda disseminated widely. Although the secret ballot allows the individual voter to cast a ballot according to his own judgment, his decision will be swayed by mass media and powerful interest groups. They give prominence to certain candidates and make other candidates recede into the background. These variables will be examined when we explore how sortition has been used throughout history.